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Puppy Love! How Baby Animal Photos Could Help Your Marriage
Live Science: That "squeee!" you feel when you look at pictures of cute puppies or bunnies might be good for your love life. A new study finds that looking at baby-animal photos may increase couples' levels of satisfaction with their relationships. Researchers found that study participants who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with photos of cute animals or with other pleasant images over a few weeks seemed to see their partners in a more positive light by the end of the study, compared with people who looked at the photos of their spouses paired with other images over the same period.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring attention bias modification, emotion differentiation and depressive symptoms, episodic future thinking as an intervention to reduce delay discounting, and the role of hippocampal volume in predicting adolescent depression.
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Men Can Be So Hormonal
The New York Times: “Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?” Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years. There is such a condition as “low-T,” or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don’t have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors.
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Face value: the science of first impressions
The Guardian: To explore all this and more, Hannah Devlin speaks with the California Institute of Technology’s Professor Doris Tsao, whose recent mind-reading study on primates challenged a long-held view of the way the brain processes faces. We also hear from Princeton University professor of psychology, Alex Todorov – author of Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions – about the first impressions we all form based on the faces the we see. Read the whole story: The Guardian
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A Beginner’s Guide to Calling BS
New York Magazine: It can be hard to know what to do in the face of this onslaught, when truth seems to have lost all currency, and you can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. It’s easy to slip into confused, exhausted apathy, overwhelmed by the task of sorting it all out. .. Also, look for a corroborating source. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, said he read two months ago on Twitter that Trump would be impeached within 24 hours, which seemed plausible, until he noticed he didn’t see the same story in the Washington Post or the BBC or CNN.
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The Science of Microaggressions: It’s Complicated
Scientific American: The story of racial prejudice in the U.S. over the past several decades is a tale of good and bad news. On the mostly positive side, surveys of the American public suggest that overt prejudice—biases to which people are willing to admit—has been on the steady decline (although some data suggest an uptick following the presidential election of Barack Obama). On the negative side, prejudice, even in its ugliest forms, is far from eradicated. In the weeks preceding my writing of this column racial slurs surfaced on the gates of the home of basketball superstar LeBron James, and nooses were found hanging at museums in our nation’s capital.
