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The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.” ... This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore.
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Is Online Dating Bad for Our Mental Health?
We’ve all seen those cheesy eHarmony commercials where two strangers find each other on their platform and fall in love. Despite its cheesiness, many of us now turn to online dating platforms like eHarmony, Tinder, Hinge, etc. in the hopes of telling our own cheesy stories about how we found “the one”. Unfortunately, it’s just not that easy. The dating world has changed significantly in the past couple of decades. According to Wikipedia’s online dating services timeline, the idea of matching strangers based on questionnaires that are run through computer algorithms has been around since the 1960s, but modern online dating services like Match.com didn’t launch until the late ‘90s. ...
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Romance, Scent, and Sleep: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of
The scent of a romantic partner can improve your quality of sleep. This is true regardless of whether or not you are consciously aware that the scent is even present. [NEWS Feb. 13, 2020]
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on interpersonal distance and psychopathy, how suggestive feedback may worsen stress symptoms, emotion changes associated with depressive and borderline features, depression symptoms, and posttraumatic stress after a terrorist attack.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on moral obligations and family, how people view God in times of conflict, and sex differences in perceptions of sexual interest.
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Why the Democratic Majority Hasn’t Emerged
The Democrats lost to Donald Trump and may do it again. How did the world’s oldest political party, which has won four of the past seven presidential elections and received popular-vote pluralities in two more, find itself in this pickle? One symptom of the party’s ailment is that its four top-polling presidential candidates in national surveys are in their 70s and No. 5 is a 38-year-old former mayor of a city of 102,000. Why haven’t others risen? Where are the candidates with demonstrated appeal to critical segments of the electorate? One answer is that over the past decade the Democrats have had a tough time electing candidates beyond heavily Democratic constituencies. ...
