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Conservatives’ Love of Nostalgia Can Be Used to Promote Liberal Values
In these polarized times, liberals and conservatives tend to talk past each other. Leftists tend to envision a brighter future, while right-wingers lovingly look to a more-perfect past. "Forward," urged Barack Obama. "Make America Great Again," replied Donald Trump. Here's a thought: What if we could decouple those deep-seated propensities from actual policy positions? Specifically, what if liberals advocated for a progressive platform by evoking conservatives' nostalgia for a romanticized bygone era? Two researchers tried it—and found the approach markedly decreased conservatives' resistance to liberal ideas.
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Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns
The mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, isn’t fading quietly from the headlines like so many acts of gun violence before it. Nearly two weeks after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, media attention is still focused on the survivors and parents of victims who are demanding action on gun control, and lawmakers are showing signs of responding. That’s enough to make the reaction to this shooting feel different from the aftermath of other gun-related massacres. But is it a sign that Americans are actually changing the way they think about mass shootings and coalescing around a push for gun control?
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Some of the Turpin children are playing the guitar to heal
Police say they lived in squalor for years, malnourished and deprived of contact with the outside world. Their parents are accused of torturing them. Now on the road to recovery, David and Louise Turpin's seven adult children are turning to music to help them heal. They've been learning to play the guitar and singing Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly" and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as a form of musical therapy, said Mark Uffer, the CEO of Corona Regional Medical Center, where the five women and two men have been recovering since they were taken from their parents' home in January. The six minor children were taken to a separate hospital.
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Déjà Vu May Feel Like a Premonition, but It’s Not
In a study on déjà vu, participants were no more likely to accurately forecast the future than if they were blindly guessing — but when they were experiencing déjà vu, they felt like they could.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research articles exploring biases in early visual processing, action-inaction framing and escalation of commitment, socioemotional interventions for institutionally reared chimpanzees, and prenatal stress as both a risk and opportunity.
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Why People With Anxiety May Have Better Memories
Anxiety may come with a silver lining, a new study suggests: Feeling anxious in a new situation may help you remember it more vividly. Too much anxiety, though, can have the opposite effect, by impairing recall and causing people to remember neutral details in a negative light. The new study, published in the journal Brain Sciences, serves as reassurance that a little bit of nervousness can be a good thing, says co-author Myra Fernandes, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “It gives you a heightened sense of awareness and makes you attuned to details you wouldn’t be otherwise,” she says.
