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Mourning and Memory: A Paradoxical Grief
I once witnessed, up close and painfully, the grief of a man who had lost his wife of 50 years. A period of emotional disruption is normal in such circumstances, but this widower’s suffering just went on and on for years. The present was joyless for him, and the future was hopeless—non-existent really. He seemed stuck in the past, among his memories of his departed wife, and his yearning was agonizing to watch. This endless bereavement eventually took his life. I didn’t know the clinical terminology at the time, but I’ve since learned that there is a name for such disordered mourning.
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Beware Stubby Glasses
The New York Times: If you want to deter crime, it seems that you’d want to lengthen prison sentences so that criminals would face steeper costs for breaking the law. In fact, a mountain of research shows that increases in prison terms have done nothing to deter crime. Criminals, like the rest of us, aren’t much influenced by things they might have to experience far in the future. ... Fortunately, people in the behavioral sciences are putting policies to the test. I know of groups at Duke and Penn that are applying behavioral research findings to policy issues.
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Quelling the Quarter Life Crisis With Psychology and Economics
The Huffington Post: Many young adults today find themselves facing a crisis of direction in their lives and identify this experience as a 'quarter life crisis.' Critics however suggest that this is nothing more than common life angst, heighted by the echo chambers of a hyper-connected culture. Regardless of the debate around the breadth and depth of the so-called "quarter life crisis," there are clear indicators that point not only to a definitive phenomena of anxiety experienced by young adults over their personal and career life trajectories but also data that suggests that this experience is increasingly common.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about new and exciting research published in Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Visual Context Processing in Schizophrenia Eunice Yang, Duje Tadin, Davis M. Glasser, Sang Wook Hong, Randolph Blake, and Sohee Park Researchers know that people with schizophrenia exhibit visual abnormalities, but they are still not sure how these abnormalities relate to schizophrenia's symptoms and etiology. Healthy and schizophrenic participants were instructed to judge the appearance of a center stimulus by comparing it with a fixed-reference stimulus.
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Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques
TIME: In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proved most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ, like rereading and highlighting, are among the least effective. The scientific literature evaluating these techniques stretches back decades and across thousands of articles. It’s far too extensive and complex for the average parent, teacher or employer to sift through.
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How to banish earworms from your brain
NBC: Although it seems maddeningly impossible, new research suggests we really can get rid of that nagging tune that endlessly plays over and over again in our head. For those of you who had Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” in your head for most of 2012, or haven’t been able to stop your brain from playing “Master of the House” since seeing “Les Miserables” over the holidays, you’ll want to take note. The trick is this: We can banish earworms from our brains by engaging in an absorbing task – something that is not too easy, but not too difficult, either.
