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What We’ve Learned Through Sports Psychology Research
Since the early years of this century, it has been commonplace for computerized analyses of athletic statistics to guide a baseball manager’s choice of pinch hitter, a football coach’s decision to punt or pass, or a basketball team’s debate over whether to trade a star player for a draft pick. But many sports experts who actually watch the games know that the secret to success is not solely in computer databases, but also inside the players’ heads. So perhaps psychologists can offer as much insight into athletic achievement as statistics gurus do. Sports psychology has, after all, been around a lot longer than computer analytics.
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Couples Who Laugh Together, Stay Together
Podcast: In this episode, psychological scientists Norman Li and Kenneth Tan illuminate how the mutual creation and enjoyment of humor serves as crucial markers of relationship well-being.
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Professional Development Workshop: Belonging and Success in Work Settings
In a February Professional Development workshop, Danielle King and Kecia M. Thomas discussed imposter syndrome, academic burnout, and best practices for sustaining and supporting yourself during hard times.
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Identifying Talent in Business, Sports, and Education
A new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology: Performance Science led by Andy Parra-Martinez at the University of Arkansas “describes the general status, trends, and evolution of research on talent identification across multiple fields globally over the last 80 years,” by drawing from the Scopus and Web of Science databases and conducting a bibliometric analysis of 2,502 documents. Bibliometric analysis is a way of understanding the structure and citation patterns of research around a given topic, in this case, talent identification research. ...
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The Remarkable Power of Holding Hands With Someone You Love
Q: I’m curious why humans hold hands. Is there a biological reason it’s such a common part of relationships across so many cultures? A: Holding hands exerts striking effects on our emotional state, especially when it’s with a romantic partner: It can help lower blood pressure, reduce pain and buffer stressful experiences. A 2021 experiment confirmed the soothing effect of holding a spouse’s hand while watching scenes from horror films such as “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” The simple gesture can limit the impact stress has on our autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious bodily functions such as pupil dilation.
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We All Love to Be Loved, But Women May Experience Love More Frequently than Men
Conventional wisdom holds that men and women approach romance differently. But new research suggests that love is important for well-being regardless of gender—and the differences that do exist may hint at the evolutionary basis of love.
