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War may not be cause of all military PTSD
United Press International: The experience of war or combat is not typically what triggers the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a Danish researcher says. Professor Dorthe Berntsen of the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research at the Aarhus University in Denmark, military psychologists at the Danish Center for Defense Veterans and researchers from Duke University in North Carolina surveyed 746 Danish soldiers who served in Afghanistan. The soldiers completed a questionnaire five times -- before their posting, during their time in Afghanistan and three times after their return to Denmark.
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Gender Equality Influences How People Choose Their Partners
Men and women clearly have different strategies for picking sexual partners, but the reason why differences exist is less clear. The classic explanation for these differences has been that men’s and women’s brains have evolved to make certain choices, but a new study in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that evolution is only part of the answer. To be a ‘success’ in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females.
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When Do We Lie? When We’re Short on Time and Long on Reasons
Almost all of us have been tempted to lie at some point, whether about our GPA, our annual income, or our age. But what makes us actually do it? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam and Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev investigated what factors influence dishonest behavior. Previous research shows that a person’s first instinct is to serve his or her own self-interest. And research also shows that people are more likely to lie when they can justify such lies to themselves.
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Repeated Exposure to Media Images of Traumatic Events May Be Harmful to Mental and Physical Health
From 24-hour cable news to YouTube and Twitter, today’s mass media can turn local disasters into international events within minutes, and research reveals that widespread transmission can have a traumatic impact far beyond the people who are directly exposed.
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Can Bilingualism Counteract Effects of Poverty?
Education Week: The bilingual brain is sharper than the monolingual one, more and more research is showing. People with fluency in at least two languages have better attention spans, enhanced memory, among other cognitive advantages. But do those same cognitive strengths show up in bilingual children who are low-income? In other words, can bilingualism help children in low-income communities overcome the enormous cognitive challenges that poverty presents? A soon-to-be published study from Pascale Engel de Abreu of the University of Luxembourg and colleagues takes a look at that very question. Their answer in a nutshell: yes.
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Pardon Me! A Fearless Look at Our Bodies’ Mundane Functions
The New York Times: When you go straight to the most shocking piece of information in a book, there’s always a spoiler risk. So let me just say that the strange tale I am about to recount is one of many in this new book. As you may have guessed, I am about to dip into the category listed in the subtitle as “beyond” yawning, laughing and hiccupping. It includes, among other behaviors, itching, crying, and the body’s two ways of expelling digestive gases, belching, and the other one. The author, Robert R. Provine, would not be so reticent in describing the other one. In fact, Dr.
