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How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus
When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways — a fact that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated with the help of a hypothetical situation, eerily apropos of today’s coronavirus epidemic, that has come to be known as the Asian disease problem. Professors Tversky and Kahneman asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease that was expected to kill 600 citizens.
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The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.” ... This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore.
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Is Online Dating Bad for Our Mental Health?
We’ve all seen those cheesy eHarmony commercials where two strangers find each other on their platform and fall in love. Despite its cheesiness, many of us now turn to online dating platforms like eHarmony, Tinder, Hinge, etc. in the hopes of telling our own cheesy stories about how we found “the one”. Unfortunately, it’s just not that easy. The dating world has changed significantly in the past couple of decades. According to Wikipedia’s online dating services timeline, the idea of matching strangers based on questionnaires that are run through computer algorithms has been around since the 1960s, but modern online dating services like Match.com didn’t launch until the late ‘90s. ...
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Romance, Scent, and Sleep: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of
The scent of a romantic partner can improve your quality of sleep. This is true regardless of whether or not you are consciously aware that the scent is even present. [NEWS Feb. 13, 2020]
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on interpersonal distance and psychopathy, how suggestive feedback may worsen stress symptoms, emotion changes associated with depressive and borderline features, depression symptoms, and posttraumatic stress after a terrorist attack.
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Psychological Assessment in Legal Contexts: Are Courts Keeping “Junk Science” Out of the Courtroom?
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 20, Number 3) Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Psychological tests, tools, and instruments are widely used in legal contexts to help determine the outcome of legal cases. These tools can aid in assessing parental fit for child custody purposes, can affect the outcomes of disability proceedings, and can even help judges determine whether an offender should go to prison, remain incarcerated, or be exempt from death penalty. In this issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 20, Issue 3), Tess M. S. Neal, Christopher Slobogin, Michael J. Saks, David Faigman, and Kurt F.
