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The Mind of a Flip-Flopper
The New York Times: Forget for a minute everything you know about politics. Barack Obama now openly supports gay marriage. Mitt Romney now opposes roughly the same kind of health care reform he fought for as governor of Massachusetts. What if they weren’t two politicians calculating how to win an election but instead just two guys who changed their minds? They didn’t “flip-flop”; they experienced, as social scientists say, an attitude change, the way any of us do when we become a vegetarian or befriend a neighbor we used to hate or even just choose to buy a new brand of toothpaste.
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Psychology Awe’s Good as It Gets
The Wall Street Journal: Feeling a sense of awe causes people to feel less rushed and impatient—and, at least briefly, happier about their lives. Researchers induced awe in participants through various means, including watching televised scenes of waterfalls, astronauts in space, and whales, and reading about gazing out over Paris from the Eiffel Tower. (Control groups watched people getting showered with confetti and other scenes.) People primed to feel awe reported less of a sense that "time is slipping away" and a stronger belief that there was enough time to get things done.
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How To Have More Self Control: Look At The Big Picture
The Huffington Post: Thinking about the big picture instead of the little steps required along the way can help to give us the self-control we need to reach a goal, according to new research. This finding could be especially useful for weight loss. For example, when confronted with the choice between a piece of fruit or an unhealthy snack, thinking of the end weight loss result could better help you pick the fruit, researchers said.
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Goal-oriented activity speeds perception of time
Examiner: Scientists Philip Gable and Bryan Pool of the University of Alabama recently decided to investigate the old saying “time flies when you are having fun”. Although they suspected there was some truth to the concept, they hypothesized that this only held true when you were engaged in ‘approach motivation’ or the desire to achieve a goal. One of the experiments consisted of showing participants picture of positive images and recording their perception of the how long they viewed the image. Images consisted of neutral, pleasant and goal-oriented images (such as enticing dessert).
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Want to Feel Healthier and Happier? Cut Back on Lying
GOOD: The costs of lying extend beyond burning pants. According to new research led by Anita Kelly, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies secrecy, self-disclosure, and self-presentation, telling lies—both little "white lies" and major deceptions—takes a psychological and physiological toll. Kelly and her collaborators spent 10 weeks with 110 subjects of various ages and backgrounds. Half of the subjects were told to stop telling lies, both big and small, for the duration of the study. The other half was given no special instructions. Every week, both groups would come in for tests that assessed how frequently they had lied in the past week and measured their well-being.
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Would Judge Give Psychopath With Genetic Defect Lighter Sentence?
NPR: In 1991, a man named Stephen Mobley robbed a Domino's pizza in Hall County, Ga., and shot the restaurant manager dead. Crimes like this happen all the time, but this particular case became a national story, in part because Mobley seemed so proud of his crime. After the robbery, he bragged about the killing and had the Domino's logo tattooed on his back. But there was another reason Mobley's case became famous. Right around the time Mobley went to trial, a study was published in a scientific journal about an extremely interesting gene called MAOA: monoamine oxidase A.
