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Is Mental Time Travel Good for Us?
In our fast-paced modern lives, we are increasingly encouraged to stop and focus on the present. And there are tangible advantages. Studies on the effects of mindfulness and meditation — practices that gear people’s cognitive capacities towards the present moment — have pointed to reduced stress, increased focus and less emotional reactivity. As a result, mindfulness has become a billion-dollar industry that promises to alleviate all manner of psychological ills.
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The New Science on Making Healthy Habits Stick
Any healthy choice seems doable for a day. Building consistent good habits around exercise, sleep and nutrition in the long term is harder. Recent research is uncovering how long it takes to cement different kinds of habits—and gives fresh insight into how to make them stick.
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Alan Kraut-Jane Steinberg Family Fund Showcases Public Benefit of Psychological Science
APS is excited to share that the Alan Kraut-Jane Steinberg Family Fund has donated $100,000 to support an APS Annual Convention plenary session showcasing how psychological science contributes to the public good.
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Endel Tulving, Whose Work on Memory Reshaped Psychology, Dies at 96
Endel Tulving, whose insights into the structure of human memory and the way we recall the past revolutionized the field of cognitive psychology, died on Sept. 11 in Mississauga, Ontario. He was 96. His daughters, Linda Tulving and Elo Tulving-Blais, said his death, at an assisted living home, was caused by complications of a stroke. Until Dr. Tulving began his pathbreaking work in the 1960s, most cognitive psychologists were more interested in understanding how people learn things than in how they retain and recall them.
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The Climate Crisis Is Driving People to Substance Abuse
KAMAL SONAVANE KNEW she’d pass out if she chewed smokeless tobacco one more time. It was a scorching April afternoon in the middle of another of India’s brutal heat waves, and with no job to go to, the farmworker had already chewed tobacco five times that day. “Even an addicted person avoids doing this in extreme heat because there’s a risk of fainting,” she says. Yet Sonavane repeated the familiar ritual: adding the slaked lime to the tobacco leaves, then putting the mixture in her mouth. “I would have anyway collapsed, either because of the heat waves or the mounting stress,” she says, sitting in her two-room brick house in Bhadole in the Indian state of Maharashtra.
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Brain Scans Reveal That Loneliness Changes the Way We View the World
Humans are meant to be around one another. It’s been that way for millennia. We needed each other to hunt, construct homes, procreate, care for our offspring and protect one another against the saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves that meant to harm us. We also need each other to be happy and to take up the burdens that sometimes weigh us down. All told, being a human is exceedingly difficult when life is lived alone. Research shows that socialization is so engrained in our survival that when we’re lonely, it has both psychological and physical effects on us. It even impacts our brains. ...
