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Are We Attracted to the Things We Fear?
Conventional psychological wisdom says that we avoid the things we fear. That avoidance is, in fact, one of the primary indications that fear is present. But what about those cases in which our fears actually push us into the arms of their objects? What about the boyfriend who is so afraid his girlfriend will leave…
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Do Negative Emotions Sharpen Perception?
Lots of people carry in their heads the image of the tortured artist: the writer/painter/musician whose brilliant artistic achievements spring from a soil rich with personal failures, miseries, addictions, and/or mental illnesses. Writing guru Julia Cameron persuasively argues that creativity does not require depression. Or agony. That well-adjusted artists are, actually, quite successful and productive–maybe even more so than the…
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Washing Dishes
Some days in my life are so full it feels like I’ll never get everything done if I don’t use every spare second. If the cornbread muffins are going to take 12 minutes to cook, that’s 12 minutes I can spend grading papers. And if one of those papers is taking a long time to…
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The Tears of Men
From Pat Conroy’s Beach Music: American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no…
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Why We Read
A few weeks ago, I read a blog post by someone who was upset by research that suggested people don’t read in order to find information that could make their beliefs more accurate but primarily in order to confirm the beliefs they already have (a noted exception being the times we read work by authors we love to hate,…
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Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD 