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This column will change your life: burning bridges
The Guardian: Not long ago, in an interview conducted at his home – the Butner Federal Correctional Institution, in North Carolina – the convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff said something surprisingly profound. "I have… no decisions to make," Madoff, who's scheduled for release in 2139, told Barbara Walters. "I know I will die in prison. I lived the last 20 years of my life in fear. Now I have no fear because I'm no longer in control." In all honesty, the interview hardly gave the sense he'd seen the light, and I suspect the world's not yet ready for a book entitled The Spiritual Wisdom of Bernie Madoff.
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Think ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You,’ When Dealing With Angry Person
U.S. News & World Report: Telling yourself that an angry person is just having a bad day and that it's not about you can help take the sting out of their ire, a new study suggests. This strategy of finding another way to regard an angry person is an approach commonly suggested in cognitive behavioral therapy. For example, you can tell yourself that the angry person has just lost his dog or received bad news and is taking it out on you. Stanford University researchers conducted two experiments to examine the speed and efficiency of this process of reappraising others' emotions. In one experiment, participants were upset when they were shown a picture of an angry face.
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Ignorance IS bliss! We don’t want to know about complex issues preferring to leave them to governments
Daily Mail: People who know less about challenging social issues, are more likely to want to avoid becoming well-informed about them, according to a new report. The study looked at people’s knowledge and willingness to learn about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment. And it revealed that the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Read the full story: Daily Mail
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Tips agar Otak Anda Tokcer
Metro TV News Indonesia: Beberapa kondisi lingkungan mampu merangsang otak menjadi lebih baik atau buruk. Dengan alasan itu, anda harus mengetahui segala hal yang berada di lingkungan yang dapat memperbaiki kemampuan dan kekuatan otak anda. Penglihatan, suara, tekstur,aroma, rasa dan sensasi lainnya yang dialami setiap hari dapat menjadi makanan untuk pikiran dan jiwa anda. Menciptakan sebuah lingkungan yang indah dan positif ternyata dapat juga meningkatkan kekuatan otak. Read the full story: Metro TV News Indonesia
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More About Academics and Dodgy Statistics
The Wall Street Journal: Can statisticians “prove almost anything”? Canada’s National Post takes on one of the academic issues of the moment. The focus is a new article in Psychological Science, alluded to on Ideas Market last week, called “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” In it, three psychologists make their case by presenting a study in which people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m 64″ literally grew younger, relative to a control group.
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Babies may benefit from moms’ lasting melancholy
ScienceNews: A double dose of mom’s depression may do a baby good. Infants generally thrive physically and mentally if their mothers’ emotional condition, whether healthy or depressed, remains stable before and after birth, say psychologist Curt Sandman of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues. Kids whose mothers stayed depressed from the fourth month of pregnancy on displayed first-year mental and physical development comparable to that of youngsters whose mothers stayed emotionally healthy for the same stretch, Sandman’s team will report in Psychological Science.
