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AI ‘EMOTION RECOGNITION’ CAN’T BE TRUSTED
As artificial intelligence is used to make more decisions about our lives, engineers have sought out ways to make it more emotionally intelligent. That means automating some of the emotional tasks that come naturally to humans — most notably, looking at a person’s face and knowing how they feel. To achieve this, tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon all sell what they call “emotion recognition” algorithms, which infer how people feel based on facial analysis. For example, if someone has a furrowed brow and pursed lips, it means they’re angry. If their eyes are wide, their eyebrows are raised, and their mouth is stretched, it means they’re afraid, and so on.
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One Secret To Success: Take Your Brain On A Vacation
When was the last time you completely unplugged from work and truly relaxed while on a vacation? Turned the phone off, let the emails go unanswered, allowed the “out of office” reply to do its job so that you could forget about yours, and took a real break from the office? Thanks to advances in technology, the lines between professional and personal life are increasingly blurred. We are all guilty of responding to a work email while at the beach or taking a work call while on a family trip. In fact, 66% of American employees admit to working while on vacation, and 78% say they feel comfortable taking time off only if they know they can still access work.
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You 2.0: Tunnel Vision
Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing? Two researchers have dubbed this phenomenon scarcity, and they say it touches on many aspects of our lives. "It leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help you to manage scarcity, but in the long term only make matters worse," says Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Several years ago, he and Eldar Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton, started researching this idea.
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Always Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop? Here’s How to Quit Worrying
Ever felt as if the joy of a big win was contaminated with the stress of imagining when the pendulum would swing the other way and something awful would happen to balance it out? If so, you’re not alone: Often, when driven people care about something and finally experience whatever they’ve been hoping to achieve — whether it’s a new relationship, a health goal, a promotion or something else altogether — they’re unable to entirely savor the good times. They may, in fact, do the exact opposite: endlessly worry about when their peak might plummet. But taking yourself out of the moment to dread what might happen next won’t prepare you for disaster.
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Kelly McGonigal: Can We Reframe The Way We Think About Stress?
Stress is an unpleasant emotion — but does it have an upside? Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal says adjusting the way you think about stress can actually change the way your body responds to it.
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You’re probably more freaked out about the world than you should be
I don’t know you. But I’m guessing I can still tell you something important about yourself: You are more freaked out about the world — especially the other people in it — than you should be. For starters, you are reading this, which means you consume at least some news media. And the news is, lately, a scary place. Perhaps you saw some stunning graphs recently that depicted the most common actual causes of death in the United States, the causes of death most commonly searched for online and those that get the most news coverage. In reality, most people die of diseases of old age, such as heart disease and cancer.
