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Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions
The Washington Post: The Olympics is a laboratory for testing the limits of human strength and endurance. But it serves as a laboratory for other types of experiments, too. One such experiment has been helping researchers to unlock the mystery of facial expressions. Psychologists have long debated whether the smiles, frowns and other expressions that people make are a universal reaction that humans are born with, or whether we learn them from those around us. If we are born with certain facial expressions, researchers argue, these expressions should be the same around the world. If these behaviors are learned, though, they might differ from place to place.
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Researchers Study Effects Of Social Media On Young Minds
NPR: So if you're freaking out because you think social media is running your life, I recommend that you do not listen to the next four minutes or so of radio. My colleague, social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, is here to talk about the effects that social media has on our brains. Hi, Shankar. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: Is this bad news you're about to give me? VEDANTAM: You know, it depends on your point of view. GREENE: All right. VEDANTAM: Researchers took teenagers, stuck them in the brain scanner and observed them as they engaged with social media.
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Mass Killings May Have Created Contagion, Feeding on Itself
The New York Times: The horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion, prompting a small number of people with strong personal grievances and scant political ideology to mine previous attacks for both methods and potential targets to express their lethal anger and despair. The Iranian-German who killed nine people at a Munich mall was reportedly obsessed with mass killings, particularly the attack by a Norwegian that killed 77 people in 2011.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Reconsidering Temporal Selection in the Attentional Blink Patrick T. Goodbourn, Paolo Martini, Michael Barnett-Cowan, Irina M. Harris, Evan J. Livesey, and Alex O. Holcombe When two stimuli are presented in close succession, people often report the first but fail to report the second. In studies of this phenomenon, which is known as attentional blink, many items are presented in rapid succession and participants are asked to make judgments (presence or absence, report the identity) about two target stimuli (T1 and T2) appearing in the string of items. The time between the presentation of T1 and T2 is called a lag.
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What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories
Scientific American: Every memory you have ever had is chock-full of errors. I would even go as far as saying that memory is largely an illusion. This is because our perception of the world is deeply imperfect, our brains only bother to remember a tiny piece of what we actually experience, and every time we remember something we have the potential to change the memory we are accessing. I often write about the ways in which our memory leads us astray, with a particular focus on ‘false memories.’ False memories are recollections that feel real but are not based on actual experience. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Building Better Science Means Breaking Down Barriers
Many of the world’s most challenging issues – poverty, health behavior change, and globalization – are at their core issues that can be solved with a better understanding of human behavior. Making progress on solving these complex, multidimensional issues increasingly requires interdisciplinary collaboration across research disciplines. But the way most modern universities are organized, with behavioral and social science faculty splintered throughout dozens of departments, prevents scholars in one department from sharing ideas and resources with their colleagues from another department — even if it’s just down the hall.
