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The Yale Happiness Class, Distilled
The most popular class in the history of Yale University was inspired by a paradox: Even when people, conventionally speaking, succeed—get into a top college, make lots of money, or accumulate prestige and accolades—they are often left feeling unsatisfied. It’s a problem that may be particularly acute at a place like Yale, but the lessons of the class, called “Psychology and the Good Life,” are widely applicable—they address fundamental features of the human mind that make it difficult to appreciate things that seem like they’d be great.
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To Appear More Intimidating, Just Tilt Your Head Down, Study Suggests
Facial expression can convey a staggering amount of information—not just what kind of mood a person is in or real-time emotional reactions, but also more complex concepts like dominance and subservience. But a new study out in the journal Psychological Science shows that there’s a way to communicate dominance that doesn’t involve moving the facial muscles at all: just tilt your head downward slightly and maintain eye contact. In one experiment, participants in the University of British Columbia study rated avatars who were tilted upward 10 degrees, tilted downward 10 degrees, or level (neutral).
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A solution to psychology’s reproducibility problem just failed its first test
Behavior change is difficult—just ask any psychologist. A new study shows behavior change among psychologists is no different. Efforts to improve the robustness of research by asking psychologists to state their methods and goals ahead of time, a process called preregistration, have stumbled at the first hurdle. “Preregistration is not as easy as it may seem,” says Aline Claesen, a psychologist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. She and her colleagues examined 27 preregistration plans filed by psychologists from February 2015, when the journal Psychological Science started to offer badges for preregistered studies, to November 2017.
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Examining why false confessions occur in the U.S. criminal justice system
If you were under interrogation, would you confess to a crime you didn’t commit? It’s more common than you might think. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 27 percent of people in the registry who were accused of homicide gave false confessions, and 81 percent of people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities did the same when they were accused of homicide. But why? Scientists are working to understand more about the psychology of false confessions. In “The confession,” an article in the journal Science, journalist Douglas Starr focuses on one of them.
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How to, Maybe, Be Less Indecisive (or Not)
Should you order tacos or tikka masala? Stay at the hotel with the free breakfast or the one with all the succulents? Melt into the couch or drag yourself to happy hour? If you’re like me, even the simplest decisions can make your pulse race. And when it comes to big, life-altering choices, the need to get it right (because life is short!), combined with ever-looming F.O.B.O. (fear of better options), can cause a state of near paralysis. While this abundance of choice is a result of incredible privilege — not everyone has the freedom to select where they work or live, or how to spend their time or money — it can still be overwhelming.
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Pets, Pests And Food: Our Complex, Contradictory Attitudes Toward Animals
When psychologist Hal Herzog's son Adam was young, he had a pet mouse named Willie. One day, Willie died. "When he died, we thought it would be a good lesson for the kids in terms of understanding death to have a funeral for him. After all, you know, he was a pet." But a couple of days later, Hal's wife found some mouse droppings in the kitchen and asked him to do something about it. "She asked me to kill the mouse, and I did," Hal recalls. "I went out, and I bought a mousetrap. I put a little dab of peanut butter on it and put it [in] the kitchen.
