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Teens — gay or straight — more likely to attempt suicide in conservative towns
MSNBC: Suicide attempts by gay teens — and even straight kids — are more common in politically conservative areas where schools don’t have programs supporting gay rights, a study involving nearly 32,000 high school students
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How politicians clean up
The Globe and Mail: Researchers at Cornell University have found that a subtle psychological manipulation can have statistically significant political effects,” The Boston Globe says. “Simply being in the presence of a hand sanitizer or
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Neuroscience in the Courtroom
Scientific American: By a strange coincidence, I was called to jury duty for my very first time shortly after I started as director of a new MacArthur Foundation project exploring the issues that neuroscience raises
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Empathy and torture
The Economist: EMPATHY is often confused with sympathy in Washington and derided as a trait of bleeding-heart liberals. But whereas sympathy can be uninformed—”I could never imagine what she is going through”—empathy is the ability
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Torture – Too Severe for Empathy
An interrogation practice is classified as torture when it inflicts severe physical or mental pain. But the people who determine what defines severity aren’t experiencing that pain so they underestimate it. A study in an
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Is ‘enhanced interrogation’ torture? Yes, say those given small dose
The Vancouver Sun: Those who approve “enhanced interrogation techniques” probably have a flawed idea of whether this constitutes torture, because few have felt the pain these methods can cause, researchers report. A study that gave