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Could Depression Be Caused By An Infection?
NPR: Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn't work, he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons. Cotton was the newly appointed director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane and was acting on a theory proposed by influential Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, under whom Cotton had studied, that psychiatric illness is the result of chronic infection.
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Older Beats Younger When It Comes to Correcting Mistakes
Findings from a new study challenge the notion that older adults always lag behind their younger counterparts when it comes to learning new things. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that older adults were actually better than young adults at correcting their mistakes on a general information quiz. “The take home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults. Correcting their factual errors—all of their errors—is one of them,” say psychological scientists Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman of Columbia University, who conducted the study.
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The Trouble with Too Much Talent
Recruiting high-level talent may seem like a sure way to win, but bringing together the most talented individuals doesn’t seem to guarantee the best possible team performance.
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The Ambivalent Marriage Takes a Toll on Health
The New York Times: Every marriage has highs and lows from time to time, but some relationships are both good and bad on a regular basis. Call it the ambivalent marriage — not always terrible, but not always great, either. While many couples can no doubt relate to this not bad, but not good, state of affairs, new research shows that ambivalence in a relationship — the feeling that a partner may be unpredictable with his or her support or negativity — can take a quiet toll on the health of an individual. ... Arthur Aron of the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in New York, notes that every marriage will inevitably have good and bad qualities. But Dr.
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What we talk about when we talk about rape
Los Angeles Times: When I was a young social psychologist and feminist in the 1970s, I never imagined that I would be asked to testify for the defense in a rape case. Rape laws at the time still included the "marital rape exemption," with rape commonly defined as "an act of sexual intercourse with a female, not one's wife, against her will and consent." Men joked about this. "If you can't rape your wife," California state Sen.
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Harvard’s Amy Cuddy is changing lives with a simple pose
The Boston Globe: Amy Cuddy’s directive was simple: Raise your arms in a V shape over your head, keep your posture straight, and hold the pose for two minutes. But when she explained the logic behind this seemingly elementary “power pose” during her 2012 TED Talk, she changed lives. More than 28 million people have watched her talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” online. And she’s contacted daily by fans who say that just by tweaking their habits and posture, they’ve become happier, more successful people. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
