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Q&A: Art Glenberg, on how the body affects the mind
Smartplanet: Psychologists and philosophers have long thought of the brain as the primary tool for all abstract thinking, like reasoning or judgment. But recently, science has been changing its mind on this. ... Our awareness of this phenomenon will have a profound impact on our day-to-day behavior. We now know that our facial expressions can absolutely change our moods. And that children are more successful in math if they use their hands and bodies to guide themselves through algebraic problems. In fact, a new study suggests that the number one thing we can do to preserve our brain function is to be physically active — regardless of any intellectual enrichment.
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How To Not Come Off As Being Overly Confident
Business Insider: Confidence is indisputably a good thing. But over-confidence can spell trouble—especially when we’re learning. Research has shown over and over again that we are not very good judges of how effectively we’re learning new information, or how accurately we’ll remember it. This means we may stop the studying or training process prematurely, before new material is truly absorbed, and it means we may be in for an unpleasant surprise when we realize (at test or performance time) that we didn’t know that material as well as we assumed.
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How To Defuse a Hateful Slur
I grew up in a town, and a time, with a great deal of racial and ethnic tension, and I heard hateful slurs constantly at school. African-Americans, then politely called Negroes, were disparaged as niggers, and Italian-Americans, as wops or guineas. The Puerto Ricans in the neighboring communities were spics. Perhaps because of this, I was taught early and forcefully never to use these cruel labels. And that included any stigmatizing label—queer, bitch, kike—all of which I heard a lot. This rule was an absolute in my family, no exceptions, and it worked. I don’t even like writing these words right now.
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Emotion-Health Connection Not Limited to Industrialized Nations
In fact, UC Irvine study finds phenomenon more marked in developing countries Positive emotions are known to play a role in physical well-being, and stress is strongly linked to poor health, but is this strictly a “First World” phenomenon? In developing nations, is the fulfillment of basic needs more critical to health than how one feels? A new study shows that emotions do affect health around the world and may, in fact, be more important to wellness in low-income countries. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is the first to examine the emotion-health connection in a representative sample of 150,000 people in 142 countries.
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Why Good Deeds Can Cause Moral Backsliding
LiveScience: Doing a good deed can lead some people to more kind acts while spurring others to backslide. But how people respond depends on their moral outlook, according to a new study. ... The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science. Some studies show that people maintain a kind of moral equilibrium, meaning that giving money to charity may lead them to skimp on the tip at dinner, whereas partying too much may inspire a volunteer day at the soup kitchen. But other studies found just the opposite: Behaving ethically leads people to more good deeds later, said study co-author, Gert Cornelissen, a psychologist at the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
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New Research on Aging From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on cognitive and perceptual processes in aging published in Psychological Science. Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting Renée K. Biss, K. W. Joan Ngo, Lynn Hasher, Karen L. Campbell, and Gillian Rowe Can distraction improve memory in older adults? Older and younger adults studied a list of words and then performed a working memory task in which half of the original words appeared as distractors. Participants were then asked to recall as many words as they could from the original word list. Older adults had better memory for words from the list that had been repeated in the working memory task.
