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Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues
The New York Times: WASHINGTON — The brothers who carried out suicide bombings in Brussels last week had long, violent criminal records and had been regarded internationally as potential terrorists. But in San Bernardino, Calif., last year, one of the attackers was a county health inspector who lived a life of apparent suburban normality. And then there are the dozens of other young American men and women who have been arrested over the past year for trying to help the Islamic State. Their backgrounds are so diverse that they defy a single profile. ...
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Eating something sweet can lead to a romantic date
The Washington Post: Ate something bitter? It can make you judgmental. Feeling love is all around? It can make even water taste sweeter. Not only do our emotions influence our perceptions of taste, but what we taste can also change how we feel, scientists have found. “The tongue could be a window to the psyche,” says Nancy Dess, a professor of psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, pointing to the growing number of studies that connect taste perception with emotions and even personality types. ... In that study, close to 1,000 Americans were given standard personality and taste-preference questionnaires.
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Genes and the American Dream
Scientific American: Nearly a century after James Truslow Adams coined the phrase, the “American dream” has become a staple of presidential campaign speeches. Kicking off her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton told supporters that “we need to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American dream.” ... A study just published in Psychological Science by psychologists Elliot Tucker-Drob and Timothy Bates reveals that this version of the American dream is in serious trouble.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Brain's Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General Brian Odegaard and Ladan Shams Studies have found that there is quite a bit of variability in the way people integrate information from different sensory modalities; however, little is known about the mechanism responsible for this between-person variability. Participants completed a temporal-numerosity judgment task in which they had to count the number of beeps and the number of flashes that were presented and a spatial localization task in which they had to localize auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli.
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Don’t Delay! Impatient People are Also the Worst Procrastinators
Across a series of experiments, impatient people were more likely to put things off – even when it meant a financial penalty.
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Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
NPR: What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff. Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do. This conflict is frequently described as "intractable," with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.
