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When You Shouldn’t Bring a Friend
The New York Times: Misery may love company, but new research suggests a corollary to that adage: Sometimes, having company could make misery even worse. For a paper published in the journal Psychological Science, Erica J. Boothby and her co-authors asked 23 female undergraduates to taste chocolate (“pretested to be pleasant tasting”) in the company of another person who was secretly working with the study authors. That person tasted one piece of chocolate along with them, and looked at a book of paintings while the participant tasted another piece. The undercover researcher didn’t talk to the participants about either task. Afterward, the participants rated both pieces of chocolate.
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Actually, People Still Like to Think
The New Yorker: This past July, Science published a paper with an alarming conclusion: most people would rather give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts. A slew of news stories followed, seizing on this dramatic evidence of our inability to be content without external distractions. “I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company,” Jonathan Schooler, a University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist, who was not involved in the study, told the Boston Globe. The University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and his collaborators began the study with a simple question: When our minds turn inward, “is it a pleasing experience”?
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The Bare Walls Theory: Do Too Many Classroom Decorations Harm Learning?
NBC: To decorate her kindergarten classroom for the new school year, Lori Baker chose cheerful alphabet and number charts featuring smiling children of different races. In the reading corner, she hung three puffy paper flowers from the ceiling and posted dancing letters spelling “Welcome to Kindergarten.” Otherwise, though, the 20-year teaching veteran exercised restraint and deliberately left several walls bare in her room at Whittier Elementary School in Harvey, Ill., a predominately African-American, working-class city about 25 miles south of Chicago. The latest research suggests she’s onto something.
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Are Women Better Decision Makers?
The New York Times: RECENTLY, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said that if we want to fix the gridlock in Congress, we need more women. Women are more focused on finding common ground and collaborating, she argued. But there’s another reason that we’d benefit from more women in positions of power, and it’s not about playing nicely. Neuroscientists have uncovered evidence suggesting that, when the pressure is on, women bring unique strengths to decision making. Mara Mather, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, and Nichole R.
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25 Is the New 21
The Atlantic: My 22-year-old daughter, Emma, waved goodbye to her college campus last spring and walked into a job this fall. Given the still-tepid state of the economy and all the stories—in the news and from friends—about recent graduates who can’t find work, you might well imagine that my husband and I are thrilled. And we are. Sort of. Emma’s job is a good one, and she is lucky to have it. She is an editorial assistant at a well-respected magazine. But it is the kind of job that countless millennials are landing these days: part-time, low paying, with no benefits.
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APS Announces Third Replication Project
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS EXTENDED TO 9 JANUARY
Two months after APS published its first Registered Replication Report (RRR), the plan for the third RRR has been finalized and editors are accepting proposals from researchers who would like to participate in the large-scale replication by running the study in their lab. Roy Baumeister and colleagues (1998; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998) proposed that performance on tasks requiring self-control is governed by a general, unitary, and finite "internal" resource.
