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Why College Students Make Better Decisions Than Intelligence Agents
Yahoo: Who would you trust with the lives of hundreds of people: federal intelligence agents or a bunch of college students? At Cornell University, psychologist Valerie Reyna wanted to test whether intelligence agents were susceptible to a type of decision-making bias people accrue as they get older. It's called fuzzy thinking. As our life experience grows more robust, we tend to make decisions off of gists, rather than analytical lines of thought. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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Booze, Binging and the Devil You Don’t Know
Imagine this scenario. You are meeting your boyfriend at a restaurant, intending to break up with him. You know this conversation is going to be tough, but you really don’t know what his reaction will be. He could end up sobbing, or shouting, or he could just sit there in uncomfortable silence. You arrive early and order a whiskey—a double—to steady your nerves. Will the whiskey have its desired effect? Drinkers clearly expect that alcohol will dampen the effects of stress—they often drink for precisely that reason—but in fact this dynamic is poorly understood.
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To Savor the Flavor, Perform a Short Ritual First
Birthday celebrations often follow a formula, including off-key singing, making a birthday wish while blowing out candles, and the ceremonial cutting of the birthday cake. New research suggests that this ritual not only makes the
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Society for Affective Science Inaugural Conference
A new society has been formed -- The Society for Affective Science. Its mission is to foster basic and applied research in the variety of fields that study affect, broadly defined. The SAS inaugural conference will be April 24-26, 2014 in Washington DC. This will be a theoretically/methodologically diverse, student-friendly conference that will provide a forum for cross-cutting work in emotion, stress, and many of the other topics that fall under the broad umbrella of affective science. For more information, and to get early-bird registration rates, see the society website: society-for-affective-science.org. For questions, contact [email protected].
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Go-carting babies reveal origin of fear of heights
New Scientist: STEPPING out onto the glass platform of the Willis Tower, 412 metres above the streets of Chicago is enough to make most people dizzy. Not so babies, who are born with no fear of heights. Now it seems that this wariness develops as a result of crawling. You might think fear of heights would be innate, since falling from high up can result in injury or death. But babies with little experience of crawling are not afraid of heights.
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A Better Way to Discover Your Strengths
LinkedIn: If you want to excel at anything, it’s not enough to fix your weaknesses. You also need to leverage your strengths. When Albert Einstein failed a French exam, if he had concentrated only on his language skills, he might never have transformed physics. When J.K. Rowling realized that she was highly disorganized, if she had focused solely on becoming more orderly, she might never have honed her storytelling skills to write Harry Potter. And had Dennis Rodman worked exclusively on overcoming his weakness in shooting free throws, he might have never become a seven-time NBA rebounding champion. Before you can leverage your strengths, you need to figure out what they are.
