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Checking Facebook or Twitter is more tempting than sex or cigarettes, says study
The Daily Mail: Checking social networking sites is more tempting than sex and cigarettes, a study has revealed. Researchers at Chicago University's Booth Business School used BlackBerrys to log reports about participants' willpower and desires over seven days. The online poll of 250 participants in Germany revealed the yearning to interact through tweets, photos, and comments was stronger than sex and cigarettes. Over seven consecutive days participants were signaled seven times a day over 14 hours, reported the Guardian. This meant they were required to message back and inform if they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes.
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Free Your Mind: Experience Awe, Have More Time
Pacific Standard: I don’t tend to budget a lot of time for trolling YouTube. But the other day, I cashed in four minutes and twenty-three seconds to watch a video my husband sent me: a short film in which the Scottish cycling wunderkind Danny MacAskill pedals around San Francisco, performing acrobatic feats that make you consider the urban landscape in a whole new way. I’m your typical time-crunched working mother, my day jammed with day-care pickups and drop-offs, writing, meal prep, chasing an energetic 2-year-old boy.
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Studies Link Students’ Boredom to Stress
Education Week: One glance, and any teacher knows the score: That student, halfway down the row, staring blankly at his tapping pen, fidgeting, sneaking glances at the wall clock roughly every 30 seconds, is practically screaming, "I'm bored!" While boredom is a perennial student complaint, emerging research shows it is more than students' not feeling entertained, but rather a "flavor of stress" that can interfere with their ability to learn and even their health. An international group of researchers argues this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science that the experience of boredom directly connects to a student's inability to focus attention. Read the whole story: Education Week
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The candidates’ message: I might be so-so, but the other guy is terrible
The Washington Post: Four stories are at the heart of any campaign. If you understand them, you know who controls the message — and with it, perhaps the election. These stories make up what campaign strategists call the “message grid,” which has four quadrants. The first two comprise the positive stories the candidates are telling about themselves; the other two feature the negative stories each candidate is telling about the other. In some elections, one quadrant of the grid dominates the conversation — for example, when the economy or a candidate is particularly strong or weak.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Guilty: Anticipating Feelings of Guilt Predicts Ethical Behavior
From politics to finance, government to education, ethics-related scandals seem to crop up with considerable regularity. As whistleblowers and investigative journalists bring these scandals to light, one can’t help but wonder: Are there specific character traits that predispose people to unethical behavior? Converging evidence suggests that the answer could be guilt proneness. In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Taya Cohen and Nazli Turan of Carnegie Mellon University and A.T.
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Scientific Inquiry Among the Preschool Set
The New York Times: When engaged in what looks like child’s play, preschoolers are actually behaving like scientists, according to a new report in the journal Science: forming hypotheses, running experiments, calculating probabilities and deciphering causal relationships about the world. The report’s author, Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says she based it on more than 10 years’ worth of research and studies, including some of her own. In one study, for example, an experimenter performed five different sequences of three actions each, as a 4-year-old looked on. The sequences would either activate a toy or fail to activate it.
