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The secret to happiness? Ask this Yale professor (and the 1,200 students taking her class)
What's the secret of happiness? Hard work. But a little help from a Yale professor — and roughly 1,200 eager classmates — probably doesn't hurt. Laurie Santos teaches Psychology and the Good Life course at Yale, a class designed to teach students how to be happy. She said that much of the anxiety she sees comes from being focused on things that don't lead to happiness. "The hope is that teaching students the right way to spend their time, and the right things to worry about, and the right things to focus on might actually shift things around," she said.
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NIH Requests Feedback on Behavioral and Social Protocol Template
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) requests input on a new optional template it has developed for NIH-funded scientists to use in writing protocols for behavioral science research. This draft protocol template is connected to NIH’s new policy of defining basic behavioral or social science research as clinical trials, which APS opposes. Psychological scientists are encouraged to consider in their responses to NIH whether a separate template for behavioral research is even necessary. If you are interested in submitting comments on NIH’s proposed behavioral and social science template, please view the comment form here and the accompanying NIH notice NOT-OD-18-167 here.
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Three reminders to help you thrive—not merely survive—in grad school
Grad school does not have the best reputation. The stereotype is that it is a time of so much despair that it seems, as Marge Simpson noted, like a terrible life choice. This idea is not entirely unfounded: Ph.D. and master’s students around the world report rates of depression and anxiety that are six times higher than the general public. When asked how things are going, grad students often respond, “I’m surviving.” And we as an academic community seem to have accepted this as par for the course. My fellow Letters to Young Scientists authors and I think it is time to change that.
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To Cope with Stress, Try Learning Something New
Stressed. Anxious. Exhausted. Drained. This is how many employees feel at work due to stressors like longer work hours, more-frequent hassles, the need to do more with fewer resources, and so on. Such work stress has been shown to induce anxiety and anger, unethical behavior, poor decision making, and chronic exhaustion and burnout — all of which impair personal and organizational performance. There are typically two ways people try to deal with this stress. One is to simply “buckle down and power through” — to focus on getting the stressful work done.
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Researchers replicate just 13 of 21 social science experiments published in top journals
The “reproducibility crisis” in science is erupting again. A research project attempted to replicate 21 social science experiments published between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. Only 13 replication attempts succeeded. The other eight were duds, with no observed effects consistent with the original findings. The failures do not necessarily mean the original results were erroneous, as the authors of this latest replication effort note. There could have been gremlins of some type in the second try. But the authors also noted that even in the replications that succeeded, the observed effect was on average only about 75 percent as large as the first time around.
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Why You Should Write More Thank You Notes
Research has shown time and time again that being grateful is good for your health, mood and general well-being. In fact, it’s one of the easiest things you can do to increase your mental health. But if you can’t remember the last time you sent a real thank-you note, a recent study may explain why. The research, published recently in Psychological Science, says people chronically underestimate the power of expressing gratitude and overestimate how awkward it will be, which may keep them from engaging in the simple but impactful practice.
