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What Scientists Know—And Don’t Know—About Sexual Orientation
A comprehensive review of sexual orientation research aims to correct important misconceptions about the link between scientific findings and political agendas.
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Merging Career And Motherhood, In Simultaneous Practice
NPR: A few years ago, I received an early career award at the annual meeting of a professional society. Before the awards ceremony, the other recipients and I were herded together, placed in adjacent seats, and told to wait for the event to begin. The five or six of us had a lot in common. Though we worked in different areas of psychology, we were at similar career stages and had overlapping interests. But we didn't spend our time together talking about science or ideas — the work that had won us the awards we were there to receive. What we talked about was childcare. Read the whole story: NPR
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Limits of Executive Control: Sequential Effects in Predictable Environments Frederick Verbruggen, Amy McAndrew, Gabrielle Weidemann, Tobias Stevens, and Ian P. L. McLaren Studies have shown that bottom-up processes modulate performance in unpredictable environments, but is this also true in predictable environments? Participants completed a go/no-go task in which the trials alternated predictably. Before seeing each stimulus, participants had to rate the extent to which they thought the go or no-go stimulus would appear.
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Angela Duckworth on Passion, Grit and Success
The New York Times: Angela Duckworth was teaching math when she noticed something intriguing: The most successful students weren’t always the ones who displayed a natural aptitude; rather, they displayed something she came to think of as grit. Later, as a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she defined the term — a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal — and created a tool to measure it: the “grit scale,” which predicted outcomes like who would graduate from West Point or win the National Spelling Bee. As a result of this work, Dr. Duckworth was named a MacArthur “genius” in 2013, and the notion of grit has become widely known.
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Can You Trust a Eureka Moment?
Scientific American: Aha! moments are satisfying in part because they feel so right; all the pieces of a puzzle appear to fall into place with little conscious effort. But can you trust such sudden solutions? Yes, according to new research published in Thinking & Reasoning. The results support the conventional wisdom that this type of insight can provide correct answers to challenging problems. In four experiments, Carola Salvi, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, and their colleagues presented college students with mind teasers, such as anagrams and rebus puzzles.
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Intuition – It’s More Than a Feeling
Great leaders make smart decisions, even in difficult circumstances. From Albert Einstein to Oprah Winfrey, many top leaders ascribe their success to having followed their intuition. New research shows how going with our gut instincts can help guide us to faster, more accurate decisions. Intuition — the idea that individuals can make successful decisions without deliberate analytical thought — has intrigued philosophers and scientists since at least the times of the ancient Greeks. But scientists have had trouble finding quantifiable evidence that intuition actually exists.
