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Grin and Bear It! Smiling Facilitates Stress Recovery
Just grin and bear it! At some point, we have all probably heard or thought something like this when facing a tough situation. But is there any truth to this piece of advice? Feeling good usually makes us smile, but does it work the other way around? Can smiling actually make us feel better? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas investigate the potential benefits of smiling by looking at how different types of smiling, and the awareness of smiling, affects individuals’ ability to recover from episodes of stress.
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Awe Slows Down Time, Boosts Life Satisfaction: Study
Huffington Post: Think back to your last jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring moment -- was it gazing across vast stretches of ocean, or into the deep voids of a canyon? A new study in the journal Psychological Science shows that those feelings of awe seem to slow down time and boost feelings of life satisfaction. "...Awe offset the feeling that time is limited, which increased willingness to volunteer time, accentuated preferences for experiential goods, and lifted satisfaction with life," the researchers, from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, wrote in the study. The study included three experiments.
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Mind games of the victorious
Chicago Tribune: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Your mean boss could be insecure
The Washington Post: Most people who work inside organizations know the experience of having their ideas shot down as soon as they’re floated. And for some folks, it’s a daily barrage. In their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton point to negativity as a primary reason companies fail to implement improvements, even when key people inside those companies know exactly what should be done and how to do it. And this negativity seems to be taking a growing toll on workers. Recent Gallup research shows that 17 percent of people who quit their jobs leave because they can’t stand management or the work environment.
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Children exposed to sex scenes in movies ‘will be more promiscuous and have more sexual partners’
Daily Mail: Watching sex scenes in movies can make children more sexually active from a younger age, research suggests. Whether it’s Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet making love on the Titanic or Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart cuddling in bed on their vampire honeymoon in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, teenagers watching sex scenes have an increased curiosity for sex. Watching sex on screen could lead to teenagers having more sex with more partners and without using condoms, researcher Ross O’Hara from the University of Missouri said. The scenes can 'fundamentally influence a teenager's personality’ and make them more prone to take risks he said.
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Give up your time to have more time
The Telegraph: They argue that giving time to others rather than relaxing may make us feel that we have more time for ourselves. A study found that our sense of having time - 'time affluence' - can be increased by spending time on others. This means that we may feel as if we have more time on our hands despite the fact we are 'giving' some of it away, reports journal Psychological Science. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of 'wasting' time and giving time - for example, writing a letter to a sick child. They found that those who did the latter actually felt they had more time on their hands.
