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Local culture is in your genes
The Boston Globe: Previous research has shown that European-Americans have a more independent social orientation than people from East Asia. However, researchers at the University of Michigan have now qualified this relationship: Cultural differences are only observed among people with certain variants of a gene associated with dopamine function—and reward sensitivity—in the brain. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Cold, Hard Truth: Most People Can’t Handle Multitasking
Inc.: You’ve probably heard by now that multitasking simply doesn’t work. One study out of University of London showed that multitasking lowers your IQ by around 10 points, while Harvard Medical School declared war on the practice after activity-juggling doctors nearly caused fatal errors in treatment. The case against switching tasks seems pretty open and shut. But it seems there may be a few exceptions. A very few.
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Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates
The Wall Street Journal: A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think. ... University of Pennsylvania Professor Martin Seligman, who has studied the psychology of happiness, said it was impossible to know whether the college experiences Gallup asked about were the cause of later success or simply coincidental to it. "One hopeful possibility is that if college were changed to produce more emotional support, this would result in much more engagement later in life," he wrote in an email.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Orthographic Coding in Illiterates and Literates Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Karla Orihuela, and Manuel Carreiras Does literacy shape the way letter strings are visually processed? Literate and illiterate adults performed perceptual matching tasks in which they indicated whether a target string of symbols was the same or different from a previously presented reference string of symbols. "Different" character strings were created by changing the position of characters (transposed-characters condition) or by replacing one character in the string with a new character (replaced-characters condition).
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What You Farm Affects Your Thinking, Study Says
National Geographic: That is the result of a study published Thursday in Science comparing people from different parts of China. Researchers led by Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, found that people from rice-growing regions think in more interdependent and holistic ways than do those from wheat-growing areas. Talhelm thinks these differences arose because it takes much more cooperation and overall effort to grow rice than wheat. To successfully plant and harvest rice, farmers must work together to build complex irrigation systems and set up labor exchanges. Over time, this need for teamwork fosters an interdependent and collectivist psychology.
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The Science of Peak Human Performance
TIME: The science of ultimate human performance has a bad name–literally. “Flow” is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof. Yet, it was University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who selected this term, and he did so for a reason. In the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi embarked upon what would soon become one of the largest psychological surveys ever, running around the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best. Read the whole story: TIME
