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Are You in Despair? That’s Good
The New York Times: WHEN the world gets you down, do you feel just generally “bad”? Or do you have more precise emotional experiences, such as grief or despair or gloom? In psychology, people with finely tuned feelings are said to exhibit “emotional granularity.” When reading about the abuses of the Islamic State, for example, you might experience creeping horror or fury, rather than general awfulness. When learning about climate change, you could feel alarm tinged with sorrow and regret for species facing extinction.
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Could Thinking Positively About Aging Be The Secret Of Health?
NPR: The dictionary defines ageism as the "tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment." But research indicates that ageism may not just be ill-informed or hurtful. It may also be a matter of life and death. Not that it's literally killing people. Researcher Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, says it depends on how much a given individual takes those negative ideas to heart. Read the whole story: NPR
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Genetic Variations Linked with Social and Economic Success
Psychological characteristics link genes with upward social mobility, according to data collected from almost 1000 individuals over four decades. The data suggest that various psychological factors play a role in linking a person’s genetic profile and several important life outcomes, including professional achievement, financial security, geographic mobility, and upward social mobility. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, led by psychological scientist Daniel W.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Searching for Category-Consistent Features: A Computational Approach to Understanding Visual Category Representation Chen-Ping Yu, Justin T. Maxfield, and Gregory J. Zelinsky Categories provide a fundamental structural framework that guides human cognition. When we encounter a single object, we typically understand that it belongs to a hierarchy of different categories that range from very specific (e.g., a sailboat) to very broad (e.g., mode of transportation). What visual features do people use to determine whether an object fits better into one category than another?
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When Looking Like a Leader Derails the Group
Experiments show that people who display the powerful, confident body language associated with leadership tend to dominate decision making—even when their ideas were entirely incorrect.
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How to Turn Any Random Object Into a Memory Cue
New York Magazine: If you jot down a reminder on a Post-it, and then forget to put the post-it someplace visible, and then your deadline comes and goes and you never even see the reminder — did it ever really happen? For all intents and purposes, no, not really. A reminder, after all, only deserves the label if it actually reminds; otherwise, it’s just some words on a piece of paper. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science makes the case for a better, less intuitive way to leave yourself reminders: a trick called the “reminders by association” approach, which pairs up random objects and images with items on your to-do list.
