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Simple Strategy Helps You Learn from Mistakes
Yahoo: A new study in Psychological Science bears out this benefit of self-affirmation. Volunteers were first asked to rank six values in order of importance to them. Then half spent five minutes writing about why their top value matters—a task designed to boost self-affirmation. The other half spent the time writing about why that value doesn’t actually matter—a task designed to undermine their sense of self-worth. Afterward, all the volunteers moved on to another activity—one that gave them ample opportunity to screw up. Volunteers were asked to press a button when the letter M appear on a screen, but refrain from pressing it when the letter W popped up.
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Psychiatric association approves changes to diagnostic manual
CNN: Starting next year, the process of diagnosing autism may see drastic changes following the revision of the official guide to classifying psychiatric illnesses. After years of reviewing and refining criteria used by psychiatrists and other experts to diagnose mental health disorders, the American Psychiatric Association board of trustees on Saturday approved major changes to the manual, better known as DSM-5. The approval of the changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders came during a meeting in Arlington, Virginia. The DSM is considered the "bible" of psychiatry because it's the criteria mental health professionals use to diagnose their patients. ...
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Feeling Disgust May Enhance Our Ability to Detect Impurities
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not only helps us to avoid impurities, it may also make us better able to see them. If something looks dirty and disgusting, we typically assume it’s contaminated in some way; when something is white, however, we are more likely to assume that it’s clean and pure.
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Babies learn to walk after dozens of falls per day
Asian News International: Infants learn new things and acquire new skills every day and researchers have suggested that the abilities that they demonstrate early on can shape the development of skills later in life, in childhood and beyond. Babies learn to walk after thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day, according to a study. In the study, Karen E. Adolph, Whitney G. Cole, Meghana Komati, Jessie S. Garciaguirre, Daryaneh Badaly, Jesse M. Lingeman, Gladys L. Y. Chan, and Rachel B. Sotsky, recorded 15- to 60-minute videos of spontaneous activity from infants.
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Apes, Humans Share A Happiness Dip Mid-Life
NPR: Well, yeah, I think so. So for a long time, the research on the midlife crisis, or the views on the midlife crisis, have primarily looked at it in terms of social forces. So there's psychological and socio-psychological explanations that were offered, things about money and so on and so forth. And while I wouldn't say that, you know, one can completely rule that out, what this shows is that there's actually something deeper and more biological going on here, something that probably exists in our common ancestors that we shared with these species. And that this midlife crisis, you know, there's nothing wrong with you. You know, the question is what do you do with that?
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Neuroscience Fiction
The New Yorker: In the early nineteen-nineties, David Poeppel, then a graduate student at M.I.T. (and a classmate of mine)—discovered an astonishing thing. He was studying the neurophysiological basis of speech perception, and a new technique had just come into vogue, called positron emission tomography (PET). About half a dozen PET studies of speech perception had been published, all in top journals, and David tried to synthesize them, essentially by comparing which parts of the brain were said to be active during the processing of speech in each of the studies. What he found, shockingly, was that there was virtually no agreement.
