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Babies prefer those who pick on individuals who are different
The Boston Globe: People often yearn for the innocence of youth, that time of unbiased childlike wonder that came before experience intruded, transforming us into cynical and self-interested adults. But we may be nostalgic for a time that never quite existed, according to a new study that found babies prefer individuals who harm, rather than help, characters who are different from them. ... But would babies always, universally, prefer heroes to villains? Or would their preference depend on who was being helped or hindered? The researchers wondered: would they see the enemy of their enemy as a friend?
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MBA Admissions Interviews: A Numbers Game?
Business Week: As any rejected business school applicant will probably tell you, admissions officers sometimes make mistakes. Now, new research from two business school professors attempts to show how those mistakes happen. Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of operations and information management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Francesca Gino, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, analyzed data from 9,000 MBA admissions interviews spanning 10 years. The program that was the subject of the research is at “a large state school,” according to Simonsohn.
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Sleep Paralysis: Researchers Identify What Makes The Sleep Condition So Distressing
The Huffington Post: Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis, the condition where you may feel totally physically paralyzed either right before falling asleep or immediately upon waking up? If you felt panicked after the experience, science is getting closer to understanding why. A new study examines what exactly makes people feel distressed after a sleep paralysis episode, and shows that sensory experiences and innate "features" of the condition -- like feeling fear -- were linked with higher reports of distress. The research, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, included 293 people who experienced sleep paralysis.
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Know Thyself: How Mindfulness Can Improve Self-Knowledge
Mindfulness -- paying attention to one’s current experience in a non-judgmental way -- might help us to learn more about our own personalities, according to a new article published in the March 2013 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Recent research has highlighted the fact that we have many blind spots when it comes to understanding our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Despite our intuition that we know ourselves the best, other people have a more accurate view of some traits (e.g., intellect) than we do.
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Study: People who ostracize others could be hurting, too
MSN: Bullies with the blues have only themselves to blame, according to a new study. Research published in the journal Psychological Science said deliberately ignoring or excluding someone can hurt the ostracizer as much as their victim. "By causing harm to others, the perpetrators may be thwarting their own basic psychological needs to feel in control and to feel connected to others," the researchers found. Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester, with graduate student Nicole Legate, explored this by having participants play a ball-throwing computer game.
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Single, childless and want work-life balance? How taboo
The Washington Post: The Yahoo no-work-from-home brouhaha had working moms up in arms last week. Professional women with children had been dealt a blow, they said. Oh, and as one writer reminded us, it’s an issue for working dads, too. Okay, but what about all the single people? And all the people without kids? We need to stop acting like they’re not part of the work-life conversation. Whether it’s our pets or our parents, our health or our education, there are many facets of our lives besides children that, thanks to work, get short shrift.
