Virtual reality can help make people more compassionate compared to other media

A Stanford-developed virtual reality experience, called “Becoming Homeless,” is helping expand research on how this new immersive technology affects people’s level of empathy. According to new Stanford research, people who saw in virtual reality, also known as VR, what it would be like to lose their jobs and homes developed longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored […]

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‘Mindful people’ feel less pain; MRI imaging pinpoints supporting brain activity

Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers—mindfulness. “Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment,” said the study’s lead author, Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at […]

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Happy elderly people live longer, say researchers

Happy older people live longer, according to researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. In a study published today in Age and Ageing, the scientific journal of the British Geriatrics Society, the authors found that an increase in happiness is directly proportional with a reduction in mortality. The study utilised data for 4,478 participants of a nationally representative survey to […]

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‘Prevalence induced concept change’ causes people to re-define problems as they are reduced, study says

Although it’s far from perfect by virtually any measure—whether poverty rates, violence, access to education, racism and prejudice or any number of others—the world continues to improve. Why, then, do polls consistently show that people believe otherwise? The answer, Daniel Gilbert says, may lie in a phenomenon called “prevalence induced concept change.” As demonstrated in a series of new studies, […]

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