-
Does Your Partner Hold Grudges? Blame It on His Mother
TIME: All couples fight, and how you recover from a tiff has a lot to do with the health of your relationship. It also has a lot to do with Mom: those partners who are able to bounce back quickest are likely to have had more secure relationships with their caregivers as infants, according to new research in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers at the University of Minnesota zeroed in on a group of people they've been tracking since before they were born in the mid-1970s.
-
People Would Rather Let Bad Things Happen Than Cause Them, Especially if Someone Is Watching
People are more comfortable committing sins of omission than commission—letting bad things happen rather than actively causing something bad. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that this is because they know other people will think worse of them if they do something bad than if they let something bad happen. “Omissions and commissions come up relatively frequently in everyday life, and we sometimes puzzle over them,” says moral psychologist Peter DeScioli of Brandeis University, who conducted the study with John Christner and Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania.
-
Therapist-free therapy
The Economist: THE treatment, in the early 1880s, of an Austrian hysteric called Anna O is generally regarded as the beginning of talking-it-through as a form of therapy. But psychoanalysis, as this version of talk therapy became known, is an expensive procedure. Anna’s doctor, Josef Breuer, is estimated to have spent over 1,000 hours with her. Since then, things have improved. A typical course of a modern talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, consists of 12-16 hour-long sessions and is a reasonably efficient way of treating conditions like depression and anxiety (hysteria is no longer a recognised diagnosis). Medication, too, can bring rapid change.
-
Secret to a happy marriage? Delusion.
The Boston Globe: We’ve all seen those mismatched couples — where the husband is 10 times better looking than the wife. Or where she’s an absolute sweetheart, and he’s a total jerk. What does she see in him?, we think. What does he see in her? If the couple is happily married, it could be that the better half of the couple has an idealistic vision of the lesser half. New research published in Psychological Science oddly enough finds that people who were, well, a bit delusional about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than those see-it-like-it-is realists. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
-
Born-Again Feminism
Newsweek: Among life’s surreal experiences, few can compare with finding myself seated on a baroque bench, one of dozens lining the perimeter of an ornate drawing room in the palace of Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak in Abu Dhabi, chatting it up with three Ph.D.-endowed women sheathed in black abayas, sipping sweet hot tea and eating candies. “I think you Americans do not enjoy being women as much as we do,” said one, peering into my face with an earnestness one usually associates with grim news delivered to next of kin. Say what? Read the whole story: Newsweek
-
Science Learning Easier When Students Put Down Textbooks
The Epoch Times: Put down those science textbooks and work at recalling information from memory. That’s the shorthand take-away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. Read the whole story: The Epoch Times
