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Mood and Experience: Life Comes At You
Living through weddings or divorces, job losses and children’s triumphs, we sometimes feel better and sometimes feel worse. But, psychologists observe, we tend to drift back to a “set point”—a stable resting point, or baseline
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Eighty Years Along, a Longevity Study Still Has Ground to Cover
The New York Times: After reading “The Longevity Project,” I took an unscientific survey of friends and relatives asking them what personality characteristic they thought was most associated with long life. Several said “optimism,” followed
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Making the ‘Irrelevant’ Relevant to Understand Memory and Aging
Age alters memory. But in what ways, and why? These questions comprise a vast puzzle for neurologists and psychologists. A new study looked at one puzzle piece: how older and younger adults encode and recall
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Are Positive Emotions Good for Your Health in Old Age?
The notion that feeling good may be good for your health is not new, but is it really true? A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
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The pursuit of happiness: Buying time
When the late U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas was diagnosed with cancer in 1984, he resigned his Senate seat with these words: “Nobody on his death bed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time
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A Learning Machine: Plasticity and Change Throughout Life
Drawing together five psychological scientists unlikely to cross paths outside of a conference, one of the APS 18th Annual Convention’s themed programs, “Plasticity & Change: A Lifelong Perspective,” showcased extraordinary research from various areas, all