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Genes and the American Dream
Scientific American: Nearly a century after James Truslow Adams coined the phrase, the “American dream” has become a staple of presidential campaign speeches. Kicking off her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton told supporters that “we need to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American dream.” ... A study just published in Psychological Science by psychologists Elliot Tucker-Drob and Timothy Bates reveals that this version of the American dream is in serious trouble.
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The Benefits of Spicing Up a Breast-Feeding Mother’s Diet
The New York Times: When I had my children I felt that there was a tendency by experts, including those in my own pediatric profession, to push certain principles that took all the fun out of life. This played out for me, in particular, after I gave birth to my first child, and was told as part of my breast-feeding “support” that I should avoid all spicy foods, because they would upset the baby.
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Long-Term Pot Use Linked to Financial, Social Problems in Midlife
A research study that followed children from birth up to age 38 has found that people who smoked cannabis four or more days of the week over many years ended up in a lower social class than their parents, with lower-paying, less skilled and less prestigious jobs than those who were not regular cannabis smokers. These regular and persistent users also experienced more financial, work-related and relationship difficulties, which worsened as the number of years of regular cannabis use progressed.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Brain's Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General Brian Odegaard and Ladan Shams Studies have found that there is quite a bit of variability in the way people integrate information from different sensory modalities; however, little is known about the mechanism responsible for this between-person variability. Participants completed a temporal-numerosity judgment task in which they had to count the number of beeps and the number of flashes that were presented and a spatial localization task in which they had to localize auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli.
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Don’t Delay! Impatient People are Also the Worst Procrastinators
Across a series of experiments, impatient people were more likely to put things off – even when it meant a financial penalty.
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Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
NPR: What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff. Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do. This conflict is frequently described as "intractable," with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.