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Swearing Is Scientifically Proven to Help You *%$!ing Deal
TIME: It has been a long damn year. But you know what studies show may help ease your pain? Swearing. In this era of endless squabbling over what is or is not offensive, a corner of academia has been pursuing the language that we pretty much all agree is not polite — studying the syntax of sentences like “F-ck you” on the same college campuses where students are being safeguarded by trigger warnings. Let some social scientists tell it and the way profanity affects us reveals elements of our nature as evolutionary beings, I sh-t you not. “If you don’t study this kind of language,” says psychologist Timothy Jay, “you’re missing an important part of being a human.” Read the whole story: TIME
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New Research in Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Role of Hedonic Behavior in Reducing Perceived Risk: Evidence From Postearthquake Mobile-App Data Jayson S. Jia, Jianmin Jia, Christopher K. Hsee, and Baba Shiv How does experiencing a disaster affect people's daily behaviors? To study this, the researchers followed participants who had experienced the Ya'an earthquake, which occurred on April 20, 2013, in southwest China. The researchers used phone data to examine telecommunications and app usage in the timeframe before and after the earthquake. One week after the earthquake, a subset of participants reported how threatened they currently felt by the earthquake.
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How Your Hometown Influences Your Driving Risk
Whether drivers are accustomed to country roads or city streets, they face an increased risk of fatal accidents when switching from one road type to the other.
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Can an app change human behavior? This behavioral economics professor is banking on it
Mashable: Whether personal or professional, change is hard. And the cumulative data is not on our side. Take something obviously detrimental, like smoking. A mere 4% to 7% of people successfully quit without the aid of medication or outside help. Even experiencing a traumatic event — like the death of a loved one or being diagnosed with cancer — only leads to a 20% success rate. Not to be a killjoy, but as the Washington Post found, roughly 25% of New Year resolutions fall apart within the first two weeks. And even when it comes to our work — where money’s on the line — “70% of [management-led] transformation efforts fail.” So why is change such a struggle?
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To Feel More Productive, Take a Break to Do Something Selfless
New York Magazine: The problem with time is that it typically does exactly the opposite of what you want it to do. There are a handful of exceptions — vacation days, for example, tend to pass more slowly than those spent on your normal routine — but for the most part, the clock tends to speed up precisely when you want it to slow down. It doesn’t matter how many hours are in a day if they all seem to fly by before you can get anything done.
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Feeling Less Than Grateful? Some People Are Just Wired That Way
NPR: It's a time of year when we're often urged to be grateful; for friends, for family, for presents under the tree. But not everyone experiences gratitude as a positive force in their life. People who score higher on measures of autonomy experience less overall gratitude and value it less, according to experiments conducted by Anthony Ahrens, an associate professor of psychology at American University, and his colleagues. Autonomous folks who really value independence might feel that gratitude undermines that independence, says Ahrens.
