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You’re reminiscing wrong
The Washington Post: Nostalgia is a funny thing, and you may be missing out on some of your best opportunities for reminiscing. While you're likely to expect notable events - like holidays and unusual activities - to be more fun to think back on in the future, it turns out that the most mundane experiences can give you just as much pleasure. In a study published in Psychological Science, Harvard Business School psychologists had students create time capsules full of songs they were listening to, papers they'd written, social events they'd attended, and records of conversations they'd had.
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13 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Laughing
Real Simple: Contrary to popular belief, the number one catalyst for laughter isn’t a joke: It’s interacting with another person. That’s because the modern-day ha-ha! probably evolved as a form of communication. Our primate ancestors used a similar sound—a sort of pant-pant—to reassure one another that their rough-and-tumble play was all in good fun and not an attack, says Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the author of Curious Behavior, and one of the foremost experts on laughter. Read the whole story: Real Simple
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Kids And Screen Time: What Does The Research Say?
NPR: Kids are spending more time than ever in front of screens, and it may be inhibiting their ability to recognize emotions, according to new research out of the University of California, Los Angeles. The study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, found that sixth-graders who went five days without exposure to technology were significantly better at reading human emotions than kids who had regular access to phones, televisions and computers. The UCLA researchers studied two groups of sixth-graders from a Southern California public school.
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Faces Are More Likely to Seem Alive When We Want to Feel Connected
Feeling socially disconnected may lead us to lower our threshold for determining that another being is animate or alive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “This increased sensitivity to animacy suggests that people are casting a wide net when looking for people they can possibly relate to -- which may ultimately help them maximize opportunities to renew social connections,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Katherine Powers of Dartmouth College.
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Food Craving Is Stronger, but Controllable, for Kids
Children show stronger food craving than adolescents and adults, but they are also able to use a cognitive strategy that reduces craving, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association
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The Science of Truthiness
Slate: A bumper sticker was popular in the city where I went to college. It was yellow, with large black print that read: “Mopeds are dangerous.” Beneath the text was the blocky silhouette of a moped and nothing else. The sticker didn’t illustrate the claim that mopeds were dangerous—it didn’t show a moped crumpled against a tree or running someone over—but it was eye-catching, the yellow contrasting sharply with the black, and on message. I believed that bumper sticker, and still do, for all that I’ve rarely encountered a moped or read about a moped accident or even really grasped the difference between a moped and a Segway.
