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Who You Are
The New York Times: Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend’s house, past the 6 p.m. curfew. He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present.
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Deliberate Practice: Necessary But Not Sufficient
Psychological scientist Guillermo Campitelli is a good chess player, but not a great one. “I'm not as good as I wanted,” he says. He had an international rating but not any of the titles that chess players get, like Grandmaster and International Master. “A lot of people that practiced much less than me achieved much higher levels.” Some of the players he coached became some of the best players in Argentina. “I always wondered: What's going on? Why did this happen?” Now a researcher at Edith Cowan University in Joondalup, Australia, Campitelli studies practicing.
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Want to improve your memory? Oh, forget it
msnbc: The better you can forget, the better you’ll be able to remember, scientists now say. To remember facts that are important in your life today, you have to be able to let go of information that you no longer need, says Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “For example, if someone asks you who is the current Speaker of the House, you might remember Newt Gingrich or Nancy Pelosi,” explains Storm, co-author of a study on the subject published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. “That, of course, is incorrect.
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Men Are Funnier Than Women, But Not By Much, Study States
Huffington Post: Men are funnier than women, according to a study published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Skeptical? Keep reading, there's a catch. Researchers at the University of California San Diego released a study that suggests males are more likely to make people laugh, but only by a small margin of 0.11 points. The researchers wanted to explore if the "women aren't funny" gender stereotype stood up to a series of experiments. A group of 16 male and 16 female undergraduates were instructed to write humorous captions for 20 New Yorker comics. A group of 34 males and 47 females were brought in to rate how funny they found a caption.
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Can’t remember the names of Beckham’s children? Then lucky you for avoiding the acquisition of trivia
The Daily Telegraph: The capital of New Zealand, the date of the Battle of Waterloo, the boiling point of water, the six wives of Henry VIII, the longest river in Africa, the names of David Beckham’s children, the colours of the rainbow, the last three winners of The X Factor... we all have that sort of tat cluttering up our brains, but how much of it do we actually need? Shouldn’t we be making a determined effort to forget the lot? That’s the intriguing question raised by new research published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Undeserved Compliments May Harm Kids’ Self-Esteem
LiveScience: Giving yourself undeserved pats on the back may lead to psychological distress, a new study shows. The overly positive, yet distorted, view of one's achievements could keep someone from experiencing dejection, the researchers say. But the price may be more anxiety over whether others will find out. In addition, if a person thinks they are doing such a bang-up job, there's no room for improvement. Young-Hoon Kim of the University of Pennsylvania and Chi-Yue Chiu of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore conducted four studies that included 295 U.S. college undergraduates with an average age of 19 and 2,780 Hong Kong students from grades 7 to 12.
