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Peace Through Friendship
The New York Times: WHEN two groups are in conflict, how can you improve relations between them? One strategy is to encourage positive personal contact among individuals from each group. If a Catholic and a Protestant in Northern Ireland would only sit down together to talk — learning about one another’s families, hearing about one another’s fears — the encounter, according to this approach, would foster understanding, humanize the enemy and lessen bigotry. The scholarly version of this idea is known as interpersonal contact theory. It’s an intriguing hypothesis, but does it work in reality?
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Why Access to Screens Is Lowering Kids’ Social Skills
TIME: People have long suspected that there’s a cost to all this digital data all the time, right at our fingertips. Now there’s a study out of UCLA that might prove those digital skeptics right. In the study, kids who were deprived of screens for five days got much better at reading people’s emotions than kids who continued their normal screen-filled lives. The California research team’s findings, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior this month tries to analyze the impact digital media has on humans’ ability to communicate face-to-face.
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Here’s An Easy Way To Improve Your Writing Immensely
Business Insider Australia: Great writing requires clear thinking. Just ask Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. “There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking,” he has said. Writing, even though you’re most likely a long way removed from your college essay days, remains a key skill for success. Which is what makes new research out of George Mason University relevant to you. Something that you are probably doing every day is making you a much worse writer than you otherwise would be, the findings revealed. What is this simple activity that severely dips your writing skill? Simple, everyday interruptions. Read the whole story: Business Insider Australia
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The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It
The Atlantic: When I woke up this morning, I had one goal: Finish this article by 11 a.m. So, predictably, by the time it was 10 a.m., I had made and consumed two cups of coffee, taken out the trash, cleaned my room while taking a deliberately slow approach to folding my shirts, gone on a walk outside to clear my head, had a thing of yogurt and fruit to reward the physical exertion, sent an email to my aunt and sister, read about 100 Tweets (favorited three; written and deleted one), despaired at my lack of progress, comforted myself by eating a second breakfast, opened several tabs from ESPN.com on my browser ... and written absolutely nothing.
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Ditch the laptop and pick up a pen, class. Researchers say it’s better for note taking.
The Washington Post: Using technology in the classroom can produce fabulous results, but for note-taking, it may pay to keep it old-school and stick with pen and paper. Students who take longhand notes appear to process information more deeply than those who take notes on a laptop, according to a study published this year in Psychological Science. Using the newfangled method generally produces more raw notes, researchers say in the study, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard,” which was published in April. (The study was resurfaced this week by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, as students return to school.) Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Dads’ Housework Inspires Girls’ Ambitions
The Wall Street Journal: Fathers who help with the dishes and laundry may play an important role in shaping their daughters' future, suggests a study in the August issue of Psychological Science. Researchers found that fathers who performed an equal share of household chores were more likely to have daughters who aspired to less traditionally feminine occupations, such as astronaut, marine biologist, geologist, police officer and professional hockey or soccer player. Fathers who believed in gender equality and yet left most of the housework to mothers had daughters who favored more traditionally feminine careers, such as nursing, fashion designer, librarian and stay-at-home mom.
