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‘Fat Talk’ Compels but Carries a Cost
The New York Times: Over winter break, Carolyn Bates, a college senior, and a friend each picked out five pairs of jeans at a Gap store in Indianapolis and eagerly tried them on. But the growing silence in their separate fitting rooms was telling. At last, one friend called out, “Dang it, these fit everywhere but my thighs! I wish my legs weren’t so huge.” The response: “My pair is way too long. I need to be taller or skinnier!” ... Renee Engeln, who directs the Body and Media Lab at Northwestern University, cautioned that “we have complicated reactions to confident women in general, and particularly to women who are confident about their bodies.
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No, Having Bigger Biceps Does Not Make You More Conservative
Business Insider: A study by a group of researchers about biceps and politics that has made waves over the past couple of days following its publication in Psychological Science has been widely misinterpreted by several news outlets. The study looked at correlations between a man's socioeconomic status, his upper body strength, and his political views. What it found was this: Specifically, men with greater upper-body strength should more strongly favor redistribution if they are poor but oppose it if they are wealthy.
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Stress Kills The Mind, One Day At A Time
Forbes: Stress is hard on the mind — this much we intuitively know. But what we may not realize is how much our daily reactions to stress take a cumulative toll on our minds. Most psychological research on the effects of stress has focused on relatively short-term outcomes. A new study in the journal Psychological Science took the analysis further by attempting to find out what daily stress reactions do to us 10 years later. Read the whole story: Forbes
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Never Forget a Face? Women May Remember Faces Better Because They Scan More
Women may remember faces better than men in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to the researchers, teaching people to increase feature scanning may be one way to help improve their memory for faces. The findings may help to shed light on long-standing questions about why some people can remember faces easily while others quickly forget the face of someone they’ve just met.
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Microbleeding in Brain May Be Behind Senior Moments
Science: People may grow wiser with age, but they don't grow smarter. Many of our mental abilities decline after midlife, and now researchers say that they've fingered a culprit. A study presented here last week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science points to microbleeding in the brain caused by stiffening arteries. The finding may lead to new therapies to combat senior moments. This isn't the first time that microbleeds have been suspected as a cause of cognitive decline. "We have known [about them] for some time thanks to neuroimaging studies," says Matthew Pase, a psychology Ph.D. student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
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Emotional Regulation Strategies May Influence Anxiety, Study Finds
The Huffington Post: How you deal with both positive and negative emotions could have big implications for your mental health. Emotional regulation -- whether you avoid your emotions, or explore them -- may plat a role in how much, and whether, you suffer from anxiety, according to a new University of Illinois study. The findings, recently published in the journal Emotion, are based on survey responses from 179 healthy adult men and women. The participants answered questionnaires asking them how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations.
