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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on social media, language comprehension, intelligence (and other variables) tracking, human movement patterns data, early language learning and auditory experiences, personality change, and digital games and skill acquisition.
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Constellations Across Cultures: How Our Visual Systems Pick Out Patterns in the Night Sky
The Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades are just a few of the many recognizable star patterns in the night sky. New research published in the journal Psychological Science reveals that our visual processing system may explain the striking commonality of constellations across cultures.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on incel activity on social media, the gender-equality paradox in chess, sources of regret, personality structure across nations, feedback and decision-making, early socioeconomic circumstances and physical activity in older adults, stopping actions, and mathematical ability.
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You’ve Done Self Care. You’ve Languished. Now Try This.
In our first session this year, my coaching client Jane told me that she has rested, given herself permission to feel down, and lowered her personal bar, just as we all have been advised to do as we wearily approach the third year of the pandemic. But even as she goes through the motions of self care, she told me, she still feels blah. “I’m just kind of stuck,” she said. “And I don’t exactly like it.” Jane, a 50-year-old entrepreneur who lives in New York City, isn’t alone.
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It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart
It is an insolent cliché, almost, to note that our culture lacks the proper script for ending friendships. We have no rituals to observe, no paperwork to do, no boilerplate dialogue to crib from. Yet when Elisa Albert and Rebecca Wolff were in the final throes of their friendship, they managed, entirely by accident, to leave behind just such a script. The problem was that it read like an Edward Albee play—tart, unsparing, fluorescent with rage. ... This is, mind you, how most friendships die, according to the social psychologist Beverley Fehr: not in pyrotechnics, but a quiet, gray dissolve. It’s not that anything happens to either of you; it’s just that things stop happening between you.
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Your Body Knows You’re Burned Out
Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, knows she’s edging toward burnout when she wakes up, feels instantly angry at her email inbox and doesn’t want to get out of bed. It’s perhaps not surprising that a mental health professional who is trying to stem the rising tide of burnout could burn out sometimes, too. After all, the phenomenon has practically become ubiquitous in our culture. In a 2021 survey of 1,500 U.S.
