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You’re Not Always as Capable as You Think
Inflated egos are a staple of professional environments. Most people will endure colleagues who act as if they, and only they, can carry out certain tasks, lead a work team effectively, or carry the company softball team to a big victory. But studies show that those perceptions are often out of proportion — that a person’s views about their own talents and skills often fly well above their actual performance. The importance of accuracy in self-insight has not been lost on psychologists, leading to a wealth of studies examining this topic. But these studies have typically only examined perceptions of ability in one area.
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Half a Century Later, Psychology Researchers Remember Kitty Genovese
Fifty years ago today, a young woman was killed walking home from work in a quiet neighborhood of Queens, New York. Over the span of an excruciating half hour, she cried out for help as her killer maimed and stabbed her. And though there were people around who heard her calls, no one came to her aid and the police weren’t notified until it was too late. This is the story of Kitty Genovese’s death, perhaps the most well-known parable in psychology to emerge in the last century.
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Emotions May Not Be So Universal After All
TIME: From a very young age, infants have a way of making their feelings known – contorted faces and howls indicate their displeasure with a meal or a damp diaper, a gummy smile their contentment, and a furrowed brow their puzzlement over a new discovery such as their thumb. While it seems logical that these expressions are universal, the latest study suggests they may not be. In fact, expressions of the major emotions – happiness, sadness, anger and the like, may be strongly culturally driven. Maria Gendron, a post doc in the lab of psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, visited remote tribes in Namibia to come to that conclusion.
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Forget the fakery! Teens tell us they’re not cool with Photoshop
TODAY: They say comparison is the thief of joy, and there is maybe no place this is truer than inside the minds of teenage girls. The TODAY/AOL Body Image survey asked teen girls about how images in the media make them feel about themselves. The answer: Not great! Eighty percent of the teenage girls we surveyed said they compare themselves to the images they see of celebrities, and almost half of those girls said it makes them feel dissatisfied with their own appearance. Also: Teenage girls are wise to Photoshopping shenanigans, and they’re not into it: The majority of the girls surveyed said they want the practice to stop entirely.
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A one-hour class could cut the college dropout rate
Reuters: (Reuters) First generation college students get lower grades and are more likely to drop out - an "achievement gap" that threatens efforts to boost the number of college graduates. Recent research, however, suggests a simple one-hour intervention that focuses on students' social-class backgrounds could help close the divide. In an experiment at an unnamed elite private college, incoming students listened to college juniors and seniors discuss how their social class backgrounds affected their college experience, according to the paper "Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap," to be published in Psychological Science.
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Rose-Colored Words, but Gray Outcomes
The New York Times: When all the words you hear about the economy are bullish, you may want to run in the other direction. This counterintuitive finding — that positive visions of the future precede downturns — appears to be the case both for people and the economy as a whole. This bad news for unbridled optimism was laid out in a paper published in Psychological Science online in February. The study looked at the relationship between economic malaise and language in newspaper articles and presidential addresses. The finding was stark: Optimistic language was a predictor of poor performance.
