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How To Stress Out Less And Reduce Worrying
body likes stressing and worrying. And, no, even if you think it keeps you sharp it's not good for you. It can cause all sorts of health problems over time, including messing up your memory and ability to pay attention: The authors report the first direct assessment of working memory capacity when people engage in worry. High and low worriers performed a random key-press task while thinking about a current worry or a positive personally relevant topic. High (but not…
3 minutes
Why don’t we like Mondays?
cause you're focused about how you predict you'll feel, not how you actually feel in the moment: An Internet survey revealed that day-of-the-week (DOW) stereotypes (i.e., “Monday blues”, “Wednesday hump day”, “TGIF”, etc.) were pronounced when subjects predicted their moods for each day of the upcoming week, less obvious when they remembered their moods from each day of the preceding week, and least apparent in the momentary moods they actually experienced on each day. In a second study involving 2-hour,…
2 minutes
Do _______ people all look alike?
s, they do. Whenever people are a different race from you, it's a lot harder for you to tell them apart: People are more accurate at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group than at recognizing faces from other ethnic groups. This other-ethnicity effect (OEE) in recognition may be produced by a deficit in recollective memory for other-ethnicity faces. In a single study, White and Black participants saw White and Black faces presented within several different visual contexts. The participants…
1 min read
How long will you be miserable after quitting smoking?
out 3 weeks: This article describes a multidimensional, multivariate, and multilevel approach to the assessment of nicotine withdrawal. In this prospective study, 70 adult smokers assigned to an active or placebo nicotine patch condition completed multiple daily assessments using an electronic diary. Average and individual growth curves were estimated for affective and nonaffective withdrawal symptoms. All symptoms but hunger increased significantly on the quit day and remained elevated for three weeks. Variability in symptom experiences across individuals increased from pre-…
2 minutes
How to make stereotypes work to your advantage:
e you feeling the effects of negative stereotypes? How do you prevent it from affecting your performance? Fight fire with fire! You can neutralize a negative stereotype with a positive stereotype: One troubling aspect of membership in a stigmatized group is that negative stereotypes about the group’s performance affect one’s personal performance (i.e., stereotype threat). Women who are made aware of the negative stereotype that "women are bad at math" perform worse than women who are not made aware of…
1 min read
Can some negativity improve your relationships?:
s, it can: Four studies support the hypothesis that expressing negative emotion is associated with positive relationship outcomes, including elicitation of support, building of new close relationships, and heightening of intimacy in the closest of those relationships. In Study 1, participants read vignettes in which another person was experiencing a negative emotion. Participants reported they would provide more help when the person chose to express the negative emotion. In Study 2, participants watched a confederate preparing for a speech. Participants…
1 min read
How much do teachers improve with experience?
ey don't: Do university teachers, like good wine, improve with age? The purpose of this methodological/substantive study is to apply a multiple-level growth modeling approach to the long-term stability of students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness (SETs). For a diverse cohort of 195 teachers who were evaluated continuously over 13 years (6,024 classes, an average of 30.9 classes per teacher), there was little evidence that teachers became either more or less effective with added experience. This stability of SETs generalized reasonably…
1 min read
Can your name determine whether you’re successful or not?
d I don't mean being born with the last name "Kennedy", "Gates" or "Buffett." Can name alone really affect success? Absolutely. If voters don't know anything about a politician's stances on issues, they vote for the one with the nice-sounding name: The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether the attractiveness of political candidates' names would influence voter preferences, both when only the names were known and when politically relevant information was provided. The names and platforms of candidates…
2 minutes
