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Who Am I? The Heroes of Our Minds
One of my guilty pleasures is the TV show Ice Road Truckers, which tells the stories of the heavy haulers who deliver vital supplies to remote Arctic territories of Alaska and Canada. In just two months each year, these truckers make more than 10,000 runs over hundreds of miles of frozen lakes, known as ice roads. We get to share in the treacherous drives—and just as important, the personal travails—of the veteran Hugh “The Polar Bear” Rowland, the brash tattooed Rick Yemm, the cold-hating rookie T.J. Wilcox, and former school bus driver and motocross champ Lisa Kelly, one of the rare women to break into this man’s world. I’m not alone in this fascination.
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Journal Brings Zen, and Bio, to Mental Health
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Like many scientific disciplines, mental health is a fragmented place, with individual researchers plugging away on their favorite disorders, like depression, often without regard to how the disease connects to, say, physical health, let alone molecular biology. So just where is it that a group of scientists studying the intersection of Buddhist meditation and human-cell aging is supposed to publish? Alan Kazdin, a Yale psychologist, has decided it will be in his new journal, Clinical Psychological Science.
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Unshakable Humanity: Altruism and Disaster
The Huffington Post: In May of 2008, a massive earthquake hit China's Sichuan province. The earthquake measured 8.0 and could be felt as far away as Pakistan, Vietnam and Russia. The shaking lasted a full two minutes and was followed by some 40,000 aftershocks, triggering hundreds of landslides. By the time the earth stopped moving, almost 70,000 were left dead, with another 18,000 missing and more than 300,000 injured. It was one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded. These facts are staggering -- incomprehensible, really. Even people who have experienced some of nature's wrath must find such fury and human loss unimaginable.
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Facebook updates may stave off loneliness, even if no one ‘likes’ you, study finds
The Washington Post: Scientists have found clues to what compels people to constantly update their Facebook status. College students who posted more status updates than they normally did felt less lonely over the course of a week, even if no one “liked” or commented on their posts, researchers found. Fenne Grosse Deters, a psychology researcher at the Free University Berlin, and a colleague recruited about 100 undergraduates at the University of Arizona. All participants filled out initial surveys to measure their levels of loneliness, happiness and depression, and they gave the researchers access to their Facebook profiles by friending a dummy user.
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How to Make People Laugh
Women's Health: If you’ve ever watched a good SNL skit, you know that impersonations can be hilarious. Want to spread the giggles yourself? The best way to master an impression is to practice in front of a mirror, according to a study published in Psychological Science. British researchers videotaped 20 adults as they recited jokes, then asked participants to recreate and photograph four facial expressions featured in their videos. While practicing, some people looked at photos of their attempts, and some rehearsed without any visual feedback.
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Implicit Race Bias Increases the Differences in the Neural Representations of Black and White Faces
Racial stereotypes have been shown to have subtle and unintended consequences on how we treat members of different race groups. According to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, race bias also increases differences in the brain’s representations of faces. Psychological scientists Tobias Brosch of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Eyal Bar-David and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University examined activity in the brain while participants looked at pictures of White and Black faces. Afterwards, participants performed a task that assessed their unconscious or implicit expression of race attitudes.
