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The Dark Side of Empathy
Pacific Standard: Public figures from President Obama to Neil deGrasse Tyson have suggested a lack of empathy is one of our species’ fundamental problems. “Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes,” writes author and prominent business-world thinker Daniel Pink. “Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” A lovely thought. But new research suggests it isn’t always true. A paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that feelings of empathy toward a distressed person can inspire aggressive behavior.
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3 Reasons Holding a Grudge is Bad for Your Health
TIME: “Countless studies have shown that holding grudges and keeping in negative feelings is bad for your mental health, increasing anxiety and frustration,” says Meyers. Case in point: Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that when people were told to nurse a grudge when thinking about wrongdoers, they had stronger negative emotions and greater stress responses (namely, higher heart rate and blood pressure) than those who were instructed to imagine granting forgiveness. Read the whole story: TIME
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An Important New Insight Into How Women Remember Childbirth
New York Magazine: Just in time for Meaghan O'Connell's extremely good (and extremely difficult to read) account of getting an epidural comes a new study in Psychological Science on the question of how women remember their experiences of giving birth. According to a popular theory, the press release explains, when it comes to remembering experiences "we tend to recall the moment of peak intensity and the final moments, which we average and use to form an overall memory of the experience ... [while] the duration of an experience is not all that important to memories — a phenomenon called 'duration neglect.'" The authors of the study wanted to know whether this applies to childbirth as well.
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Teenage Girls Are Exposed to More Stressors that Increase Depression Risk
Adolescence is often a turbulent time, and it is marked by substantially increased rates of depressive symptoms, especially among girls. New research indicates that this gender difference may be the result of girls’ greater exposure to stressful interpersonal events, making them more likely to ruminate, and contributing to their risk of depression. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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The Face of Fortune: When CEO Appearance Predicts Company Success
Can we predict how successful a company will be just by looking at the CEO’s face? Several studies have shown that people are surprisingly good at judging a leader’s success based just based on a photo. For example, researchers have found that CEOs with masculine facial features that connote dominance and aggression tended to lead companies with greater annual net profits. But a new study suggests that this relationship between CEO appearance and company profitability may depend on the broader economic climate. Psychological scientists Nicholas O. Rule and Konstantin O.
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The Fake-Tongue Illusion
The New Yorker: The tongue in the title of Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory’s new paper, “The Butcher’s Tongue Illusion,” does not come from a butcher shop. “I actually just ordered the most normal-looking rubber tongue from a magic store,” Charles Michel, the report’s lead author and a professionally trained chef, said. “Magicians put them in their mouths and tie them in knots and things like that.” Michel and his co-authors put their magic tongue to use in a simple but provocative experiment, carried out late last year and described in the current issue of the scientific journal Perception.
