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Testing for Joy and Grit? Schools Nationwide Push to Measure Students’ Emotional Skills
The New York Times: SAN FRANCISCO — The fifth graders in Jade Cooney’s classroom compete against a kitchen timer during lessons to see how long they can sustain good behavior — raising hands, disagreeing respectfully and looking one another in the eye — without losing time to insults or side conversations. As reward for minutes without misconduct, they win prizes like 20 seconds to kick their feet up on their desks or to play rock-paper-scissors.
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Some Bus Riders Do Secretly Just Want a Car
The Atlantic's CityLab: The talk of the public transit world yesterday centered on a report by Laura J. Nelson and Dan Weikel of the Los Angeles Times spotlighting a troublesome decline in local bus and rail ridership. The news shouldn’t have been a shock: dips in U.S. bus travel, very likely the result of service cuts, have been out there for all to see. But the story revived the impassioned debate about whether transit riders are really just would-be drivers who can’t afford a car. ... The question of which view is more accurate isn’t so easy to answer.
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Is It the Right Time for a Fresh Start?
Scientific American: Around this time of year, I tend to look back at the list of commitments I made in early January: I will exercise more often, spend more time with family, do a better job balancing my personal and professional lives, leave my laptop home when we go on vacation, and so on. And yet, only two months into the new year, I find I am not doing such a good job. And I am sure I am not alone. On January 1, people around the globe commit with vigor to all sorts of virtuous goals, from losing weight to being a more understanding boss or partner to eating more healthfully to saving more money. And, before too long, most of us find we’re back where we started.
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Our Weak, Fragile Millennials
The Wall Street Journal: From a conversation between John Leo, editor of Minding the Campus, and New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about the turmoil in higher education, published online Feb. 3: John Leo: What happens to the academy now? You used the word “die.” Is it dead or dying? Most academics think it’s just aflutter. They seem to have no idea that something important happened at Yale. Jonathan Haidt: The big thing that really worries me—the reason why I think things are going to get much, much worse—is that one of the causal factors here is the change in child-rearing that happened in America in the 1980s.
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One critical psychological factor would tell us whether Donald Trump is conning us
Business Insider: With Donald Trump surging in the GOP race, the other Republican candidates are pulling out all the stops in an attempt to discredit him. In a series of interviews, Marco Rubio repeatedly called Trump a "con artist." Business Insider's video team recently asked psychology and science writer Maria Konnikova, author of a book about con artists, "The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It...Every Time," what the science says about whether or not Trump really is a con artist. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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We’re not getting enough sleep
WHYY: If you’re feeling sleep-deprived, you’re not alone. New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control shows that more than one-third of American adults are not getting the recommended amount of sleep on a regular basis. Those seven-plus hours of shut eye are important for all sorts of daily functions: from memory to physical health, and the CDC research gives a disturbing glimpse of just how poorly we’re doing across the country. We’ll break down the CDC study with SIGRID VEASY a professor of medicine at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a member of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology.
