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Improve your sense of direction
AUTOMATED VOICE: Continue on North Calvert Street for half a mile. LIMBONG: Because without it, not only would I be lost, I'd also feel lost, and I know I'm not the only one. MARY HEGARTY: One of the things we measure in our lab is whether people feel anxious if they suddenly find themselves lost or realize they've lost track of where they are. LIMBONG: That's Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She leads the spatial thinking lab there, where they study how we see and interpret ourselves and other objects in space. And one of the things they study there is this thing called spatial anxiety.
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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning
The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand. To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand. ...
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Allergies or Sickness? Unraveling the Mystery of Concealing Infectious Diseases
Podcast: In this episode, Under the Cortex hosts Wilson Merrell to discuss disease concealment and the factors that contribute to it.
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Our Cognitive Bias Toward Novel, Negative Information May Make New Social Groups Seem Less Likeable
People’s biases against members of other groups may have a cognitive basis owing to how we prioritize negative information when encountering new social groups, new research suggests.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on personality pathology and momentary stress processes, stereotypes and OCD-symptom presentations, threat appraisal and pediatric anxiety, and much more.
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Can scientists ‘solve’ stress? They’re trying.
As modern-day stress ratchets up to what feels like unbearable levels, researchers are striving to learn more about the precise mechanisms through which it affects our body and mind. The hope is that by unlocking more about how stress works physiologically, we can find ways to prevent it from permanently harming people. ... Katie McLaughlin, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, is investigating how mental health problems arise in adolescents as they’re going through a particularly vulnerable time in their lives, transitioning to adulthood.
