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Six Books to Build a Dream On
The Wall Street Journal: Now that you have all these ideas about what you'd like to change (whether it's starting an exercise plan, plotting a job hunt, managing your budget or moving elsewhere), here's the book to tell you how to get going: "Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions" by John Norcross. A leading researcher on the psychology of change, Mr. Norcross has identified five distinct stages common to successful behavioral change, which he calls the five P's: psych (getting ready by specifying realistic goals), prep (preparing to take the leap), perspire (taking action), persevere (managing slips) and persist (maintaining change).
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Connecticut School Shooting: 4 Tips to Help Kids Cope
ABC: Alan Kazdin, a professor of child psychology at Yale University, offers four tips for parents to frame that discussion and help their kids cope. Don’t Over-Talk This Parents can easily project their own fears onto their kids. Your kids will likely hear about it, so your child has questions. Answer at the level of the question. Parents shouldn’t dwell on the tragic nature of it, but don’t be evasive. Don’t lie, don’t withhold.
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Walk Like a Fish
The New York Times: NOBODY in their right mind visits Midtown Manhattan during the holidays. The reason is simple: everyone, it seems, is in Midtown Manhattan during the holidays. Drawn to the scene like lacewings to streetlights, tourists jam the sidewalks, the crowds slow-moving, veering, shopping-bag-laden, and only vaguely walking forward. New Yorkers normally roll their eyes, but they ought to take a closer look: watching these tourists interrupt the flow of traffic shows us how well pedestrians in our city usually move. This year I slowed down and observed them. The study of pedestrian movement took off with the urban sociologist William H.
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Reasoning Is Sharper in a Foreign Language
Scientific American Mind: The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent.
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Reappraisal Defuses Strong Emotional Responses to Israel-Palestine Conflict
Reappraisal is a widely-used cognitive strategy that can help people to regulate their reactions to emotionally charged events. Now, new research suggests that reappraisal may even be effective in changing people’s emotional responses in the context of one of the most intractable conflicts worldwide: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Negative intergroup emotions play a crucial role in decisions that perpetuate intractable conflicts,” observes lead researcher Eran Halperin of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel.
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Few Friends or Many: Which Is Best?
LiveScience: Whether one has a small, cozy group of friends or a larger, more boisterous gaggle may depend on individual personalities and circumstances, but new research suggests when deciding which type is best, socioeconomic conditions are key. "In the age of Facebook, many Americans seem to opt for a broad, shallow networking strategy," write Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia and Selin Kesebir of the London Business School last week in the journal Psychological Science.
