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Past research has reached similar conclusions. In a 2015 Stanford study of 690 Chinese and American participants, for example, the Americans generally sought to maximize positive feelings and minimize negative ones, while the Chinese subjects were more likely to report that they commonly felt mixed emotions. The study authors argued that the results had to do with differing ideas about the importance of the individual: The individualistic American culture places more emphasis on people doing what's best for themselves, while more collectivist East Asian cultures prioritize doing what's best for the group.

Yoo believes the cultural influence on the positivity-health connection may be the result of culturally specific health behaviors. "Frequent experience of positive affect in the Western context would be aligned with prescribed values and beliefs, and thus likely motivate engagement in and pursuit of healthy behaviors," she explains. "In contrast, positive affect aligns less with norms and beliefs about positive affect in the East Asian context, and thus may not be associated with healthy behaviors."

It's not simply that Americans are more intent on seeking happiness, then -- there's also a high bar for how intense that happiness is supposed to feel. "Westerners value high-arousal emotions more than Easterners, so they promote activities that elicit high-arousal emotions.," Lim noted. "Even children of the West learn through storybooks that high-arousal emotions are ideal, and the opposite is true for children of the East."

Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are expected to be up 0.6% in 2019 over 2018, according to projections from the Global Carbon Project. In the past decade, humans have put more than 350 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes, according to calculations provided by the World Resources Institute.

Meanwhile, scientists are becoming even more concerned about tipping points in the climate system that could lead to rapid rise in sea levels, the deterioration of the Amazon and so on. One particularly frightening commentary last month in the journal Nature, by several notable climate scientists, says the odds we can avoid tipping points in the climate system "could already have shrunk towards zero." In non-science-speak: We're there now.

This was the decade when some people finally started to see the climate crisis as personal. Climate attribution science, which looks for human fingerprints on extreme weather events, made its way into the popular imagination. We're starting to realize there are no truly "natural" disasters anymore. We've warmed the climate, and we're already making storms riskier.

The news media is picking that up, using terms such as "climate emergency" and "climate crisis" instead of the blander "climate change." Increasingly, lots of people are making these critical connections, which should motivate the political, social and economic revolution necessary to fix things.

Only 52% of American adults say they are "very" or "extremely" sure global warming is happening, according to a report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which is based on a 1,303 person survey conducted in November 2019. Yale's been asking that question for a while now. Go back a decade, to 2009, and the rate is about the same: 51%.

The bright spot -- and it truly is a bright one -- is that young people are waking up. They are shouting, loudly and with purpose. Witness Greta Thunberg, the dynamic teenager who started a one-girl protest outside the Swedish Parliament last year, demanding that adults take seriously this emergency, which threatens young people and future generations disproportionately.

"My job at the White House right now is to help find whatever the American people need and buy it from wherever we can, and if we need to send a plane to go get it, we'll get that done using the full force of government and private enterprise," Mr. Navarro said

"If China or any other country has some masks, gloves or other products we need for the American people, we welcome that with open arms," he said.

"Hopefully we can match up external suppliers, external sources with states and entities in the US that actually need them," they said.

New York alone had over 25,000 known infections on Tuesday and 210 dead. Its governor, Andrew Cuomo, angrily told reporters that he needed "30,000" ventilators.

Others have found that paranormal and religious believers are more prone to pareidolia than skeptics and nonbelievers. Although believers and nonbelievers had equivalent sensitivity to faces, the paranormal and religious believers had lower thresholds for reporting that a face was present than nonbelievers did, possibly due to being more open to the suggestion that the images might contain faces.

Pareidolia can be exacerbated in cases of fatigue and in some neurological diseases, such as Lewy body dementia

It may not be a strictly human phenomenon either. Research has shown that rhesus monkeys see illusory facial features on inanimate objects such as toasters or sliced vegetables.

