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Being Empathetic Is Easier when Everyone’s Doing It
As a grid of video feeds blinks into view, attendees across the country prepare for an ideological collision. All have signed up for a virtual forum billed as an “empathy cafe,” held to spark dialogue between police and community members. Among the participants are officers as well as people who’ve been burned in encounters with law enforcement. ... Increasing empathy, says Stanford University social psychologist Jamil Zaki, will take more than teaching skills such as listening actively to others. Empathy is a socially motivated process, Zaki and other researchers say, meaning that people won’t necessarily empathize just because they know how.
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Gen Z Has Regrets
Was social media a good invention? One way to quantify the value of a product is to find out how many of the people who use it wish it had never been invented. Feelings of regret or resentment are common with addictive products (cigarettes, for example) and addictive activities like gambling, even if most users say they enjoy them. For nonaddictive products — hairbrushes, say, or bicycles, walkie-talkies or ketchup — it’s rare to find people who use the product every day yet wish it could be banished from the world. For most products, those who don’t like the product can simply … not use it.
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How Does Pregnancy Change the Brain? Clues Are Emerging.
Research is revealing intriguing clues about how pregnancy changes the brain. ... Dr. Ronald Dahl, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study, said the emerging research reflected the key role of hormones in transitions like puberty and pregnancy, guiding neurological shifts in priorities and motivations. “There is that sense that it’s affecting so many of these systems,” he said.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on parent reinforcement and relationship behaviors, global well-being and mental health, predicting transdiagnostic symptom change across diverse demographic groups, and much more.
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End-of-Day Meltdowns Are Not Just for Kids
It’s been a while since I really fell to pieces at the end of a long day. But I know the feeling, and I instantly recognized it when a colleague with young children told me about a concept called “after-school restraint collapse.” ... Could it be that adults do this, too? Absolutely, said Kathryn Humphreys, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University — though we’re more likely to be irritable or tense than to throw an all-out tantrum. That said, we might pick a fight with another member of our household, she added.
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This Chatbot Pulls People Away From Conspiracy Theories
Shortly after generative artificial intelligence hit the mainstream, researchers warned that chatbots would create a dire problem: As disinformation became easier to create, conspiracy theories would spread rampantly. Now, researchers wonder if chatbots might also offer a solution. ... The new findings challenge the widely held belief that facts and logic cannot combat conspiracy theories. The DebunkBot, built on the technology that underlies ChatGPT, may offer a practical way to channel facts. “The work does overturn a lot of how we thought about conspiracies,” said Gordon Pennycook, a psychology professor at Cornell University and author of the study.
