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People Seem More Likely to Follow Rules They Can’t Beat
U.S. News & World Report: People who believe a rule or restriction is absolute are more likely to accept it than those who think the rule has some wiggle room, according to a new study. The findings may help explain a number of human behaviors and actions, including the Arab Spring uprisings, according to the authors of the study to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. In the study, participants read articles that said lower speed limits in cities would make people safer. Some of them also read that government leaders had decided to reduce speed limits.
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You’re Just One in 7 Billion!
Did you take a deep breath before pushing and shoving your way into a crowded train this morning? Stepped on a few toes or nerves perhaps? Phew, well, if you thought dodging elbows and trying to hop on that crowded morning rush hour train was bad, try thinking about this – the world’s population recently hit 7 billion and in an already crowded planet, that poses quite a problem. According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population more than doubled just in the last fifty years. This staggering growth is certainly a cause for alarm and has scientists, economists and sociologists scrambling to find a solution to combat the problems that come with an overcrowded planet.
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Memory Lapse
The New York Times: A while ago, I was going through my files when I came across a cache of partly crumbled photographs. One was of me holding the sight box for the M252 mortar in Garden City, N.Y., parking lot. In another, I sat with Oum in the open hatch of a UH-1W at Camp White Horse, outside Nasiriyah, Iraq. There was another of me and the guys at the 2003 Marine Corps birthday ball. I looked like a boy in those photos. At the bottom of the stack I found one photo of us standing with First Sgt. Allen. I was wearing a set of borrowed Alphas; she wore a black evening gown, First Sergeant stood adorned in dress blues, everyone was smiling, teeth shining.
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Tantrum Tamer: New Ways Parents Can Stop Bad Behavior
The Wall Street Journal: Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial—for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions. Instead, a set of techniques known as "parent management training" is proving so helpful to families struggling with a child's unmanageable behavior that clinicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to adopt them. Aimed at teaching parents to encourage sustained behavior change, it was developed in part at parenting research clinics at Yale University and King's College London.
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Beautiful people ‘likely to earn more money’
The West Australian: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin says beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S. Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In Beauty Pays he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Using his research and worldwide studies he's collected, Hamermesh notes that beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse.
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Call for Nominations for APA Awards for Year 2012
The Society for General Psychology, Division One of the American Psychological Association, is conducting its Year 2012 awards competition, including the William James Book Award for a recent book that serves to integrate material across psychological subfields or to provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology, the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for a Lifetime Career Contribution to General Psychology, the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology, and the Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Unifying Psychology, which is an American Psychological Foundation Award managed by the Society for General Psychology.
