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The World Isn’t Actually Going to Hell in a Handbasket
A lot about the world feels dark right now. We’re reeling from a turbulent presidential race. Processing an attempted assassination. Divided by protests—and a barrage of images on social media that feeds our anxieties. ... Mastroianni and a colleague, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, tried to assess whether people think morality is declining, and then whether it actually is. “If we believe the worst in people, we treat them in terrible ways,” says Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, who has a book coming out on cynicism. “And then we bring out the worst in them.” His advice: Fact-check your assumptions about others.
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Here’s What Could Be a Sign of Future Cognitive Decline
Feeling as if you’re wandering aimlessly through life or like you’ve done all there is to do may carry harms more serious than unfulfilling days — it could be hurting your brain.
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New Open Access Journal from APS and Sage Expands Publishing Opportunity for Psychological Scientists
APS and Sage announce the launch of Advances in Psychological Science Open, a fully open access journal that will publish high-quality empirical, technical, theoretical, and review articles, across the full range of areas and topics in psychological science.
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The Crybaby Olympics
Sports have always had sore losers. But based on this year’s Games, athletes seem to be getting worse at losing well. ... It’s not just in our head. In a 2017 survey of referees in the United States, 57 percent said that sportsmanship was getting worse. By 2023, that number had climbed to 69 percent, and half said they’d at some point feared for their safety. “I think society as a whole has moved away from good sportspersonship,” David Matsumoto, a former Olympic judo coach and a psychology professor at San Francisco State University, told me. ... Another possibility: People everywhere are becoming more selfish.
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Do You Really Store Stress in Your Body?
If you get enough back aches, someone will eventually tell you that’s where your body stores stress. If your stomach hurts, you’ll hear the same thing: Your emotions are trapped in your belly. But what does that mean? Is your anxiety about work or money really coursing through your body and nestling into your organs and limbs? ... The idea that stress is stored in specific parts of the body likely comes from Sigmund Freud’s work more than 100 years ago.
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The “Fight or Flight” Idea Misses the Beauty of what the Brain Really Does
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. She is the author of several books, including How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. When a person views a photograph of a hairy, looming spider or a slithering snake in a laboratory experiment, scientists usually see markers of increased electrical activity deep in that person’s brain, in a region called the periaqueductal gray (PAG). When a caged mouse smells a cat and freezes, scientists observe similar changes in the mouse’s PAG. What’s the obvious conclusion? The PAG controls fight-or-flight responses of mammals in threatening situations.
