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There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief
It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain. His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death, the most shattering. I’d spent the first weeks of his existence obsessing over him around the clock, preoccupied with the basics of survival and longing for a snatch of sleep. Now, in the first weeks after his death, I reeled through a twisted mirror image of the same experience.
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To Get Kids Into Science, Just Do It
Developmental psychologists have long noted that very small children think a lot like scientists. Anybody who has spent time with a 2-year-old has witnessed their insatiable curiosity and constant experiments. Yet by the time most children are in middle school, they lose much of that innate interest and don’t see science as part of their future, especially girls and minorities. How can we counteract this phenomenon, given how important it is to encourage people to develop scientific skills and to know and care about science? What can we do to help children retain their natural scientific impulse?
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Content Moderators Pay a Psychological Toll to Keep Social Media Clean. We Should Be Helping Them
Content moderators are the unsung heroes of the internet. They work in a growing field which upholds the social media infrastructure of today. But keeping us safer, by constantly seeing and filtering the worst content online, takes its toll. Can people really cope with this constant barrage of horror? One of the main handbooks for psychologists, the DSM-5, includes ‘indirect exposure to aversive details’ in the category of post-traumatic stress disorder. In extreme circumstances this can result in what is often called ‘secondary trauma’. Secondary trauma can happen when people, such as first responders, deal with victims in distress.
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Anxiety Does Not Cause Bad Results in Exams
Exams are nerve-racking, especially for those already of an anxious disposition. The silence of the hall; the ticking of the clock; the beady eye of the invigilator; the smug expression of the person sitting at the neighbouring desk who has finished 15 minutes early. It therefore seems hardly surprising that those who worry about taking tests do systematically worse than those who do not. What is, perhaps, surprising, according to research published recently in Psychological Science by Maria Theobald at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and her colleagues, is that it is not the pressure of the exam hall which causes the problem. It is the pressure of revision.
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Can’t Sleep? Try Sticking Your Head in the Freezer.
A good night’s sleep can make us more empathetic, more creative, better parents and better partners, according to Aric Prather, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco who treats insomnia and is the author of the new book “The Sleep Prescription.” Sleep can help us manage stress; it can make us competent and capable and better able to take on the day. But Dr. Prather says we too often view sleep as an afterthought — until we find ourselves frozen in the middle of the night, our thoughts racing, fumbling for rest or relief. Some people might reach for a supplement or sleep aid.
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Why Taking Gender Out of the Equation Is So Difficult
It turns out a rock can tell us a lot about gender. In a recent study, Ashley Martin, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, recruited more than 200 participants and gave each a rock. One group was asked to decorate its rocks as creatively as possible; the other was asked to anthropomorphize them with “uniquely human qualities.” (The participants were told that the rocks that received the highest ratings from a pair of judges would win $100.) People in both groups were more likely to ascribe gender to their rocks than other social categories such as race, age, or sexual orientation.