Pareidolia extends beyond human likenesses: In 2007, a "monkey tree" in Singapore attracted thousands of visitors, who swore that a bizarrely shaped callus growing on a tree was a manifestation of either the Chinese deity Sun Wukong (also known as the Monkey King) or the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

the brain makes much ado about nothing.

If you could better connect your current self with your future self, you would muster up the motivation you need to accomplish the task now, and not then.

Half of the participants were to consider that their “children” would begin college in 18 years, the other half in 6,570 days. Of course, this was the exact same amount of time. But did the way they counted time influence when would they start saving for that education? Interestingly, the “parents” who looked at matters from a “days” perspective planned to start saving four times sooner than parents planning from a “years” perspective. This experiment illustrated a valuable lesson: Procrastination can be overcome by finding a way to connect to your future self, now.

If you’re tempted to procrastinate, find a way to visualize your future self. Focus on the pain that results from putting things off, contrasted with the relief of having completed your task.

America’s word is worth less today than at any time since 1945. Trust is not an easily recoverable commodity. Solemn accords entered into by the United States, like the Iran nuclear deal, are ripped up — and replaced by empty threats. Friends like the Kurds who have shed blood to inflict great harm on the Islamic State are betrayed. Day after day a president for whom facts don’t matter dismantles the idea of truth.

A recent report from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian quoted the Saudi ambassador to Britain calling Trump a “tweet monster” and saying the abrupt American troop withdrawal from northern Syria “does not give one incredible confidence.”

Sure, but this Middle East demeans the sacrifice of the thousands of Americans who died for something better, and makes a nonsense of the nearly trillion American dollars spent to that end. Trump is not cutting losses; he’s perpetuating them. Iran could not have asked for American chaos more conducive to its interests. Nor could Putin, al-Assad and Erdogan.

Trump folded to Turkey’s Kurd Derangement Syndrome. Even the plankton known as the Republican Party were so appalled that some lawmakers developed sufficient backbone to protest.

“Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” Trump has said. Damn right.

When scientists ask: “How old do you feel, most of the time?” the answer tends to reflect the state of people’s physical and mental health. “This simple question seems to be particularly powerful,” says Antonio Terracciano, a professor of geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee.Sign up for the Well NewsletterGet the best of Well, with the latest on health, fitness and nutrition.Sign Up* Captcha is incomplete. Please try again.Thank you for subscribingYou can also view our other newsletters or visit your account to opt out or manage email preferences.An error has occurred. Please try again later.You are already subscribed to this email.View all New York Times newsletters.

Scientists are finding that people who feel younger than their chronological age are typically healthier and more psychologically resilient than those who feel older. They perform better on memory tasks and are at lower risk of cognitive decline.

If you’re over 40, chances are you feel younger than your driver’s license suggests. Some 80 percent of people do, according to Dr. Stephan. A small fraction of people — fewer than 10 percent — feel older.

At age 50, people may feel about five years, or 10 percent, younger, but by the time they’re 70 they may feel 15 percent or even 20 percent younger.

In a 2018 German study, investigators asked people in their 60s, 70s and early 80s how old they felt, then measured their walking speed in two settings. Participants walked 20 feet in the laboratory while being observed and timed. They also wore belts containing an accelerometer while out and about in their daily lives. Those who reported feeling younger tended to walk faster during the lab assessment. But feeling younger had no impact on their walking speed in real life.

Indeed, in cultures where elders are respected for their wisdom and experience, people don’t even understand the concept of subjective age, he said. When a graduate student of Dr. Weiss’s did research in Jordan, the people he spoke with “would say, ‘I’m 80. I don’t know what you mean by ‘How old do I feel?’”

As we age, we tend to become generally happier and more satisfied, said Dr. Tracey Gendron, a gerontologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who questions the whole notion of subjective age research

“Older age is a time that we can actually look forward to. People really just enjoy themselves more and are at peace with who they are. I would love for everyone to say their age at every year and celebrate it.”

The first is that elder sisters, in being more willing to talk to their younger siblings than brothers, may compensate for their parents being less available. Another hypothesis would be that elder sisters compete less than elder brothers for parental attention.

