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Cash, compassion and morality
The Baltimore Sun: I was a passenger in a car on Thursday morning, and we stopped for a fill-up at a gas station on North Charles Street in Baltimore, a block up from North Avenue. I was on the phone while the driver purchased and pumped the gasoline. A young, male panhandler tried to make eye contact with me through the passenger's side window, but I avoided being drawn into his tractor beam. Some panhandlers appear broken and docile, some seem impatient and even angry; some have yellow heroin eyes or some other form of medicated stare. This one seemed a little frustrated by a series of rush-hour rejections.
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Kindness rewards the giver, too
The Columbus Dispatch: Among the benefits of kindness is the positive psychological gain that occurs for both the giver and receiver. When we see someone else help another person, it gives us a good feeling, which in turn causes us to go out and do something altruistic. Research has shown that generosity and kindness are contagious. American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” Why do generosity and kindness have a positive psychological effect on people? Researchers think that kindness gives people a strong sense that they are doing something that matters.
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5 habits of highly successful dieters
CNN Health: Eat less, exercise more. That's the recipe for losing weight, and we all know it by heart. So if we want to get slimmer, and we know the formula, then why can't we do it? Commitment is important -- in fact, it's essential -- but it's only the beginning. The key to successful dieting is bridging the gap between what you want to do and actually doing it. The desire is there; you just need a plan. The scientifically proven tactics on these two pages will help you do just that. I say that with confidence -- not only as a social psychologist who studies motivation, but also as someone who has benefited from these tricks firsthand.
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Great Results in the Psych Lab—But Do They Hold Up in the Field?
How well do findings in the psychology lab generalize to real life? This criterion—“external validity”—is probably the most important for experimental psychology. So it was good news when, in 1999, Craig A. Anderson and his colleagues compared laboratory and field research on 38 topics in 21 meta-analyses (or analyses of numerous other studies), and found a lot of agreement between the results of the two. Greg Mitchell, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia School of Law, wanted to know if these findings hold up in a bigger sample—and whether there were differences among different kinds of psychological research.
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Low Socioeconomic Status Means Worse Health – But Not for Everyone
Poverty is bad for your health. Poor people are much more likely to have heart disease, stroke, and cancer than wealthy people, and have a lower life expectancy, too. Children who grow up poor are more likely to have health problems as adults. But despite these depressing statistics, many children who grow up poor have good health. In a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Edith Chen and Gregory E. Miller of the University of British Columbia suggest a possible reason: some children have role models who teach them to cope with stress.
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Throwing Light on the Dark Side
Huffington Post: Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there may have been someone who had not heard of "the dark side." But I seriously doubt it. Whether you are a Star Wars aficionado or not, there is no doubt that these hugely popular movies have saturated the culture and the common vocabulary. As Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi explained to the innocent young Luke Skywalker in the original 1977 film, the once-virtuous Darth Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force, his destructive power fueled by rage and hate. The dark side is all the galaxy's evils rolled together. Of course, Star Wars creator George Lucas did not invent the metaphor of the dark side. Not even remotely.
