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You Know You Want One: Personal Robots Are Coming, But Not Ready For You Yet
NPR: Meet Jake. At 500 pounds, he stands 4 feet 4 four inches tall, with a spine that stretches another foot. He has white urethane skin, a flat head sporting an array of camera lenses, and a laser scanner in his throat. And he may be coming to a home near you. Jake is a PR2, which stands for "personal robot," and the brainchild of Willow Garage, a robotics company in Menlo Park, Calif. Founded in 2006, the company is considered one of the most exciting, influential players in the world of personal robotics. Willow Garage has given away 11 of these PR2 robots — each worth $400,000 — to research institutions.
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Study Offers Possible Explanation for the Huge Gender Gap in Science and Math
Slate: Schools have tried for years to encourage girls to explore careers in math and science, yet a stubborn gender gap in the STEM fields persists. But new research might have an explanation: The messages we take in about our gender—like the old refrain that girls aren’t as good as boys at science–can influence the way we perform. Believing you have innate qualities that make you good or bad at something—called “entity theories”— can change the way you handle a difficult task, psychologists have theorized.
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How To Save Energy by Driving Less
The Wall Street Journal: What would it take to get people to drive less? It could be as simple as having them keep a record of the car trips they don’t take, a study found. In the study, students at the University of Virginia who kept track online of the car trips they avoided ended up driving less than those who didn’t keep a record, researchers found. What’s more, students who also received feedback on both the money they saved on gas and the pollution they prevented by not using their cars reduced time behind the wheel even more. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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It’s respect of your peers – not wealth – that will bring you happiness, report claims
Daily Mail: The respect of your peers is the root of happiness in life and more important than how well-off you are, according to a report published yesterday. It suggests that overall happiness in life is related more to relationships with those around you than the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in the bank. Researchers from the University of California, Berkely explored the relationship between different types of status and well-being in the study published in the journal Psychological Science.
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New Research From Current Directions in Psychological Science
Expressing Emotions in Stressful Contexts: Benefits, Moderators, and Mechanisms Annette L. Stanton and Carissa A. Low Historically, emotion-focused coping has been linked with negative psychological outcomes; however, better assessment of stressor-related emotional expression has indicated that it can be beneficial. Stanton and Low discuss factors that affect the amount of benefit individuals gain from expressing their emotions and present possible mechanisms through which emotional expression might relieve stress. They conclude by saying that whether emotional expression is beneficial depends on the interpersonal, intrapersonal, and situational contexts of the emotional expression.
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The Psychology of ‘Phew’
The Wall Street Journal: “Although relief is readily identified and frequently experienced,” write the psychologists Kate Sweeny and Kathleen Vohs, in a new article, it is not understood well from the perspective of psychological science.” As Christian Jarrett explains, at BPS Research Digest, the researchers identified two sets of feelings that might fall under the rubric of “relief”: One involving the completion of a task (“Phew, that’s finally done”) and one involving a near miss (“Phew, I’m not locked out of the house, after all”).
