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Ew, Gross! Why Humans Are Hardwired To Feel Disgust.
In the late 1860s, Charles Darwin proposed that being grossed out could have an evolutionary purpose. Disgust, he wrote, was inborn and involuntary, and it evolved to prevent our ancestors from eating spoiled food that might kill them. Darwin hypothesized that the early humans most prone to revulsion survived to pass on their genes, while the more nutritionally daring died off. For many years afterward, though, scientists didn’t pay much attention to disgust. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, a decade when gameshows eagerly slimed contestants, that disgust garnered more attention in psychological and behavioral research.
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World Happiness Report is Out, With a Surprising Picture of Global Resilience
In a conclusion that even surprised its editors, the 2021 World Happiness Report found that, amid global hardship, self-reported life satisfaction across 95 countries on average remained steady in 2020 from the previous year. The United States saw the same trend — despite societal tumult that yielded a national drop in positive emotions and a rise in negative ones. The country fell one spot, to 19th, in the annual rankings of the report, which was released Saturday. The report is good news regarding global resilience, experts say. ...
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Rosalind Cartwright, Psychologist and ‘Queen of Dreams,’ Dies at 98
In 1999, Rosalind D. Cartwright, a renowned sleep researcher, testified for the defense in the murder trial of a man who arose from his bed early one night, gathered up tools to fix his pool’s filter pump, stabbed his beloved wife to death, rolled her into the pool and went back to bed. When he was awakened by the police, he said he had no memory of his actions. His lawyers argued that the man, who had no motive to kill his wife, had been sleepwalking and was therefore in an unconscious state and not responsible for his behavior. Dr. Cartwright, who had successfully served as a witness for the defense in a similar case a decade earlier (working pro bono in both trials), agreed.
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The Creative Genius Within: Learning From Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci’s creative approach made use of general psychological processes common to every human being.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, psychopathology and fecundity, the general factor of psychopathology, task learning in schizophrenia, life positive events and depression, predictions of hospitalization outcomes, and adolescents’ stress reactions to COVID-19.
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New Content from Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on measurement practices, multiverse methods, and intervention research; plus tutorials on performing omega estimates in R, visualization of neuroimaging data, and creating data dictionaries for shareable data sets.