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Flying Solo
Slate: If you strolled through a 1950s airport, you would have seen a flight crew of four stride by in step, sporting aviator sunglasses and dressed to the nines. They’d be headed into the office. Up top, where the sky’s blue, the coffee’s hot, and the view can’t be beat. The cockpit they knew had more gauges and switches than the top floor of Frankenstein’s castle, and each crew member was master of his own part of it. They had wild layovers in faraway places that most people only dreamed of ever going. At work and at play, they were a team. Airline pilots today will tell you that much of the romance has been deleted from that scene—not to mention half the flight crew.
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Health and Marriage: The Cortisol Connection
The Huffington Post: Bad marriages can be sickening. Most people don't have to be convinced of this, but for those who do, several decades of studies offer plenty of proof. Even so, very little is known about exactly how marriage quality affects health. Do strife and rudeness and neglect--and all the other signs of marital unhappiness--somehow get under the skin and trigger physical ailments? Or do warmth and trust and understanding and appreciation follow some biological pathway to wellness? Or both? Relationship experts have been focusing recently on marital partners' beliefs about their marriage--specifically a partner's belief that the other partner understands and cares for him or her.
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Aggressive Boys Tend to Develop Into Physically Stronger Teens
Boys who show aggressive tendencies develop greater physical strength as teenagers than boys who are not aggressive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “This work was motivated by a long-standing controversy over the relationship between physical development and personality,” says psychological scientist Joshua Isen of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Greater Maternal Insensitivity in Childhood Predicts Greater Electrodermal Reactivity During Conflict Discussions With Romantic Partners in Adulthood Lee Raby, Glenn I. Roisman, Jeffry A. Simpson, W. A. Collins, and Ryan D. Steele How do our early interpersonal experiences shape the way we react to relationships in adulthood? Participants' childhood interactions with their mothers were assessed for maternal sensitivity.
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How Children Learn To Read
The New Yorker: Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences?
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Positive thinking isn’t all-powerful. Penalty for failure may help more in reaching goals.
The Washington Post: It’s that time of year when New Year’s resolutions begin to fade, and even the best-laid plans can become sidetracked as life gets busy. But as psychologists and behavioral economists have found reasons why it’s so easy to let good intentions slide, they’ve also come up with tools to help. As counterintuitive as it may sound, many resolutions fail due to positive thinking, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University. Her research has shown that optimistic thinking can actually hamper your drive to succeed. ... “We found that positive dreams and fantasies are not only not helpful, but they might actually hurt,” Oettingen says.
