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Being empathetic is good, but it can hurt your health
The Washington Post: Your husband was just passed over for a promotion, and he’s depressed. Your friend’s breast cancer has returned. As a supportive spouse and friend, you feel their pain. Growing research suggests there’s a cost to all that caring. Empathy — the ability to tune into and share another person’s emotion from their perspective — plays a crucial role in bringing people together. It’s the joy you feel at a friend’s wedding or the pain you experience when you see someone suffering. It’s an essential ingredient for building intimacy in relationships, says Robin Stern, associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
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Does Happiness Really Make You Healthier? It Depends on Where You Live
New York Magazine: I am an Eeyore; I know this. I’m a glass-half-empty, worst-case-scenario, dwell-on-the-imperfections, existential-dread ruminating worrywart, and I envy the people I encounter who seem to effortlessly exude perkiness and fun. That’s not to say there’s no joy in my life; it just doesn’t come as naturally to me as it appears to for others. And yet despite fully meeting the textbook definition of “the opposite of an optimist,” I’ve never thought to label myself a pessimist. ... Now, new research seems to show that cultural perceptions of mental states may indeed mediate their physical effect.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Topological Relations Between Objects Are Categorically Coded Andrew Lovett and Steven L. Franconeri How do people compare images? The authors hypothesized that people use categorical relations between objects rather than metric changes of objects when comparing images. The researchers examined three topographical categories (overlapping, touching, and containing) in four studies in which participants were shown pairs of filled or unfilled circles that were briefly masked before reappearing. Participants were instructed to indicate whether the circles had changed or stayed the same.
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Self-Driving Cars Face Psychological Speed Bumps
Industry and regulators seem ready to embrace autonomous cars, but consumers still need to be brought on board.
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Don’t Suspend Students. Empathize.
The New York Times: To his teachers at Ridgeway High School in Memphis, Jason Okonofua was a handful. During class, his mind drifted and he would lose the thread of the lesson. He slouched at his desk and dozed off. Today Jason Okonofua is a newly minted psychology professor at Berkeley whose research focuses on empathy. As a Ph.D. student, he examined how helping couples understand each other’s feelings enabled them to talk to, not at, each another. Then he began applying the idea to education: How can you help teachers understand the ways adolescents make sense of the world? Tackling the problem from the teachers’ instead of the students’ perspective was a novel approach.
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When the Mind Wanders
The Atlantic: In 2014, one in 16 Americans visited the ER for home injuries that resulted from, among other things, fumbling knives (the cause of at least 249,000 injuries), ladders (at least 105,000), and cookware (at least 22,000). One of the main causes of these accidents? A wandering mind, says Steve Casner, the author of Careful: A User’s Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds. By one estimate, he notes, people daydream through nearly half their waking hours. Psychologists have recently focused more intently on the tendency to think about something other than the task at hand.
