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Altruists Make More Money and Have More Kids
Altruistic people tend to score higher on many measures of life satisfaction. Yes, that seems counterintuitive, and such scales can admittedly be subjective. So a research team decided to explore the relationship between selflessness and two outcomes we are evolutionarily programmed to desire: wealth and procreation. It reports generous people have more children than selfish ones. What's more, as a rule, they also earn more money. It further finds "people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes," an unsupported belief that can inspire bad behavior.
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The One Thing You Should NEVER Say in a Thank You Email After a Job Interview
The moments after a crucial job interview may feel like a sigh of relief or a pang of anxiety. But, no matter how you feel, there’s an important next step: writing a thank you note. Whether over email or by hand, a thank you note after a job interview is expected nowadays as a basic sign of appreciation. So how do you both stand out and effectively show your gratitude? Never — never — use your thank you note as an opportunity to ask for a favor. “It should stand on its own without asking for something. Just pure appreciation,” says Peter Bregman of Bregman Partners, a management consultancy company where he works with CEOs and business leaders.
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What Happens When A Country Bans Spanking?
In 1979, Sweden became the first country to ban the corporal punishment of children. Earlier this year, Nepal became the 54th country to do so. Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights.
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So Is Living Together Before Marriage Linked to Divorce or What?
Late last month, the Journal of Marriage and Family published a new study with a somewhat foreboding finding: Couples who lived together before marriage had a lower divorce rate in their first year of marriage, but had a higher divorce rate after five years. It supported earlier research linking premarital cohabitation to increased risk of divorce. But just two weeks later, the Council on Contemporary Families—a nonprofit group at the University of Texas at Austin—published a report that came to the exact opposite conclusion: Premarital cohabitation seemed to make couples less likely to divorce.
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What’s All This About Journaling?
It was my ex-husband who got me journaling again. Our marriage was falling apart, and, on the advice of his friend, he had started to do “morning pages,” a daily journaling practice from the seminal self-help book “The Artist’s Way.” Though I had kept a diary throughout my teen years and early 20s, somewhere along the way I’d fallen out of the habit. At 29, though, I was deeply unhappy and looking for answers wherever — anywhere — I could find them. It helped. Once the domain of teenage girls and the literati, journaling has become a hallmark of the so-called self-care movement, right up there with meditation.
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Cognitive Training Focused on Consequences May Promote Healthier Habits
Interventions to reduce unwanted behaviors often focus on retraining people’s mental associations, but showing people the consequences of the behaviors may be more effective.
