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Where’s the Magic in Family Dinner?
The New York Times: Like many families, we strive to eat dinner together as often as possible. And when my husband and I meet our tween and her younger sister at the table, we sometimes have worthwhile conversations or manage to crack each other up. But, at least as often, dinner devolves into a failing effort to find out what happened at school or a nag-fest over mealtime manners. After an especially short or harried supper, I can find myself wondering how the family gathering that just transpired could possibly help to raise my daughters’ grades, improve their psychological well-being or lower their risk of substance abuse. ...
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The Sad Truth About Speed-Reading: It Doesn’t Work
New York Magazine: In 2007, shortly after the final volume in the Harry Potter series was released, a woman named Anne Jones read all 784 pages in exactly 47 minutes. To prove that she’d actually read it, Jones — who has won the World Championship Speed Reading Competition six times — summarized the major plot points to a group of reporters. They were satisfied with her impromptu book report, which suggests Jones had successfully read the book at 4,200 words per minute. ... Treiman is a co-author on a paper in the May edition of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest that reviews the evidence for speed-reading, and mostly finds it lacking.
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To Be More Persuasive, Repeat Yourself
The philosopher Plato wrote that there is no harm in repeating a good thing. Even better, a new study finds that repeating key points during your next meeting is a good way to sway colleagues’ decisions. Across two experiments, Stefan Schulz-Hardt (Georg-August-University) and colleagues demonstrated that repeating specific information during a discussion was enough to change someone’s mind. “From a rational point of view, information repetitions constitute redundancy and, hence, should not affect the recipient's decision,” the researchers write.
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Money does buy happiness, but only if…
CNBC: In fact, it's even more important than your overall income or how much you spend in total, according to a study published online Thursday in Psychological Science. In other words, what matters more than your salary or how frequently you shop is whether you make purchases that match your personality. The University of Cambridge study examined approximately 77,000 U.K. bank transactions of 625 people and categorized purchases in different personality traits buckets — for example, eating out at a pub was put in the extroverted and impulsive spending category. Read the whole story: CNBC
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Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away
NPR: As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way. For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run. In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A.
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Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read
The New York Times: OUR favorite Woody Allen joke is the one about taking a speed-reading course. “I read ‘War and Peace’ in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s about Russia.” The promise of speed reading — to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension — can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger. ...
