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How to Find Joy in Your Everyday Life, According to Psychologists
The increasingly materialistic society we live in has led many of us to believe that happiness is something to be chased, to obtain. The ultimate end goal that leads to everlasting bliss and contentment. Paradoxically, research shows that the more people chase materialistic pleasures as a means to seek happiness, the more depressed, anxious and less satisfied with life they are. "We get a lot wrong about what will make us happy," says Dr. Samantha Boardman, New York-based positive psychiatrist and author of Everyday Vitality: Turning Stress Into Strength.
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Can Body Shaming Be Outlawed?
In 1961 at the age of 37, Jean Nidetch, who struggled with her weight for most of her life, signed up for a 10-week program offered by the New York City Board of Health called the “Prudent Diet.” Ms. Nidetch lost 20 pounds, but she grew disillusioned — to keep going, she would need the kind of motivation that she believed could only come from community.
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Inside the 3D-Printed Box in Texas Where Humans Will Prepare for Mars
Red sand shifts under the boots of the crew members. In the distance, it appears that a rocky mountain range is rising out of the Martian horizon. A thin layer of red dust coats the solar panels and equipment necessary for the year-long mission. This landscape isn’t actually 145m miles away. We are in a corner of the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a large white warehouse right next to the disc golf course and on the tram route for tourists and school groups. But starting this June, four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked inside, pretending to live on Mars.
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Want to Avoid a Heated Argument? This Trick Could Help
Debate a friend about vaccines, politics, or even who’ll win the Super Bowl this year, and it rarely ends well. Each of you is so entrenched in your positions—and so sure of your convictions—that the most likely outcome is an argument. But what if both of you reflected on your values before you started bickering—how much you treasure loyalty or equality, for example? You’d boost your “intellectual humility,” your openness to being wrong, according to a new study. And that, in turn, might lead to a more civil conversation—and possibly even an agreement.
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Personality Can Change From One Hour to the Next
Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterizing typical patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change. But the assumption that you can routinely measure these traits using questionnaires that identify typical behavior has come into question in the past two decades. It is not only that behavioral changes happen often but that they occur from day to day and hour to hour. Someone could be open and agreeable at noon but negative and rigid at two o’clock.
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Pessimism Is the One Thing Americans Can Agree On
Are Americans cockeyed optimists or incorrigible pessimists? Do they think that American society has improved or gotten worse in various ways—and how accurate are their views? You might imagine that the answer would be nuanced, that it would depend on factors like people’s politics or news-consuming habits. But the answer isn’t nuanced at all, according to a new study. In research published earlier this year in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Gregory Mitchell at the University of Virginia and Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania looked at these questions empirically.
