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When helping doesn’t help – having support encourages procrastination, says study
The Vancouver Sun: A supportive partner can often give people a good kick in the rear to get motivated to accomplish their goals, but a new study suggests that too much cheerleading actually may have a detrimental effect. The study from two U.S. universities looked at "self-regulatory outsourcing," the notion that thinking about how other people can help you achieve a goal can actually decrease your motivation to focus on that task yourself. Read the whole story: The Vancouver Sun
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Lie Detection: Misconceptions, Pitfalls, and Opportunities for Improvement
Researchers discuss some of the common misconceptions about people proficient in the art of deception, and reviews the shortcomings of commonly used lie-detection techniques.
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Tots fearless when facing spiders, snakes, study suggests
MSNBC: Like the girl in that old Jim Stafford song, most people don’t like spiders and snakes. But according to new research involving infants and children, we don’t start off this way. According to Vanessa LoBue, assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers and co-author of a recent study in Current Directions in Psychological Science, spider and snake phobias are incredibly common. But they’re also rather baffling, since most of us have never been directly threatened by a wolf spider or garter snake. Read the whole story: MSNBC
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Dial ‘5683’ for Love: Dialing Certain Numbers on a Cell Phone Changes Your Emotional State
A psychological scientist in Germany has found a way that cell phones, and specifically texting, have hacked into our brains. Just by typing the numbers that correspond to the letters in a word like "love," we can activate the meaning of that word in our minds. The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. For the study, Sascha Topolinski and his students at the University of Würzburg in Germany created a list of German words that can be typed on a cell phone keypad without typing the same digit twice in a row. Also, each number combination could spell only one word.
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Kids Learn to Work Together Early, Study Finds
U.S. News & World Report (HealthDay): Some adults may want to take a lesson from young who've demonstrated that even children at the early age of 3, children have a sense of what's fair, researchers say. The study authors found that children shared with each other after working together to earn a reward, even in circumstances where it would have been easy for one child to keep all of the prize without sharing. Read the whole story: U.S. News & World Report (HealthDay)
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‘Was Doing’ Versus ‘Did’: Verbs Matter When Judging Other People’s Intentions
Your English teacher wasn't kidding: Grammar really does matter. The verb form used to describe an action can affect how the action is perceived—and these subtle variations could mean the difference between an innocent or guilty verdict in criminal law, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. William Hart, of the University of Alabama, was inspired to conduct the study by research on how people think about narratives.
