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The Right Way To Talk To Yourself
The Brilliant Blog: n the privacy of our minds, we all talk to ourselves—an inner monologue that might seem rather pointless. As one scientific paper on self-talk asks: “What can we tell ourselves that we don’t already know?” But as that study and others go on to show, the act of giving ourselves mental messages can help us learn and perform at our best. Researchers have identified the most effective forms of self-talk, collected here—so that the next time you talk to yourself, you know exactly what you should say. Self-talk isn’t just motivational messages like “You can do it!” or “Almost there,” although this internal cheering section can give us confidence.
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Are You a Career Adapter?
Over the course of your career, you’ll change jobs, get promoted, take on new responsibilities, encounter new technologies, and adjust to new supervisors, co-workers and subordinates. You might assume that your ability to navigate through those changes rests in large part on your personality traits. But new behavioral research paints a more nuanced view of what scientists call career adaptability—the ability to manage existing and impending career challenges. An international team of vocational psychologists recently developed a new measure, the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS), to assess how individuals manage their career development.
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Boosting Self-Worth Can Counteract Cognitive Effects of Poverty
For people in poverty, remembering better times — such as past success — improves cognitive functioning by several IQ points and increases their willingness to seek help from crucial aid services, a study finds.
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Inferring Missing Information
Every day people make judgments and decisions, even when they don’t have the necessary information. Ramadhar Singh studied how people, when making predictions about others, infer the missing information from the facts they do have. In his research, Singh first experimentally demonstrated that Predicted gift size = Generosity x Capability (Income). Based on this evidence, he then identified that inferred value of the missing capability information increases with the given value of generosity information. In contrast, inferred value of the missing generosity information is constant usually around the middle level of generosity in the donor.
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Income Inequality Is Rising, But Maybe Not as Fast as You Think
Americans’ perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated when compared with actual census data, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “With the genuine rise in wealth inequality over the past several decades, and the popular media’s intensive coverage of this issue, we wondered how income inequality is perceived by the average American,” says psychological scientist John Chambers of St. Louis University.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Behavioral Sensitivity to Reward Is Reduced for Far Objects David A. O'Connor, Bernard Meade, Olivia Carter, Sarah Rossiter, and Robert Hester Does spatial distance affect the ways people respond to rewarding objects? Participants received a reward for correctly identifying red, green, or blue squares and spheres presented in near or far space using a 3-D screen. They received a reward for correct responses, and the magnitude of the reward was linked to the color of the object.
