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Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”?
Scientific American: A recurring red herring in the current presidential campaign is the verity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate. Although the president has made this document public, and records of his 1961 birth in Honolulu have been corroborated by newspaper announcements, a vocal segment of the population continues to insist that Obama's birth certificate proving U.S. citizenship is a fraud, making him legally ineligible to be president. A Politico survey found that a majority of voters in the 2011 Republican primary shared this clearly false belief. Scientific issues can be just as vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.
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Till Death, or 20 Years, Do Us Part
The New York Times: It makes little sense to explore a new era of family values based around Hollywood couplings. Or, worse yet, around mere rumors of the way movie stars conduct their marital affairs. But might there be seeds of something worth considering in one such rumor, that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes signed a five-year marriage contract? It’s a dim data point but not an isolated one, suggesting people are rethinking marriage, at least around the edges. Prenuptial agreements, a different sort of contract, are on the rise, as is vowless cohabitation. The ages at which people marry have hit record highs, 28.7 years for men and 26.5 for women.
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Nothing to fear but anxiety therapy itself
Brisbane Times: Putting on a brave face could actually make your fear worse, a study shows. An international expert on fear and phobias says her research has found it helps people to talk about their fears while they are experiencing them - and in some cases the best treatments involve scaring them more. Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology and director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles, said keeping people in a heightened fear state seems to help them learn to deal with their fearful emotions.
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Why We Get Bored
NBC: Scientists are taking on boredom. No, they aren't working on a cure just yet, but they have written a new definition of boredom and outlined the mental processes behind ennui. The researchers, led by psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University in Ontario, Canada, define boredom as "an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity," which springs from failures in one of the brain's attention networks. The findings, detailed in the September issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, may speak to many Americans: In a large survey of high-school students across 26 U.S.
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How Misinformation Spreads
The Huffington Post: In a recent review paper in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, we follow the trails of misinformation: where it originates, how it is spread, how it is processed, how it affects our cognition, and how its effects can be alleviated. Misinformation comes in many guises. It can come from jokes, from the grapevine, or from works of fiction (if you now wonder whether people really extract information from fiction, think about the fact that fiction author Michael Crichton has been invited as a climate "expert" to testify before a U.S.
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Study Shows Baldness Can Be a Business Advantage
The Wall Street Journal: Up for a promotion? If you're a man, you might want to get out the clippers. Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair, according to a recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. That may explain why the power-buzz look has caught on among business leaders in recent years. Venture capitalist and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, 41 years old, DreamWorks Animation SKG Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, 61, and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.33% CEO Jeffrey Bezos, 48, all sport some variant of the close-cropped look.
