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The Power of Gratitude
Like most parents, I drilled my young kids on the importance of saying “thank you” to others. Nagged them, really. After all, words of gratitude are an important social convention, a way of letting others
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A tool for predicting suicide?
Suicide is both disturbing and perplexing to survivors, in part because it is so unpredictable. People who are intent on killing themselves often conceal their thoughts or outright deny them, so family and friends are
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An angry voter is an ignorant voter
Imagine this scenario: You lost your job at the lumber yard early in 2009. Nobody is building new homes these days, and this slowdown has trickled down to suppliers all over the country. What’s worse
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The perils of small talk
The Greek philosopher Socrates famously claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” to which the 20th-century American philosopher Daniel Dennett replied: “The overly examined life is nothing to write home about either.” Fair
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Thinking of Things Unseen
One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is probably one you don’t think of very often — the capacity to learn based merely on what someone tells you. Think about it: new information is
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On Critical Thinking
Several years ago some teaching colleagues were talking about the real value of teaching psychology students to think critically. After some heated discussion, the last word was had by a colleague from North Carolina. “The