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Refining the Formula That Predicts Celebrity Marriages’ Doom
The New York Times: In 2006, Garth Sundem and I confronted one of the great unsolved mysteries in social science: Exactly how soon will a given celebrity marriage blow up? Drawing on Garth’s statistical expertise and my extensive survey of the literature in supermarket checkout lines, we published an equation in The New York Times predicting the probability that a celebrity marriage would endure. The equation’s variables included the relative fame of the husband and wife, their ages, the length of their courtship, their marital history, and the sex-symbol factor (determined by looking at the woman’s first five Google hits and counting how many show her in skimpy attire, or no attire).
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Keep your cool with wrong hand
Yahoo! India: People who find it difficult to rein in their aggression and yell at others even for silly mistakes can benefit by simply using the wrong hand in daily life and thereby practice self control, suggests a study. According to Thomas Denson of the University of New South Wales, right handers should get into the habit of using a computer mouse, stirring a cup of coffee or opening a door with their left hand and left-handers should do the opposite, the Daily Mail reported. Training yourself to use the wrong hand seems to act as practice for other kinds of self control, such as being polite. Just two weeks of the exercises reduce the tendency to act on impulse, he says.
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Women react to Rush’s apology: Not accepted?
msnbc: The outcry over Rush Limbaugh calling birth control activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” seems to have worked. Several days after his attempt to slut-shame the Georgetown University law student, Limbaugh issued a rare apology on his website, saying "in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize." Janet Hyde, the Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says such name-calling “is a method for exerting power and control over women.” Read the whole story: msnbc See Janet Hyde at the 24th APS Annual Convention
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Can’t Help Myself
The New York Times: Human consciousness, that wonderful ability to reflect, ponder and choose, is our greatest evolutionary achievement. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and fortunately we also have the ability to operate on automatic pilot, performing complex behaviors without any conscious thought at all. One way this happens is with lots of practice. Tasks that seem impossibly complex at first, like learning how to play the guitar, speak a foreign language or operate a new DVD player, become second nature after we perform those actions many times (well, maybe not the DVD player).
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Suppressing Feelings of Compassion Makes People Feel Less Moral
It’s normal to not always act on your sense of compassion—for example, by walking past a beggar on the street without giving them any money. Maybe you want to save your money or avoid engaging with a homeless person. But even if suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality. Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn’t have any cost—that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on.
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Personality Can Change Over Time, Study Suggests
The Huffington Post: According to a new study, grouches don't necessarily remain grouches for the rest of their lives. Findings published in the journal Social Indicators Research suggest that people's personalities can change over time just as much as external factors like change in jobs or income, or marriage or divorce. The researchers, of the University of Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, said that the findings indicate we can increase our well-being not just through these actual external changes, but also through changes in our personalities.
