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How Smiling Can Backfire
Scientific American: If you’re reading this at a desk, do me a favor. Grab a pen or pencil and hold the end between your teeth so it doesn’t touch your lips. As you read on, stay that way—science suggests you’ll find this article more amusing if you do. Why? Notice that holding a pencil in this manner puts your face in the shape of a smile. And research in psychology says that the things we do—smiling at a joke, giving a gift to a friend, or even running from a bear—influence how we feel. This idea—that actions affect feelings—runs counter to how we generally think about our emotions.
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Awe, With And Without The Gods
NPR: In a 2006 article for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris identified 10 myths about atheism, among them the idea that "atheists are closed to spiritual experience." Harris explained: "There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly." ... So why the persistent idea that awe is inextricably linked to theism? And are "scientific awe" and "religious awe" fundamentally different, or deep down one and the same? To be sure, awe is a multifaceted emotion, and one that's only recently become the target of systematic psychological research.
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Learning How to Exert Self-Control
The New York Times: PARIS — NOT many Ivy League professors are associated with a type of candy. But Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia, doesn’t mind being one of them. “I’m the marshmallow man,” he says, with a modest shrug. I’m with Mr. Mischel (pronounced me-SHELL) in his tiny home office in Paris, where he spends the summer with his girlfriend. We’re watching grainy video footage of preschoolers taking the “marshmallow test,” the legendary experiment on self-control that he invented nearly 50 years ago. In the video, a succession of 5-year-olds sit at a table with cookies on it (the kids could pick their own treats).
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Don’t just photograph life’s highlights, study suggests
The Boston Globe: We assiduously document life’s obvious highlights: Our cellphones are filled with photos of the first day of school, graduations, weddings, and birthdays. A new study by a team of Harvard Business School researchers suggests, however, that we underestimate the pleasure we will gain from rediscovering our most mundane moments. In fact, the most boring, everyday stuff may give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary experiences.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Early Experience Affects the Strength of Vigilance for Threat in Rhesus Monkey Infants Tara M. Mandalaywala, Karen J. Parker, and Dario Maestripieri Research has suggested that the cognitive bias to threatening stimuli (i.e., attention toward and vigilance for threat) displayed by adult human and nonhuman primates may arise in part from early experiences. The researchers measured 3- and 9-month-old infant rhesus macaques' cognitive bias to threat by measuring their eye gaze in response to pictures of neutral and threatening macaque faces.
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Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American
The New York Times: FLORENCE, Italy — WE think of our senses as hard-wired gateways to the world. Many years ago the social psychologist Daryl J. Bem described the knowledge we gain from our senses as “zero-order beliefs,” so taken for granted that we do not even notice them as beliefs. The sky is blue. The fan hums. Ice is cold. That’s the nature of reality, and it seems peculiar that different people with their senses intact would experience it subjectively. Yet they do. In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific.