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Advil vs. Tylenol: Which to use and when
Fox News: When a headache, back pain or other complaint strikes, many people believe Advil, Tylenol and other over-the-counter analgesics are pretty much interchangeable. Far from it. These medications are each at their best when taken for certain ailments, in part because they work differently in the body and can have different side effects. Got a headache? Tylenol, or its generic version acetaminophen, might be your best bet since it comes with fewer side effects, many experts say. Inflamed elbow? Advil, whose active ingredient is ibuprofen, is likely to bring greater relief.
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Impossible Knowledge: Are You an Expert?
I grew up with a habitual overclaimer. He wildly exaggerated his expertise, at times claiming knowledge of things he couldn’t possibly know—people, events, ideas that simply do not exist. Being unfamiliar with overclaiming, I just called him a liar. I couldn’t have known the word overclaimer, nor the concept. The word didn’t exist, and is only used today in the world of psychological science. Even so, we’re all familiar with these people who feel the need to overestimate what they know about the world. What underlies such assertions of impossible knowledge?
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Storing Information In Other People’s Heads
NPR: To function effectively in the world, you need to acquire a whole lot of information. You need to know exactly which medicine is appropriate for each ailment. You need to know how to fix your car and your router and your irrigation system. You need to know the date of every major holiday and how it is observed. Right? Of course not. That would be crazy. We don't keep all the information we could possibly need in our own heads, just as we don't make all our own clothes and manufacture our own doorknobs. We rely on a division of labor.
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How Self-Promotion Can Backfire
TIME: There are social consequences to tooting your own horn too often. Tuesday in social faux pas news comes a paper showing that when we try to make people like us, we often come across as braggy and annoying. We often practice a little self-promotion when we’re trying to be impressive. Turns out, it doesn’t always come across the way we want it to. New research published in the journal Psychological Science shows that people frequently overestimate how much their self-promotion works in their favor and underestimate how much it achieves the opposite effect. Read the whole story: TIME
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Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Social Media and PTSD, Preventing Procrastination
BBC: Claudia Hammond investigates Body dysmorphic disorder and asks if social media can really cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She also talks to the psychologist who explains why describing events in terms of the number of days away they are, rather than years could help prevent people procrastinating. Listen to the whole story: BBC
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Folk Explanations of Behavior: A Specialized Use of a Domain-General Mechanism Robert P. Spunt and Ralph Adolphs Do people use similar or different cognitive processes when making sense of social and nonsocial events? Participants' brain activity was measured while they completed a task in which they answered attributional and factual yes/no questions about the content of social images (emotional expressions and intentional hand actions) and nonsocial images (weather- and season-related).
