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What Predicts Distress After Episodes of Sleep Paralysis?
Ever find yourself briefly paralyzed as you’re falling asleep or just waking up? It’s a phenomenon is called sleep paralysis, and it’s often accompanied by vivid sensory or perceptual experiences, which can include complex and disturbing hallucinations and intense fear. For some people, sleep paralysis is a once-in-a-lifetime experience; for others, it can be a frequent, even nightly, phenomenon. Researchers James Allan Cheyne and Gordon Pennycook of the University of Waterloo in Canada explore the factors associated with distress after sleep paralysis episodes in a new article published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Really? Annoying Songs Get Stuck in Our Heads
The New York Times: Virtually everyone experiences them, and rarely are they thought of fondly. They are earworms, the tunes that burrow into our consciousness and play on repeat. In a recent study involving hundreds of people, Ira Hyman Jr. of Western Washington University and colleagues looked at what made songs most likely to stick, exposing unsuspecting subjects to popular songs and then asking them to complete various tasks. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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How to deal with jerks: Give ’em the silent treatment
NBC: Giving someone the silent treatment may not always be such a bad thing. It may actually be a good way to deal with someone who is acting like a jerk, a new study finds. ... The silent treatment is not always motivated by an intent to harm another person or punish their behavior, said study author Kristin Sommer, Ph.D, an associate professor of psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York. "It may be used as a way to offset feelings of fatigue or depletion associated with the expectation of an unpleasant interaction," she explained. Read the whole story: NBC
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21 minutes to a happier marriage
The Boston Globe: How much time do you have to put in to improve your marriage? Maybe less than you think. A team of psychologists surveyed heterosexual married couples over the Internet about their relationships every four months for two years. After the first year, the survey also asked half of the couples to write for seven minutes about reappraising their disagreements from a neutral third-party perspective. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe See Eli J. Finkel at the 25th APS Annual Convention.
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Into The Hole: Terror And Survival
I know an artist who has a special interest in holes. He laboriously sculpts geometric holes in the earth, and then recreates them elsewhere. I recently saw, in a Chicago gallery, a hole he had sculpted in California, surrounded by outsize photographs of other similar holes. The overall effect was seductive and mysterious. Not everyone finds holes seductive and mysterious. Indeed, some people find holes—and images of holes—deeply upsetting, even terrifying. These people suffer from a common but little known phobia known as trypophobia. Phobias are by definition irrational and excessive, and indeed trypophobia sufferers recognize that their fear is unreasonable.
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Summoning the Past: Why This and Not That?
The Huffington Post: My memory baffles me. There is no rhyme or reason to what I recall and what I forget, whether it's today's to-do list or recollections of childhood. Important information vanishes, yet I have a random collection of odd facts and memory traces taking up space in my mind. ... The results supported the scientists' idea. As summarized in an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, words for animate objects were much more likely to be remembered than were words for inanimate objects. Indeed, animacy was one of the most potent influences on retention and recall -- along with imagery.
