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Traumatic Experiences May Make You Tough
Your parents were right: Hard experiences may indeed make you tough. Psychological scientists have found that, while going through many experiences like assault, hurricanes, and bereavement can be psychologically damaging, small amounts of trauma may help people develop resilience. “Of course, everybody’s heard the aphorism, ‘Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger,’” says Mark D. Seery of the University at Buffalo. His paper on adversity and resilience appears in the December issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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What Are Emotion Expressions For?
That cartoon scary face – wide eyes, ready to run – may have helped our primate ancestors survive in a dangerous wild, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person’s feelings to the people around him. The basic idea, according to Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon, is that the specific facial expressions associated with each particular emotion evolved for some reason. Shariff cowrote the paper with Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia.
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Women Perform Better At Spacial Tasks When More Confident, Study Shows
Huffington Post: Two new studies out last week show that the brain is mightier than the baggage -- especially when it comes to those stereotypes we women carry around in our backpacks. Parallel parking: Good at it? And speaking of driving: Get lost much? Stereotypes tell us that if you're a woman, your answer to the first question is probably a "nope." And to the second, often a "yes." But guess what? A new study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior tells us that it's often garden-variety confidence at play when it comes to spatial tasks like parking the car or reading a road map -- rather than gender-related abilities (or lack of same.) Read the whole story: Huffington Post
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Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: Elizabeth Loftus
APS Past President Elizabeth Loftus speaks about her research — investigating false memory, the reliability of eyewitness reports, and memories “recovered” through therapy — and its impact on how we think about eyewitness testimony.
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Psychopathic Personality: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy
Read the Full Text The word “psychopath” brings to mind diverse and often conflicting images, from the superficially charming and manipulative corporate boss to the coldly violent serial killer. Although the public has a fascination with psychopathy, there are still misconceptions and uncertainty about what it means to be a psychopath. How does psychopathy develop? At what age can it be diagnosed? Is it necessarily linked with violence? Is treatment possible? This new, comprehensive review summarizes what is known about psychopathy from psychological science.
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Grumpy old gorilla apes aging human males
The Globe and Mail: “For the past 100 years or so, psychologists have supported the notion that all humans have the same set of basic biological emotions,” says Psych Central News. “But a new paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science challenges this belief and holds that some of our established security procedures may be misguided. In her article, clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University said a current method to train security workers to recognize ‘basic’ emotions from expressions might be ill-advised, potentially placing individuals at risk.
