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Stress Hormone Foreshadows Postpartum Depression in New Mothers
Women who receive strong social support from their families during pregnancy appear to be protected from sharp increases in a particular stress hormone, making them less likely to develop postpartum depression, according to a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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How Offices Become Complaint Departments
The New York Times: There is the ideal life, and then there is life as it really exists. We have various ways of expressing discontent over this inevitable gap, and one of the most common is complaining. ... The workplace is no exception. The office is too hot or too cold. Brenda has been making personal calls all day. The boss is making me work on a Saturday. More seriously: that manager is a bully. I think that person’s behavior was unethical. My salary is much lower than everyone else’s. Imagine a workplace with no complaining at all, and a totalitarian government comes to mind.
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Do Music Lessons Make You Smarter?
Scientific American: Practice makes progress, if not perfection, for most things in life. Generally, practicing a skill—be it basketball, chess or the tuba—mostly makes you better at whatever it was you practiced. Even related areas do not benefit much. Doing intensive basketball drills does not usually make a person particularly good at football. Chess experts are not necessarily fabulous at math, and tuba players can’t just put down their tubas and pick up cellos. ... Much of the literature makes the mistake of inferring causation from correlation, and fails to control for confounding variables.
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The Benefits of Optimism Are Real
The Atlantic: One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly. ... Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has looked more closely at the relationship between being positive and resilience. Her research shows how important one is for the other. For starters, having a positive mood makes people more resilient physically. In one study, research subjects were outfitted with a device that measured their heart activity.
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Happiness tends to increase with age
United Press International: Overall happiness and satisfaction with life tend to increase with age, but a person's well-being depends on when he or she was born, U.S. researchers say. Angelina R. Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine conducted the study while at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health. Sutin and colleagues used two large-scale longitudinal studies -- the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for those age 30 and older. ...
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The Addiction and Cost of Social Media
The Huffington Post: Have you ever found yourself asking, "Where did the last hour go?" when connecting with friends or colleagues in social networks? Social media is like a drug; just a little taste and we can't help but want more. Social networks are the drug dealers; they facilitate our addiction to this gateway drug with one-click access to our social graph and a multitude of other sites and apps. ...
