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How Simple Rituals Help You Overcome Nervousness and Anxiety to Perform at Your Best, Backed by Considerable Science
It's easy to assume tennis star Rafael Nadal has at least a little OCD going on. He always makes sure his chair sits perfectly perpendicular to the court. He always puts two drink bottles in front of the chair to his left, one behind the other, aimed diagonally at the court. Before he serves, he uses his right hand to touch the back and front of his shorts, then his left shoulder, then his right, then his nose, left ear, nose, right ear, and lastly his right thigh. At changeovers, he always waits for the other player to cross the line, then he crosses with his right-foot first. He folds a towel and puts it behind him, then folds a second towel and puts it on his lap.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on audience characteristics in eliciting amusement, visual working memory, the effect of underestimating counterparts’ learning goals, misplaced barriers to asking for help, face-information sampling, and much more.
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What Defines Young Leaders? More Research Could Benefit Youth and Society Broadly
Lead author Jennifer Tackett: “The rapid development of personality, peer relationships, values and vocational identity during this period, make adolescence an optimal time for developing leadership potential.”
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Science Says Using YouTube and Google the Wrong Way Leads to Extreme Overconfidence
I've learned to do a lot of things by watching YouTube videos. Wire a four-way circuit. Replace the control board on a clothes dryer. Create complicated (at least to me) spreadsheet pivot tables. Granted, "learned" is an overstatement. I got a basic sense of what to do. Most of what I learned actually came from doing, and struggling, and eventually figuring out -- not from watching. Even though I went into those tasks, and plenty more, extremely confident that they would be a breeze. ...
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There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief
It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain. His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death, the most shattering. I’d spent the first weeks of his existence obsessing over him around the clock, preoccupied with the basics of survival and longing for a snatch of sleep. Now, in the first weeks after his death, I reeled through a twisted mirror image of the same experience.
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To Get Kids Into Science, Just Do It
Developmental psychologists have long noted that very small children think a lot like scientists. Anybody who has spent time with a 2-year-old has witnessed their insatiable curiosity and constant experiments. Yet by the time most children are in middle school, they lose much of that innate interest and don’t see science as part of their future, especially girls and minorities. How can we counteract this phenomenon, given how important it is to encourage people to develop scientific skills and to know and care about science? What can we do to help children retain their natural scientific impulse?
