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What’s Your Biggest Regret?
The New York Times: We all have regrets, but new research suggests the most common regret among American adults involves a lost romantic opportunity. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign collected data from 370 adults in the United States during a telephone survey. They asked respondents to describe one memorable regret, explaining what it was, how it happened and whether their regret stemmed from something they did or didn’t do. The most common regret involved romance, with nearly one in five respondents telling a story of a missed love connection.
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Teasing Out Policy Insight From a Character Profile
The New York Times: He is a delusional narcissist who will fight until his last breath. Or an impulsive showman who will hop the next flight out of town when cornered. Or maybe he’s a psychopath, a coldly calculating strategist — crazy, like a desert fox. The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades about Al Qaeda and President Obama.
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Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics
The Guardian: Mike Peel began editing Wikipedia – the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit – after a physics entry made him mad. It was 2005 and the then undergraduate was reading around a course when he became "irritated by a grammatical mistake". He hasn't looked back since. For Peel, now a 26-year-old post-doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank centre for astrophysics, is not only the secretary of Wikimedia UK – the local volunteer chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the Wikipedia project – but also one of the more prolific contributors among UK academics.
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To the brain, getting burned, getting dumped feel the same
CNN: Science has finally confirmed what anyone who's ever been in love already knows: Heartbreak really does hurt. In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you're burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you. In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are "more than just metaphors," says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Read the whole story: CNN
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Broken Heart Burns Like Hot Coffee, Brain Study of Former Lovers Shows
Bloomberg: Heartache over lost love is similar to the physical pain of spilling hot coffee on your lap, scientists studying brain scans say. The sting of seeing photos of an ex-lover stimulated the same parts of the brain as intense heat applied to the arms of 40 people in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research builds on a 2010 study published in the journal Psychological Science that showed people who took the painkiller acetaminophen, sold by Johnson & Johnson as Tylenol, felt less rejected when excluded from a ball-passing game.
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What Choice Do We Have?
Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. "When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?" says Krishna Savani of Columbia University.