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Give, if You Know What’s Good for You
The New York Times: Vancouver, British Columbia — IN the classic children’s story “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,” when the Grinch discovered the true spirit of the holiday, his “small heart grew three sizes that day.” Dr. Seuss may have been on to something — because it now appears that acts of generosity may bestow physical benefits on the donor. To be sure, there is plenty to hate about the holidays, when we endure the incessantly cheerful sounds of “Jingle Bells” spilling out of every shop and fight our way through overcrowded airports. But the holiday season can also inspire heartwarming generosity unmatched by other times of year.
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Helping Some Students Fight Stereotype Threat May Boost Classmates’ Grades, Too
Education Week: Interventions that help to immunize vulnerable students against the damage caused by negative stereotypes may convey a kind of herd immunity to their classmates as well. That's the conclusion of two studies published online this morning by the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists from Stanford, Pennsylvania State, Columbia, and Yale universities found the classmates of black 7th grade students who had participated in an earlier study of an anti-stereotype intervention saw an academic benefit as well. Read the whole story: Education Week
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Scientists say these 2 ‘dark’ personality traits can help you succeed at work
Business Insider: Who gets further at work — nice guys or jerks? It's a question that's plagued researchers for years, and unfortunately, there's no clear answer. Now, new research suggests that jerks can sometimes be more successful, depending on the specific traits they display. For the study, cited by the Association for Psychological Science, psychologists at the University of Bern in Switzerland looked at about 800 German workers between the ages of 25 and 34. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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Poverty’s Role in Intellectual Development
CityLab: Whether intelligence is more the product of nature or nurture has long fascinated American social scientists and the general public alike. Typically the result is explained as some balance of genetics and environment, but since the early 1970s, researchers have noticed that this scale tends to shift dramatically across social classes. It’s as if nature and nurture play by different rules for rich and poor. Generally speaking this work has found that genetic variance tends to explain the bulk of IQ scores for advantaged groups, whereas environmental variance plays a larger role for disadvantaged ones.
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Be Kind, Unwind: How Helping Others Can Help Keep Stress In Check
NPR: Say it's Monday and it's a bad one. You overslept and definitely didn't shower, so your hair might smell and maybe you spill some coffee on your shirt while you're barreling toward the Metro, which is especially unfortunate because you're meeting with your boss at 9:30. Just when you think your bloodstream has reached maximum cortisol saturation, a slow-moving elderly man steps between you and the train doors. Then he drops his wallet. Do you rush past him because you're too stressed to deal and there are plenty of other people around to step up — or do you help the guy out? Emily Ansell thinks you should do the good deed, and not just because it's the nice thing to do.
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Terrorism Temporarily Turns Leftists Rightward
Pacific Standard: Presidential preference polls provide a clear indication of how American conservatives are reacting to the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. They've basically doubled down on their America-first mindset, with large numbers endorsing candidates who express hostility toward outsiders such as immigrants and Muslims. OK, but what about liberals? Have they clung tighter to their basic beliefs, as one school of thought would suggest, or shifted to the right, as another predicts? New British research suggests the latter is far more likely. At least, that's what happened in the United Kingdom following a similarly tragic terrorist attack.
