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What 60 Years of Research Has Taught Us About Willpower
Inc.: The marshmallow experiment shouldn't need an introduction. In the early 1960s, a group of preschoolers at Stanford University's Bing Nursery School participated in a study that would change how psychologists think about willpower. Preschoolers were led to a room where researchers gave them a choice between one reward (a marshmallow) that they could enjoy immediately, and a larger reward (two marshmallows!) if they abstained from eating the first marshmallow for 20 minutes. Did the preschoolers hold out for double the prize? The first thing researchers noticed was that the kids who caved focused on their internal struggle.
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When Do Babies Learn Self-Control?
The Atlantic: Last year’s season of Sesame Street was a rough one for Cookie Monster. For its 44th year, the show dedicated itself to teaching its young viewers about executive functioning, an umbrella term for cognitive skills like attention to detail, strategizing, and other mental processes that connect past experiences to present decision-making—including self-control, an idea easily demonstrated by making a junk-food junkie wait for his sugar fix. And wait he did.
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The Myth of the Midlife Crisis
The Wall Street Journal: Waiting for your midlife crisis? Relax. It’s probably not coming. According to a growing body of research, midlife upheavals are more fiction than fact. “Despite its popularity in the popular culture, there isn’t much evidence for a midlife crisis,” says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is conducting a continuing study of more than 450 people who graduated from college between 1965 and 2006. The study’s latest installment is scheduled for publication in 2015. The term midlife crisis, coined in 1965 by psychoanalyst Elliot Jacques, was popularized in the 1970s by authors including Gail Sheehy.
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The Value of Your Future Self
The New York Times: I put on lipstick to meet my future self. I was nervous. When Mike Wehner of The Daily Dot tried to talk to his future self — that is, the one rendered by the communication company Orange’s new Future Self tool — he encountered a “disfigured monster.” Future Self takes a picture of your face, “ages” you by 20 years and then lets you chat with your 2034 self — but as Mr. Wehner learned, it’s susceptible to fooling. He writes: “I first noticed that the site’s facial recognition might be a bit wonky when it tried to capture a wrinkle on my shirt, thinking it was a human face.
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Depressed People Believe that Life Gets Better
Adults typically believe that life gets better — today is better than yesterday was and tomorrow will be even better than today. A new study shows that even depressed individuals believe in a brighter future, but this optimistic belief may not lead to better outcomes. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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In Interrogations, Teenagers Are Too Young to Know Better
The New York Times: Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself. Two boys, left alone together, discussed their offense, joking. What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them. Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements. ...
