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People Use Emotion to Persuade, Even When It Could Backfire
People tend toward appeals that aren’t simply more positive or negative but are infused with emotionality, even when they’re trying to sway an audience that may not be receptive to such language.
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What It’s Like To Watch #MeToo When It Is You, Too
On average, more than 300,000 Americans experience rape or sexual assault each year. When the #MeToo movement makes headlines, those survivors are reading. How is that affecting people who have experienced sexual violence, to see stories similar to their own blasted across media outlets every day? Experts aren’t sure, but they’re confident that it’s having some kind of impact. Case in point: In the last three months of 2017, calls to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network — a national crisis hotline for people who have experienced sexual trauma — increased by 23 percent compared with the same period in the previous year.
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John Cacioppo, Who Studied Effects of Loneliness, Is Dead at 66
She was a brain researcher and an authority on the scientific basis of love. He, too, was a neuroscientist, but with an expertise in loneliness. She was in her mid-30s, he in his late 50s. Both were wedded to careers in separate hemispheres — until they happened to be seated beside each other, serendipitously, at dinner on the last night of a neuroscience research symposium in Shanghai. Before going their separate ways, they left the restaurant together. A romantic full moon was rising over the East China Sea. He snapped a photograph. A few weeks later, she emailed him to request a copy (which she later admitted was just a pretext to resume their brief acquaintance).
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Why ‘Sorry’ Seems to Be the Hardest Word
Offenders may not apologize if they have little concern for the victim, if they perceive a threat to their positive self-image, or if they predict that their apology won’t be effective.
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Special Perspectives Issue Revisits Most Impactful APS Journal Articles
A new, special issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science marks the 30th anniversary of APS with a collection of reflections, insights, and forward-looking articles from authors of the 30 most-cited articles published in APS journals. In an introduction to the issue, Editor Robert J. Sternberg considers some of the factors that lead to high-impact articles, including how the research is presented, whether the research relates to issues that are important to scholars and lay people, and the extent to which the research propels the field forward. The authors discuss the origin and central hypotheses of their articles, and why they believe the work has had such an impact in the field.
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Judges and examiners get laxer with practice
Students are widely judged on their abilities before being allowed to enter top universities. Athletes are assessed on their physical prowess before being awarded medals. And academic papers, like those reported in this section, must run the gauntlet of peer review before being published. In making their determinations, evaluators study that which they are judging in a sequence, one student, athlete or paper after another, and apply standardised criteria. This approach is supposed to afford equal treatment to all.