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Mind Reading: Steven Pinker’s Case for Why the World Is Heading Toward Peace
TIME: Amidst the headlines tallying the damage wrought by persistent economic decline, cataclysmic climate change and unbending political stalemate — among other things — Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker brings good news. In his new 802-page masterwork, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the bestselling author and two-time honoree on TIME 100 list of the most influential people in the world makes a nearly ironclad case for human progress toward peacefulness. I recently spoke with Pinker about his book and the critical influences that can pacify the human brain. Read the full story: TIME
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Envy May Bear Fruit, but It Also Has an Aftertaste
The New York Times: Why envy? It seems to be the most useless of the deadly sins: excruciating to experience, shameful to admit, bereft of immediate pleasure or long-term benefits. To an evolutionary psychologist, there’s a certain logic to seducing thy neighbor’s wife or stealing his goods, but what’s the point of merely coveting them? Philosophers have offered theories, but empirical evidence has been in short supply, maybe because envy is such an uncomfortable topic for everyone, including psychologists.
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Behind a visionary: The science of Steve Jobs
msnbc: The death of Apple's Steve Jobs on Wednesday triggered an outpouring of mourning and celebration. As newspaper obits remembered Jobs as a "visionary" and the "Henry Ford of the computer industry," fans converged on Apple stores across the country to leave notes, bouquets and actual apples. It's hard to imagine this sort of grief for most other chief executive officers — would the loss of the head of General Electric or Exxon Mobile spur 10,000 tweets per second? — but Jobs had a combination of smarts, entrepreneurship and salesmanship that linked him closely with Apple and its products. Exactly how a visionary such as Jobs develops, however, is still something of a mystery.
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Melancolía:¿un camino para recuperar la autoestima y la esperanza?
Yahoo Mexico: La melancolía, a veces romántica, a veces triste, a veces dramática. Pero siempre preocupante. Al menos para la idea que los seres humanos tienen sobre el bienestar. En los siglos XVII y XVIII se consideraba que era casi una enfermedad y sus síntomas característicos eran el llanto, el latido cardíaco irregular y la anorexia. La nostalgia se atribuía a causas tan variadas como la presencia de demonios en el cerebro, los efectos de la presión atmosférica o al sonido constante de (por ejemplo) las campanas de las iglesias. Ya en el siglo XX pasó a ser considerada como un trastorno psiquiátrico, y sus señales fueron el insomnio, la ansiedad y la depresión.
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Study links bribery with collectivism
Toronto Sun: Bribery is viewed as morally wrong across cultures, but the question remains why some places are more prone to corruption than others. According to research by Pankaj Aggarwal and Nina Mazar, two professors at the University of Toronto, part of the answer seems to be the level of collective feeling in a society. The team discovered that people in more collectivist cultures – in which individuals see themselves as interdependent and as part of a larger society – are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures.
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Hearing Bilingual: How Babies Sort Out Language
The New York Times: Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information.
