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Depressed People Find It Hard to Stop Reliving Bad Times
MSN Health: June 7 (HealthDay News) -- A new study suggests that depressed people suffer from an inability to rid themselves of negative thoughts because they can't turn their attention to other things. "They basically get stuck in a mindset where they relive what happened to them over and over again," said study co-author Jutta Joormann of the University of Miami in an Association for Psychological Science news release. "Even though they think, 'Oh, it's not helpful, I should stop thinking about this, I should get on with my life,' they can't stop doing it." The study authors gave tests designed to gauge mental flexibility to 26 depressed people and 27 people who had never been depressed.
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The Psychology of Forgiveness
The Huffington Post: It was excruciating to watch Anthony Weiner, a U.S. Representative from New York, making public amends this week for tweeting lewd photos of himself to a young woman he didn't even know. He was clearly mortified -- at least his taut jaw and flat expression suggested that he was. But politicians are practiced at sending non-verbal messages, and Weiner was no doubt using every tool in his kit. Maybe he was just chagrined and upset at getting caught in such a foolish stunt. He hasn't won my trust back yet, and I'm guessing that others feel this way as well. Trust recovery -- apologizing, promising change, insisting we've changed -- is tricky business.
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A brain training exercise that really does work
University of Michigan: ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Forget about working crossword puzzles and listening to Mozart. If you want to improve your ability to reason and solve new problems, just take a few minutes every day to do a maddening little exercise called n-back training.
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CEPEDA: Now whites are feeling discrimination
The Sacramento Bee: Scholars from the Harvard Business School and Tufts University's department of psychology recently confirmed the obvious in contemporary American race relations. The title of their report, "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," pretty much says it all. Published late last month in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the report by Michael Norton and Samuel Sommers says whites believe that as bias against blacks decreased in the last six decades, intentional discrimination against whites has increased. Whites now see anti-white bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-black bias.
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The Bond: Staying in touch when children go to college
Los Angeles Times: The second in a series on the evolution of the parent-child relationship. The big deadline for high school seniors to choose a college has passed, and parents' thoughts are turning toward the joy of less laundry or the agony of how to pay the bills — and perhaps toward how much they'll be in touch with their sons and daughters come September. It was not so long ago that parents drove a teenager to campus, said a tearful goodbye and returned home to wait a week or so for a phone call from the dorm. Mom or Dad, in turn, might write letters — yes, with pens. On stationery.
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Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free
WIRED: If people are told that free will doesn’t exist, their brains might follow suit. A test of people who read passages discrediting the notion of free will found an immediate decrease in brain activity related to voluntary action. The findings are just one data point in ongoing scientific investigation of a millennia-old philosophical conundrum, but they raise an intriguing possibility. “Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Davide Rigoni of Italy’s University of Padova in a study published in May’s Psychological Science. Read the whole story: WIRED
