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Uncovering the Extravert Advantage
A Duke University psychological study pinpoints a key behavior that helps explain why and how extraverts are so socially adept.
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Your job is literally ‘killing’ you
The Washington Post: People often like to groan about how their job is "killing" them. Tragically, for some groups of people in the U.S., that statement appears to be true. A new study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford has quantified just how much a stressful workplace may be shaving off of Americans' life spans. It suggests that the amount of life lost to stress varies significantly for people of different races, educational levels and genders, and ranges up to nearly three years of life lost for some groups. ... Those gaps appear to be getting worse, as the wealthy extend their life spans and other groups are stagnant.
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Can You Get Smarter?
The New York Times: YOU can increase the size of your muscles by pumping iron and improve your stamina with aerobic training. Can you get smarter by exercising — or altering — your brain? This is hardly an idle question considering that cognitive decline is a nearly universal feature of aging. Starting at age 55, our hippocampus, a brain region critical to memory, shrinks 1 to 2 percent every year, to say nothing of the fact that one in nine people age 65 and older has Alzheimer’s disease. The number afflicted is expected to grow rapidly as the baby boom generation ages.
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Even Hands-Free Devices are Dangerously Distracting
Using a hands-free to device to update Facebook or make a call while driving may not seem so dangerous. After all, your eyes are on the road and your hands are on the wheel. But a pair of new studies conducted by APS Fellow David Strayer for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that these voice-recognition systems do little to eliminate distracted driving. The research shows that drivers can remain unwittingly distracted for up to 27 seconds after they disconnect from a call—even when they’re using the car’s own voice-command system. This means a driver driver traveling at a paltry 25 mph will cover the length of three football fields before their attention is fully restored.
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Working From Home: Awesome or Awful?
The Atlantic: For over a year, I worked almost exclusively from my tiny apartment in Harlem. Aside from trips into an office every six weeks or so, my work schedule and surroundings were mostly left up to me. On some days, I would fly through assignments and personal tasks with unusual efficiency. But on other days, telecommuting meant working from the time I woke up until the wee hours of the morning with no breaks, or spending entire days seemingly accomplishing nothing other than making headway on my Netflix queue. While my own lack of self discipline likely played a role in my frenzied schedule, a recent paper authored by the professors Tammy D. Allen, Timothy D. Golden, and Kristen M.
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Why Angry Men Are More Influential Than Angry Women
TIME: Righteous anger is one of Hollywood’s favorite devices for delineating an inspirational figure.Atticus Finch has it in To Kill A Mockingbird, Peter Finch’s newscaster has it in Network, Mr. Davis has it in 12 Angry Men and Liam Neeson has it in just about everything. Angry women, not so inspirational. ... The female anger in this experiment was expressed in exactly the same way as the male anger: words on a screen, with phrases like “This is just really frustrating…” and precisely the same number of capitalized letters. So Salerno believes it’s simply the gender that was the problem. ... Female anger, however, is assumed to be coming from within.
