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Here's a short quiz concerning several popular findings from different subfields of psychology. True or False?
1. Brain training games strengthen cognitive skills in ways that generalize to everyday life tasks.
2. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, the class of anti-depressants that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil (among others), are more effective than older anti-depressants, and are significantly better than placebo for most people with mild or moderate depression
3. Standing in a "power pose" prior to a job interview, hands on your hips or interlocked behind your head, increases testosterone production as well as the odds of being selected for the job.
4. The reason most types of psychotherapy are helpful is because they share a set of common factors, such as empathy, not because of specific methods unique to each approach.
5. Girls and women perform better on math tests when they are told the test doesn't really measure anything about their true math ability. This is one variant of the stereotype threat effect.
6. If you are asked to resist eating a freshly baked chocolate cookie on a nearby plate for 15 minutes, your performance on a cognitive test is likely to diminish — a phenomenon called ego-depletion.
7. The Stanford Prison Study, in which participants were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners in a mock prison, showed definitively that specific contexts can lead people to act sadistically.
And now the answers:
Comment: Perhaps if the transhumanists weren't so identified with nihilistic materialism and the ideas posed by neo-Darwinism they would be more open to the idea that their minds/consciousness/souls perhaps do take on a new kind of life - after death - and so they would have less to fear about such an eventuality.
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