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Mindless tasks boost creative potential
The Globe and Mail: “Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering?” asks Pacific Standard magazine. “Well, congratulations: Without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your mind won’t, by itself, lead to creative thinking.
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Bang? Zeg wat je voelt. (Afraid? Say what you feel)
De Telegraaf: Dat blijkt uit een nieuwe studie van UCLA. Psychologen vroegen 88 vrijwilligers met angst voor spinnen, een tarantula in de buitenlucht onder ogen te komen. De vrijwilligers moesten stapje voor stapje dichterbij komen en uiteindelijk de spin aanraken. Gevoel omschrijven De proefpersonen werden vervolgens verdeeld in vier groepen en moesten in een kamer gaan zitten voor een bak met daarin een tarantula. De mensen uit de eerste groep beschreven hun emoties bij het zien van de spin. Bijvoorbeeld door te zeggen: ‘Ik ben bang voor die lelijke angstaanjagende harige spin’. Gevoelens onderdrukken De tweede groep moest hun gevoelens onderdrukken en de ervaring veranderen.
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Yes We Can Go Forward and Believe in America! When did US campaign slogans become self-help mantras?
New Statesman: Something's happened to US campaign slogans. Something affirmative. Inspiring. Motivational. Yes! They've become self-help mantras. Romney has his rather hectoring “Believe in America” and Obama the grammatically pointed “Forward.” – the much discussed full stop signifying, apparently, a mind set on its course. Last election, of course, we had the rabble-rousing chant “Yes, we can”. The tone now borrows from life coaches where it once borrowed from the advertising industry (“I like Ike”, “Keep cool and keep Coolidge”), and this time it’s much harder to oppose. Agreeing is not only right – it’s healthy!
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Why We’re Happy Being Sad: Pop’s Emotional Evolution
NPR: Six years ago, Glenn Schellenberg decided to do an experiment. Schellenberg works at the University of Toronto, where he studies the psychology of music. The idea behind his experiment couldn't have been more straightforward: He simply wanted to play music for people and get them to rate how happy or sad that music made them feel. These two emotions — happy and sad — are relatively easy to identify in music, and though there are different ways for music to convey emotion (through lyrics or what kind of instruments are used), Schellenberg says the tempo of a song and whether it's in a major or minor key often strongly influences which emotion the song conveys. Read the whole story: NPR
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How to make time expand
The Boston Globe: It’s a problem so common it may qualify as a new American epidemic: We’ve got no time. Too busy. Overwhelmed by work, family obligations, and the fast-paced nature of a run-ragged world, many Americans — especially working adults, parents of young children, and those with college degrees, according to polls — feel strapped for time and are leading less happy lives as a result. Researchers in the 1990s gave this familiar, if dreadful, feeling a name: time famine. More recently, they coined a term to describe the opposite: time affluence, that elusive feeling of being rich in time. Time affluence, it appears, has real benefits in our lives.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on cognitive processes related to memory, priming, and decision-making published in Psychological Science and Current Directions in Psychological Science. Independence of Data-Driven and Conceptually Driven Priming: The Case of Person Recognition Stephan G. Boehm and Werner Sommer One of the central tenets of memory theories assumes that data-driven priming (facilitated processing of stimuli based on perceptual information) and conceptual priming (facilitated processing of stimuli based on conceptual knowledge in semantic memory) are independent.
