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Olympics: Mind games of the victorious
Otago Daily Times: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Boost Your Memory By Resting Your Eyes After Learning
Business Insider: A new study suggests that a brief — even just a few minutes — bit of rest after learning something new can greatly improve your ability to remember it. The new study was published in the journal Psychological Science. “Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” researcher Michaela Dewar said in a statement from the journal. “Indeed our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.” Read the whole story:
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How To Hate Your Job Less
Prevention: Remember that vocational test in high school that measured your career interests? You know, the one that told you to be an architect (which you then ignored and became a nurse)? Turns out they may have been onto something. How well your personal interests match with your job is a key factor in how happy you are, finds new analysis in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Researchers from Bowling Green State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examined 60 previous studies to see just how much of a factor your personal interests play in your job happiness, performance, and likelihood you’ll stick with a position.
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Teenagers ‘can be corrupted’ by Hollywood sex scenes
The Telegraph: Psychologists concluded that teenagers exposed to more sex on screen in popular films are likely to have sexual relations with more people and without using condoms. The study, based on nearly 700 popular films, found that watching love scenes could "fundamentally influence" a teenager's personality. The researchers, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, concluded youngsters were more prone to take risks in their future relationships. They also concluded that for every hour of exposure to sexual content on-screen, participants were more than five times more likely to lose their virginity within six years.
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Gain time for yourself by giving it to others
CBC News: If it seems as if there’s never enough hours in the day to do all the things you want — try reversing that feeling by volunteering your time to do things for other people. A new U.S. study suggests that helping others boosts our sense of personal competence and efficiency, which in turn stretches out time in our minds. And ultimately, giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules, says lead researcher Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Toddlers Object When People Break the Rules
We all know that, for the most part, it’s wrong to kill other people, it’s inappropriate to wear jeans to bed, and we shouldn’t ignore people when they are talking to us. We know these things because we’re bonded to others through social norms – we tend to do things the same way people around us do them and, most importantly, the way in which they expect us to do them. Social norms act as the glue that helps to govern social institutions and hold humans societies together, but how do we acquire these norms in the first place?