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Once-In-a-Lifetime Experiences Are Both Joyous and Depressing
Discover: Skydiving, winning a sexy sports car or scaling Mt. Everest sure sound like extraordinary experiences that would fill us with boundless joy to last a lifetime. But a new study finds that’s not always
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Study Suggests ‘Extraordinary Experiences’ Might Make You Feel Bad
The Huffington Post: Many people seek out extraordinary experiences throughout their lifetimes. If they didn’t, recreational activities like skydiving, bungee jumping, zorbing and mountain climbing wouldn’t exist. However, a new study published in the journal Psychological
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Savor Extraordinary Experiences, Feel Worse Afterward
Pacific Standard: Feeling out of sorts this morning? Maybe it was that recent trip you took to Machu Picchu. Sure, it was fun at the time—amazing, really. But it’s not like you could truly share the
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For Heartache, Take 2 Aspirin and Call Me in the Morning
New York Magazine: Heartache. A broken heart. A hurtful breakup. Is the language we use to describe the pain of romantic rejection just a metaphor, or could it capture a biological reality? That’s a question
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How the Brain Made Room for Complex Social Ties
When APS Fellow and Janet Taylor Spence Award recipient Naomi Eisenberger was a graduate student, she ran an experiment in which study participants felt socially excluded: Participants situated in an fMRI machine played a virtual
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The Psychology of Exile
The Huffington Post: When I was in middle school, one of the assigned readings was a story called “The Man Without a Country.” It was written by Edward Everett Hale in 1863, and told the
