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Why People With Anxiety May Have Better Memories
Anxiety may come with a silver lining, a new study suggests: Feeling anxious in a new situation may help you remember it more vividly. Too much anxiety, though, can have the opposite effect, by impairing recall and causing people to remember neutral details in a negative light. The new study, published in the journal Brain Sciences, serves as reassurance that a little bit of nervousness can be a good thing, says co-author Myra Fernandes, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It gives you a heightened sense of awareness and makes you attuned to details you wouldn’t be otherwise,” she says.
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Lost In Translation: The Power Of Language To Shape How We View The World
If you're bilingual or multilingual, you may have noticed that the different languages you speak will make you stretch in different ways. Languages like Spanish or French require you to remember the gender assigned to every noun, even inanimate objects. Uttering a sentence as simple as "I read the book" in Russian requires you to indicate whether you finished the book or merely read a few pages. If you're toggling between English and a language like Arabic, you have to swap which side of the page you look at first.
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How the Intolerable Becomes Acceptable
Public opinion can often seem mercurial. Obamacare was widely unpopular—until it took effect. The Republican tax plan was widely derided when it was proposed and debated, but people now seem to be warming to it. Why the shifts? New research offers one likely answer: Once something becomes real, we are more inclined to view it more positively. "People will often rationalize the status quo," writes University of British Columbia psychologist Kristin Laurin. In the journal Psychological Science, she analyzes public opinion on three divisive issues, and finds acceptance of the final outcome spikes soon after the matter is settled.
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How mass school shootings affect the education of students who survive
A Washington Post analysis found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools in the United States have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which is sometimes cited as the first in a string of modern mass school shootings. What happens to these survivors a year, or two, or three later? Is their schooling affected? How have they developed emotionally?
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Intelligent Machines That Learn Like Children
Machines that learn like children provide deep insights into how the mind and body act together to bootstrap knowledge and skills. Deon, a fictional engineer in the 2015 sci-fi film Chappie, wants to create a machine that can think and feel. To this end, he writes an artificial-intelligence program that can learn like a child. Deon's test subject, Chappie, starts off with a relatively blank mental slate. By simply observing and experimenting with his surroundings, he acquires general knowledge, language and complex skills—a task that eludes even the most advanced AI systems we have today.
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I have 1,605 Facebook friends. Why do I feel so alone?
My name is Hadiya. And sometimes, I feel lonely. Even the people who know me best would be astounded by that assertion. Most people would label me an extrovert. I am confident. I have no trouble striking up a conversation with strangers, and do so — in bars, online, at the coffee shop. I play team sports once or twice a week. I have 1,605 Facebook friends — about 1,300 more than the average user. My life is very busy and full of lectures and concerts, meetings and comedy shows. It’s completely acceptable, even a bit of a brag really, to talk about needing or wanting alone time.