Though this study cannot separate these two hypotheses, it does show that early language development in a younger sibling tends to be slower when the elder is a boy.

The experiments showed that participants, after making an initial call based on the first movie, were more likely to use subsequent evidence that was consistent with their initial choice to make a final judgment the second time around.

"Contrary to a common phrase, first impression does not have to be the last impression," Talluri says. "Such impressions, or choices, lead us to evaluate information in their favor. By acknowledging the fact that we selectively prioritize information agreeing with our previous choices, we could attempt to actively suppress this bias, at least in cases of critical significance, like evaluating job candidates or making policies that impact a large section of the society."

'Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size'.

'Moving forward access to this kind of data will be key to understanding the many roles that social media plays in the lives of young people', Professor Przybylski added.

This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.

“Philosophers have been debating free will for millennia, and they have been making progress. But neuroscientists barged in like an elephant into a china shop and claimed to have solved it in one fell swoop,”

For years, USPS has struggled to stay afloat with the emergence of technology threatening their bottom line, but coronavirus has further strained their financial situation as mail volume has declined. The Postal Service has warned that it could be insolvent by June, the House Oversight Committee said this week.

"The Postal Service remains concerned that this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic," said USPS spokesman David Partenheimer. "Under a worst case scenario, such downturn could result in the Postal Service having insufficient liquidity to continue operations."

The problem with this story is that it is false in all respects.

nobody saw video of it. No photographs depicted it. To this day, no autopsy report has been released. No details from any official source have been provided.

“with a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”

does not say whether it came from the police or protesters.

With the impeachment trial now over, the articles are now rewritten to reflect that the original story was false. But there was nothing done by The New York Times to explain an error of this magnitude, let alone to try to undo the damage it did by misleading the public. They did not expressly retract or even “correct” the story.

far-right forums

and the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence to the contrary

So it matters a great deal legally, but also politically, if the U.S. really did suffer an armed insurrection and continues to face one. Though there is no controlling, clear definition, that term usually connotes not a three-hour riot but an ongoing, serious plot by a faction of the citizenry to overthrow or otherwise subvert the government.

people rightly conclude the propaganda is deliberate and trust in journalism erodes further.

One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.

Smaller publishers, and those with communities with low resources themselves, are much more dependent. A withdrawal from Facebook could be a galvanising moment for Australia, and beyond.

Mr. Pesca, who is white, said he felt there were contexts in which the slur could be used, according to screen shots of the Slack conversation that were shared with The Times

In November 2019, Slate introduced a policy that required podcast hosts and producers to discuss the use of racist terms in a pending episode, in or out of quoted material, before recording it.

Mr. Pesca explored the argument over the use of the slur in a 2019 podcast about a Black security guard who was fired for using it. In one recording of the episode, Mr. Pesca said, he used the term while quoting the man, but asked his producer to make a version without the term. After consulting with his producers and his supervisor, who objected to his quotation of the slur, they decided to go with the version without it, he said

“The version of the story with the offensive word never aired, and this is how I think the editorial process should go,” Mr. Pesca said in the interview.

No action was taken against him after a human resources investigation into his quotation of the slur, Mr. Pesca said

He said he had apologized to the producers involved.

Mr. Pesca said Mr. Check, the chief executive, and Jared Hohlt, Slate’s editor in chief, had brought up the previous instance of his quoting the slur when they spoke with him after the Slack conversation

Mr. Pesca, whose interview style at times seemed to embody Slate's contrarian brand, said he was told on Friday that he would be suspended for a week without pay. On Monday he was informed that the suspension was indefinite,

Mr. Pesca, who has worked at Slate for seven years, said he was “heartsick” over hurting his colleagues but added, “I hate the idea of things that are beyond debate and things that cannot be said.”

“I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading,”

Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate who hosted the third season of the podcast “Slow Burn,” disagreed. “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,”