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Discarding Ideas (Literally)
The Wall Street Journal: Plagued by unwanted thoughts? Try writing them down and throwing the paper away. A new study finds that this trick works. First, students were asked to write down positive or negative thoughts about their bodies, and half were told to tear up and discard the paper. Then the students were asked to rate their attitudes about their bodies. Those who had kept the paper were influenced by what they wrote, but among those who had tossed the page, the written comments had no impact at all.
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The Brain: Forgetting So We Remember, Avoiding Overload
ABC: We accumulate so many memories that it's a wonder our brains don't clog, strangling us on the trivia of our daily lives. How do we recall the memories that are important to us without flooding our brains with the details of every insignificant event? How do we separate the memories we need from the mountains of garbage? According to ongoing research, we separate the wheat from the chaff by shutting down some memories, at least temporarily, to allow that one chosen treasure to resurface. In short, we forget, so we can remember.
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The Science Behind Gifting
The Wall Street Journal: To be a really successful giver of gifts, a person usually needs to get inside the head of the intended recipient. Unfortunately, psychological studies reveal that givers and receivers have a hard time understanding each other's mind-sets, which can make for a tricky holiday experience. Take regifting. That Crock-Pot your well-meaning aunt gave you last year that you are shamefully contemplating wrapping up for your dear neighbor this year? Research shows you can go right ahead and regift it, shame intact. Your aunt probably won't mind.
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Victory Or Defeat? Emotions Aren’t All In The Face
NPR: Photos of athletes in their moment of victory or defeat usually show faces contorted with intense emotion. But a new study suggests that people actually don't use those kinds of extreme facial expressions to judge how a person is feeling. Instead, surprisingly, people rely on body cues. Hillel Aviezer, a psychology researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, wanted to see how accurately people can read intense, real-world facial expressions — instead of the standardized, posed images of facial expressions that are usually used in lab tests. ...
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For Word Learning, Size Matters If You’re A Dog
Scientific American: In 1988, a three-year-old child is led into a brightly colored testing room in a psychology department in Bloomington, Indiana. A small toy is brought out and put onto a table in front of the child. The toy was wooden, blue, about two inches square, and U-shaped. “This is a dax.” The researchers picked a word that was easy to pronounce, but was definitely something the children had never heard before. Then, seven other toys were brought out. Some of them were the same shape as the DAX, but larger, or smaller. Some were the same size, but were made of cloth or sponge instead of wood. Some were the same size and texture as the original DAX, but different in shape.
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Helping Parents Score on the Homework Front
The Wall Street Journal: Homework can be as monumental a task for parents as it is for children. So what's the best strategy to get a kid to finish it all? Where's the line between helping with an assignment and doing the assignment? And should a parent nag a procrastinating preteen to focus—or let the child fall behind and learn a hard lesson? As schools pile on more homework as early as preschool, many parents are confused about how to assist, says a 2012 research review at Johns Hopkins University.
