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In Money Matters, Patience can Profit
Whether it’s waking up at the crack of dawn to go to the gym or breaking the bank to pay for college and graduate school, most of us pay small prices in hopes for a big payoff in the future. But not everyone is as focused on the future as gym rats and students. How can some of us see a particular tradeoff as advantageous, while others of us see precisely the same deal as foolish? The reason may be due to what researchers call “temporal discounting,” a tendency to consider events in the distant future less important than events in the near future. In other words, if something is way off in the distance, it’s very difficult to keep its importance front and center in the mind.
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New Study Explains why the Future is More Important than the Past
With all due respect to History teachers, people generally give events that have yet to come more value than those that have already happened. This way of thinking is far from illogical; the future is never certain and can always change while the past remains the same. But some new experiments shows that people tend to place more value on events in the future, even when it’s completely irrational.
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Study Finds That Sleep Selectively Preserves Emotional Memories
As poets, songwriters and authors have described, our memories range from misty water-colored recollections to vividly detailed images of the times of our lives. Now, a study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Boston College offers new insights into the specific components of emotional memories, suggesting that sleep plays a key role in determining what we remember – and what we forget.
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I Can, Automatically, Become Just Like You: The Effects of Exclusion on Nonconscious Mimicry
No one likes to be excluded from a group: exclusion can decrease mood, reduce self-esteem and feelings of belonging, and even ultimately lead to negative behavior (e.g., the shootings at Virginia Tech). As a result, we often try to fit in with others in both conscious and automatic ways. Psychologists Jessica L. Lakin of Drew University, Tanya L. Chartrand of Duke University, and Robert M. Arkin of The Ohio State University studied people’s tendency to copy automatically the behaviors of others in order to find out how this mimicry can be used as an affiliation strategy.
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Back to the Future: Psychologists Examine Children’s Mental Time Traveling Abilities
Planning and anticipating occur so frequently in our everyday lives that it is hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have this capability. But just as many other capacities develop, so does this mental time traveling ability. Researchers have recently explored how children comprehend the future and ways that this understanding can be affected by, for example, their current physiological state. In one particular study, psychologists Cristina Atance from the University of Ottawa and colleague Andrew Meltzoff from the Univeristy of Washington tested children ages three, four and five to determine the precise age that they develop the ability to plan for the future.
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Religion can comfort or terrorize in response to death concerns
To many people, death is seen as a frightening concept. Although it is in general a common theme in books, music, and movies, we prefer to keep thoughts of our own death to a minimum. According to the Terror Management Theory, we adopt different worldviews, such as religion, to give our lives meaning and to provide order, thereby preventing us from being overwhelmed by the idea of death. But a new study shows that the terminally ill can be overwhelmed with both religious struggle and depression as a result of being unable to cope with thoughts of death.
