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Emotion-Health Connection Not Limited to Industrialized Nations
In fact, UC Irvine study finds phenomenon more marked in developing countries Positive emotions are known to play a role in physical well-being, and stress is strongly linked to poor health, but is this strictly a “First World” phenomenon? In developing nations, is the fulfillment of basic needs more critical to health than how one feels? A new study shows that emotions do affect health around the world and may, in fact, be more important to wellness in low-income countries. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is the first to examine the emotion-health connection in a representative sample of 150,000 people in 142 countries.
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Why Good Deeds Can Cause Moral Backsliding
LiveScience: Doing a good deed can lead some people to more kind acts while spurring others to backslide. But how people respond depends on their moral outlook, according to a new study. ... The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science. Some studies show that people maintain a kind of moral equilibrium, meaning that giving money to charity may lead them to skimp on the tip at dinner, whereas partying too much may inspire a volunteer day at the soup kitchen. But other studies found just the opposite: Behaving ethically leads people to more good deeds later, said study co-author, Gert Cornelissen, a psychologist at the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
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New Research on Aging From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on cognitive and perceptual processes in aging published in Psychological Science. Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting Renée K. Biss, K. W. Joan Ngo, Lynn Hasher, Karen L. Campbell, and Gillian Rowe Can distraction improve memory in older adults? Older and younger adults studied a list of words and then performed a working memory task in which half of the original words appeared as distractors. Participants were then asked to recall as many words as they could from the original word list. Older adults had better memory for words from the list that had been repeated in the working memory task.
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Do-gooder or Ne’er-do-well? Behavioral Science Explains Patterns of Moral Behavior
Does good behavior lead to more good behavior? Or do we try to balance our good and bad deeds? The answer depends on our ethical mindset, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychological scientist Gert Cornelissen of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and colleagues found that people who have an “ends justify the means” mindset are more likely to balance their good and bad deeds, while those who believe that what is right and wrong is a matter of principle are more likely to be consistent in their behavior, even if that behavior is bad.
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Psychologists Launch a Bare-All Research Initiative
Science: A group of psychologists are launching a project this week that they hope will make studies in their field radically more transparent and prompt other fields to open up as well. With a pledge of $5.25 million from private supporters, they have set up an outfit called the Center for Open Science. It is collaborating with an established journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, to solicit work from authors who are willing to work completely in the open and have their studies replicated. Read the whole story: Science
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Your Child’s Fat, Mine’s Fine: Rose-Colored Glasses And The Obesity Epidemic
NPR: About 69 percent of American adults are overweight or obese, and more than four in five people say they are worried about obesity as a public health problem. But a recent poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health revealed a curious schism in our national attitudes toward obesity: Only one in five kids had a parent who feared the boy or girl would grow up to be overweight as an adult. Put another way, assuming current trends persist, parents of 80 percent of American children think all these kids will somehow end up being among the lucky 31 percent of adults who are not overweight.
