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Finding It Tough to Motivate Yourself? These Strategies Can Help.
Many people think that motivation is the key to changing habits — and that you either have it or you don’t. But motivation is not a psychological trait or personality characteristic. It’s something you can cultivate. “It’s about setting yourself up for success,” said behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.” “Create an environment that’s conducive to making the choices you want to make.
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Love Languages Are Fake, Scientists Say
The concept of "love languages," first theorized by a Baptist preacher in the early 90s, has had a vice grip on pop psychology for decades — but now, some scientists are calling bull. In a new paper published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers from the University of Toronto Mississauga took on the public's "obsession with love languages." They found, per their close reading of ten relationship science studies, that there just isn't a lot of "strong empirical support" for the theory. ...
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Why February Is the Best Month for Resolutions
It might be the dreariest month of the year, but there are at least two things going for February: It’s short, and it’s not January. February brings a reprieve from the pressures that come with the start of the year. The steady stream of gym advertisements eases up. Dry January ends, and bars get more of their customers back. For those of us already thinking about abandoning our New Year’s resolutions, the arrival of February may seem like tacit permission to give up. If you haven’t made as much progress on your resolutions as you might like, psychologists stress that you shouldn’t be hard on yourself.
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Robert Rosenthal, Who Linked Subtle Cues to Behavior, Dies at 90
Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, Calif. He was 90. His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aneurysm. Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect — or, more technically, “interpersonal expectancy.” ...
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‘Gender Inequities Are Important’: Why Couples Fall out of Love
The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women,” observed the late, great Nora Ephron. “It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.” Relationship wisdom is full of such emphatic generalisations but, according to that eternally reliable media source “a recent study”, women do appear to fall in and out of love more extremely than men. A behavioural economist, Saurabh Bhargava of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has published a new study in Psychological Science, the leading journal in the field, which has a number of striking findings. The first is that women reported having feelings of love almost twice as frequently as men.
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The ‘Love Languages’ Are Popular. Are They Real?
If you’ve ever tried to improve communication in a relationship, you may have come across the concept of the five “love languages” — different ways of showing and receiving affection that have helped couples understand each other for decades. The theory comes from a Baptist pastor turned relationship counselor named Gary Chapman, whose 1992 book “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts” has been on and off the bestseller list for years. Now, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto and York University have set out to investigate the scientific underpinnings of the love languages — or lack thereof.
