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Yes We Can Go Forward and Believe in America! When did US campaign slogans become self-help mantras?
New Statesman: Something's happened to US campaign slogans. Something affirmative. Inspiring. Motivational. Yes! They've become self-help mantras. Romney has his rather hectoring “Believe in America” and Obama the grammatically pointed “Forward.” – the much discussed full stop signifying, apparently, a mind set on its course. Last election, of course, we had the rabble-rousing chant “Yes, we can”. The tone now borrows from life coaches where it once borrowed from the advertising industry (“I like Ike”, “Keep cool and keep Coolidge”), and this time it’s much harder to oppose. Agreeing is not only right – it’s healthy!
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Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Evolution
NPR: Six years ago, Glenn Schellenberg decided to do an experiment. Schellenberg works at the University of Toronto, where he studies the psychology of music. The idea behind his experiment couldn't have been more straightforward: He simply wanted to play music for people and get them to rate how happy or sad that music made them feel. These two emotions — happy and sad — are relatively easy to identify in music, and though there are different ways for music to convey emotion (through lyrics or what kind of instruments are used), Schellenberg says the tempo of a song and whether it's in a major or minor key often strongly influences which emotion the song conveys. Read the whole story: NPR
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How to make time expand
The Boston Globe: It’s a problem so common it may qualify as a new American epidemic: We’ve got no time. Too busy. Overwhelmed by work, family obligations, and the fast-paced nature of a run-ragged world, many Americans — especially working adults, parents of young children, and those with college degrees, according to polls — feel strapped for time and are leading less happy lives as a result. Researchers in the 1990s gave this familiar, if dreadful, feeling a name: time famine. More recently, they coined a term to describe the opposite: time affluence, that elusive feeling of being rich in time. Time affluence, it appears, has real benefits in our lives.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on cognitive processes related to memory, priming, and decision-making published in Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Independence of Data-Driven and Conceptually Driven Priming: The Case of Person Recognition Stephan G. Boehm and Werner Sommer One of the central tenets of memory theories assumes that data-driven priming (facilitated processing of stimuli based on perceptual information) and conceptual priming (facilitated processing of stimuli based on conceptual knowledge in semantic memory) are independent.
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Who’s Trustworthy? A Robot Can Help Teach Us
The New York Times: How do we decide whether to trust somebody? An unusual new study of college students’ interactions with a robot has shed light on why we intuitively trust some people and distrust others. While many people assume that behaviors like avoiding eye contact and fidgeting are signals that a person is being dishonest, scientists have found that no single gesture or expression consistently predicts trustworthiness. But researchers from Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell recently identified four distinct behaviors that, together, appear to warn our brains that a person can’t be trusted.
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Throw like a girl? You can do better.
The Washington Post: There’s no way around it. I throw like a girl. Luckily, it’s not difficult to avoid situations in which throwing is required, and I’ve managed to do it successfully my entire adult life. Except that one time. A decade or so ago, in New York, a ball came flying over an 18-foot schoolyard fence just as I was passing by. There was no one I could hand it off to, and a gaggle of fifth-graders was waiting for me to toss it back. I had so little faith in my overarm throwing that I had to go underhand. The squeal of brakes was my first indication that the ball had ended up behind me, in the middle of Columbus Avenue.
