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The Big Idea: Is It Time to Stop Talking About ‘Nature Versus Nurture’?
When you hear people conversing in an unfamiliar language, why is it that you can’t even tell where one word ends and the next begins? If you are a native English speaker, why is it so challenging to get your mouth around a French or Hebrew “r”, which originates lower in the throat, or the “r” in Spanish or Italian, which is trilled on the tip of the tongue? Your ability to hear and make sounds, and to understand their meaning as language, is wired into your brain. How you acquire that wiring illuminates an age-old debate about human nature. In the first few months of your life, your infant brain is bathed in all kinds of information from the world around you, through your senses.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on interventions to address anxiety, models of diagnosis, sensitivity to rewards, the association between gambling disorder and suicide, suicidal behavior and borderline personality disorder, parenting during COVID-19, and stress in healthcare workers during COVID-19.
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Black Employees Will Thrive With Remote Work — It’s Anti-Racist
It is 4 p.m. on a Monday and I am on a walk. I am also on the clock. Last Friday, I received a calendar invite for a meeting to discuss my workplace’s ongoing efforts toward anti-racism. The notification made my heart skip a beat. I am a junior faculty member at an elite university, and one of only two Black tenure-track faculty members at my school. I could expect 90 minutes on the school’s sluggish pace toward diversifying the faculty, student body and curriculum, with my mostly-white colleagues occasionally stealing glances to gauge my reaction. Could I skip the meeting? No — my absence would be noted. Thank goodness for remote work.
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Yale’s Happiness Professor Says Anxiety Is Destroying Her Students
Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these young high-achievers looking for something they’ve lost, or never found.
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Freedom Versus Security: Can We Find the Right Balance?
A paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that restricting freedoms may have unintended negative consequences for behavior and health, but psychological science may help strike a balance.
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Is Your Identity a Concern? Smartphone App Usage Alone May Give It Away
The amount of time you spend each day using different smartphone apps may be enough to reveal your identity, according to new research published in the journal Psychological Science.
