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Pixar’s Mood Master
The Atlantic: In 1943, Disney released an eight-minute film titled Reason and Emotion. The film personified the ability to think and the ability to feel as, respectively, a bespectacled, suit-wearing prig and an impulsive, lascivious caveman. “Within the mind of each of us,” intoned the narrator, “these two wage a ceaseless battle” for control of the (in the film, quite literal) mental steering wheel. ... He pared down the possibilities with the help of two psychologists: Paul Ekman, whose pioneering work on facial expressions inspired the Fox series Lie to Me, and Ekman’s protégé Dacher Keltner, of UC Berkeley.
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Study: Green Space Around Schools May Boost Mental Abilities
The New York Times: NEW YORK — Putting more green space around an elementary school may help students develop some mental abilities, a study suggests. Researchers tested students repeatedly over the course of a year on attentiveness and working memory, which is the ability to keep something in mind temporarily for performing a task. Overall, students whose schools were surrounded by more green space improved more than pupils from schools with less green space. The study tracked more than 2,000 students in 36 primary schools in Barcelona, Spain. The pupils were in the second to fourth grades when the study began. ...
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Friends, then benefits
The Economist: BEAUTY opens many doors. Study after study has concluded that the comely earn more, are better liked, are treated more indulgently and are even given more lenient sentences in court than their plainer counterparts. The door it opens widest, though, is the romantic one. As both common sense and evolutionary theory suggest should happen, beautiful people attract beautiful partners. But not always. Occasionally, handsome men choose plain women, and vice versa. Why this should be vexes psychologists and biologists alike. A study by Lucy Hunt of the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues, soon to be published in Psychological Science, suggests an answer.
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Understanding stress and its signals
The Boston Globe: Lisa Feldman Barrett thinks we’ve long misunderstood how our brains work — and what’s going on when we’re stressed. For decades, scientists have assumed that the brain simply responded to signs from the outside world: See tiger coming; get anxious. But instead, Barrett, a Northeastern University professor, argues in a new paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that most of our anxieties are triggered not by danger in front of us but the anticipation or fear of it: Worry tiger might appear; get stressed. Such a response makes a lot of sense in a world where you may need to run away from fast-moving tigers.
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Science Of Sadness And Joy: ‘Inside Out’ Gets Childhood Emotions Right
NPR: Hollywood's version of science often asks us to believe that dinosaurs can be cloned from ancient DNA (they can't), or that the next ice age could develop in just a few days (it couldn't). But Pixar's film Inside Out is an animated fantasy that remains remarkably true to what scientists have learned about the mind, emotion and memory. The film is about an 11-year-old girl named Riley who moves from her happy home in Minnesota to the West Coast, where she has no friends and pizza is made with broccoli. Much of the film is spent inside Riley's mind, which features a control center manned by five personified emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.
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In the digital age, every parent is now a filmmaker
The National: When the school year ends, students around the globe take to the stage for a curtain call. This theatrical metaphor is appropriate as the end of the academic year often takes the form of a show. Let me tell you about one such performance I recently attended: the year one farewell assembly at my daughter’s school in Abu Dhabi. The moment it began, parents became paparazzi. Almost the entire audience held smart phones or tablets aloft. There were even a few mums and dads wielding high-end digital cameras. These determined parents were indefatigable in their attempts to capture the perfect moment. ...
