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You’re Too Focused on What You’re Focused On
The New York Times: Here’s some good news for self-conscious people. That coffee stain on your shirt, those mismatched earrings you absent-mindedly selected this morning, that unfortunate haircut you just got — people do not notice those things as much as you think. Although it can feel as if your flaws and missteps are the focus of everyone’s attention, research in social psychology suggests otherwise. In a classic study from the 1990s, for example, participants put on a shirt emblazoned with the face of the singer Barry Manilow and then walked into a room full of people.
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Can Repeating False Information Help People Remember True Information?
NPR: Last Saturday, a powerful earthquake struck the Philippines. It was first reported as having a magnitude of 7.2; this was later corrected to 6.8. Last Friday, a wharf collapsed in Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts. It was first reported as a wharf belonging to Cape Ann Ice, but later identified as a wharf used by Channel Fish. Last Thursday, President Trump announced plans regarding NAFTA. He originally claimed that he would withdraw from the agreement entirely, but later indicated plans to renegotiate. ...
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Sheryl Sandberg: How to Build Resilient Kids, Even After a Loss
The New York Times: Two years ago, in an instant, everything changed for my family and me. While my husband, Dave, and I were on vacation, he died suddenly from a cardiac arrhythmia. Flying home to tell my 7-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son that their father had died was the worst experience of my life. During that unimaginable trip, I turned for advice to a friend who counsels grieving children. She said that the most important thing was to tell my kids over and over how much I loved them and that they were not alone. In the fog of those early and brutal weeks and months, I tried to use the guidance she had given me.
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The 8 Coolest TED Talks on Psychology
Inc.: Humans, we all know, are strange, irrational, beautiful creatures who often act in weird and wonderful ways. That makes us hard to deal with sometimes, but it also makes us totally fascinating. These great TED Talks from some of the field's leading lights make learning about psychology easy and entertaining. Read the whole story: Inc.
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With a Little Help from My Friends
Scientific American: Humans are social animals, and our species has evolved some unique ways of enforcing the bonds of friendship. Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford, studies the behavioral mechanisms behind the number and nature of such relationships. His work suggests social cohesion and long-term bonding among primates—Homo sapiens included—are the keys to their evolutionary success. Primate societies are held together by unspoken contracts grounded in “social grooming,” whether in the form of physical affection or nonphysical activities such as storytelling.
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Fending Off Math Anxiety
The New York Times: My mother was what we would now call math anxious, if not phobic. My daughter, on the other hand, was a math major, which always left me feeling like the transitional generation, capable of mastering standardized-test math problems and surviving college calculus (it’s one of the pre-med requirements) but never really connecting to the beauty or power of the subject. ... “Math anxiety is prevalent all around the world,” said Julianne Herts, a study author and a doctoral student at the University of Chicago who works in cognitive psychology. “If you look within Japan, students in Japan who are math anxious aren’t scoring as well at math,” she said.
