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Robert Provine, scholar of laughter, yawns, and hiccups, dies at 76
Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist who brought scientific rigor to the study of laughter, yawns, hiccups and other universal human behaviors that had previously gone largely unexplored, died Oct. 17 at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 76. The cause was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said his wife, Helen Weems. Dr. Provine had spent four decades as a psychology professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County before his retirement in 2013. He continued to teach at the university in recent years as a professor emeritus ...
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The Key To Raising Brilliant Kids? Play A Game
We all want to raise smart, successful kids, so it's tempting to play Mozart for our babies and run math drills for kindergartners. After all, we need to give them a head start while they're still little sponges, right? "It doesn't quite work that way," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children with Roberta Golinkoff. She's been studying childhood development for almost 40 years. So how does it work?
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Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say
Humility is a relative newcomer to social and personality psychology, at least as a trait or behavior to be studied on its own. It arrived as part of the effort, beginning in the 1990s, to build a “positive” psychology: a more complete understanding of sustaining qualities such as pride, forgiveness, grit and contentment. More recently, humility has found a foothold in the most widely used measure of personality traits, the five- factor questionnaire. The wallflower is attracting some attention, and so far appears to be absorbing it well. ... In their day jobs, research psychologists don’t typically need safety goggles, much less pith helmets or Indiana Jones bullwhips.
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What to Expect When You’re Expecting Gender-Reveal Backlash
Reilly acknowledges that the parties might not be for everyone—and, indeed, gender reveals have suffered fierce backlash for conflating gender with sex and enforcing rigid cultural norms. But Reilly is among the defenders who argue that the new tradition is about more than whether a baby will grow up to be a square-jawed macho man or a dainty lady. They’re meant to celebrate the mother, he says. In fact, some researchers agree with that assessment—and say the discussions around gender in America today might have helped bring about the tradition’s rise in the first place. ... It also makes sense that gender would be a part of this new ritual.
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Need to Solve a Problem? Sleep On It
You truly are better off getting a good night’s sleep before making any tough decisions, findings from a study at Northwestern University suggest.
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Stanford psychology expert: This is the No. 1 work skill of the future—but most fail to realize it
You pick up your phone to look at the news notification and answer your text, only to check a Facebook post and then watch a Youtube video. Suddenly, before you know it, an hour has passed, and you haven’t accomplished a single work-related task. ... What’s the cost of all this? In 1971, the psychologist Herbert A. Simon emphasized that a wealth of information means a dearth of something else: attention. ... That said, not being distractable is the single most important skill for the 21st century. Many experts, including Adam Grant, who said that “success and happiness belong to people who can control their attention,” have addressed the importance of focus.
