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You 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
Marriage is hard. In fact, there's evidence it's getting even harder. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that's because our expectations of marriage have increased dramatically in recent decades. "[A] marriage that would have been acceptable to us in the 1950s is a disappointment to us today because of those high expectations," he says. The flip side of that disappointment, of course, is a marriage that's pretty amazing.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Linguistic Synchrony Predicts the Immediate and Lasting Impact of Text-Based Emotional Support Bruce P. Doré and Robert R. Morris Emotional support is critical to well-being, but the factors that influence the effectiveness of such support are not completely understood.
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Are first impressions really accurate?
Fictional stories are replete with villains and heroes with an almost magical ability to discern other people’s characters – think Hannibal Lecter or Sherlock Holmes. In real life, too, many people (including certain world leaders) seem to think they have this skill. Question-and-answer sites like Quora are filled with posts like: “I can read people’s personalities and emotions like a book. Is this normal? But do any of us really have an exceptional skill for judging other people’s personalities? Psychologists call such people – or the idea of them – “good judges”. And for more than a century, they have been trying to answer the question of whether these good judges really exist.
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In Sesame’s New Show, To Play Is To Learn
Turn on your TV and surf the stuff meant for kids. I dare you. You'll likely find a surfeit of fast action and fart jokes. And that's what makes Esme & Roy so unusual. The new show, about an unlikely duo who babysit monsters, is Sesame Workshop's first animated children's program in more than a decade, and it deftly combines the Workshop's parallel passions — for learning and play. In fact, Esme & Roy is dedicated to an idea that can feel radical these days: That learning and play aren't parallel at all. When done right, they should converge, each in service of the other.
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‘An anxious nation’: Barnes & Noble sees a surge in sales of books about stress
Yes, modern life in America is ... a lot. Psychologists say they’ve seen the toll it’s taken on people, and surprisingly so has Barnes & Noble. Sales of books related to anxiety rose 26 percent in June from a year ago at the bookseller. Liz Harwell, its senior director of merchandising, said the company had never seen a comparable increase in book sales related to anxiety.
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White threat in a browning America
In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope. An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different from our past. In 2016, Donald Trump wielded that same sense of change as a threat; he was the revanchist voice of those who yearned to make America the way it was before, to make it great again.
