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Scientifically Scary
Just when you thought you were safe from the ghoulish ghosts of Halloween until next year, here comes emotion researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett with another dose of fright! Feldman Barrett, an APS Fellow, uses her
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Tots fearless when facing spiders, snakes, study suggests
MSNBC: Like the girl in that old Jim Stafford song, most people don’t like spiders and snakes. But according to new research involving infants and children, we don’t start off this way. According to Vanessa
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People Aren’t Born Afraid of Spiders and Snakes: Fear Is Quickly Learned During Infancy
Studying how infants and toddlers react to scary objects can help reveal the developmental origins of common fears and phobias.
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Brandishing our inner talisman
Mexicans call it mal de ojo, and in Brazil it’s olho gordo. Turks call it the Eye of Medusa and ward it off with the ubiquitous talisman called nazar. American Jews use the Yiddish phrase
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The oil spill, the mapmaker heuristic, and me
It’s easy right now to think that the world is coming undone. The BP oil company has singlehandedly devastated the Louisiana coast. Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to blacken our skies and ground our jets. Terrorists
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The ironic power of caricature
Brent Staples is an editorial writer for the New York Times and a University of Chicago-trained psychologist. He is also African-American, and back in the 70s, when he was doing his graduate studies, he discovered