-
You’re Joking: Detecting Sarcasm in Emails Isn’t Easy
“Well, that meeting was a really fantastic use of my time.” You may want to think twice before hitting send on that email with a sarcastic joke – regardless of whether your boss or your work buddies are on the receiving end. New research investigating how we determine the emotional content of text is showing that people have a very hard time catching on to sarcasm in emails and texts. This means that written communications aren’t the best medium for making a well-meaning joke; people often interpret a friendly riff as being overtly negative, or they don’t catch the sarcastic tone at all and assume a caustic jibe is actually praise.
-
Exploring How Women’s Reproductive Health and Mental Health Intersect
Throughout their lives, women’s risk for various mental health problems fluctuates along with reproductive changes, yet research in psychological science seldom investigates the intersection of reproductive health and mental health. A special series in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, addresses these intersecting issues directly, presenting a collection of research articles that takes a multilevel, integrative view of women’s mental health in the context of reproductive development.
-
Yours or Mine? How We Handle Objects Depends on Who Owns Them
From scissors and staplers to car keys and cell phones, we pass objects to other people every day. We often try to pass the objects so that the handle or other useful feature is facing the appropriate direction for the person receiving the item, but new research shows that we’re less accommodating when it comes to handing over our own belongings. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “The associations or attachments that we have with an object leak into our movements in unintended ways when we interact with them,” says psychology researcher and study author Merryn Constable of the University of Toronto.
-
The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence
The New York Times: ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are. It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason.
-
Are Some Kids More Likely to Become Narcissists?
Scientific American Mind: Some individuals are indeed more susceptible to developing a narcissistic personality. Narcissism is characterized by self-centeredness (“It's all about me!”), grandiosity (“I'm better than you!”) and vanity (“Look at me!”). It involves multifaceted psychological traits, motives and needs that influence how a person thinks, feels and behaves. Given this complexity, developing this form of extreme self-love is not as simple as inheriting a particular gene or experiencing a specific event. Instead becoming a narcissist likely involves an intricate mix of genetic and psychological or environmental factors. Read the whole story: Scientific American Mind
-
A psychologist says a small tweak to the questions you ask your boss can make them think better of you
Business Insider: You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how to get your boss to like you. Maybe you'll stay at the office all night so you can submit a project early tomorrow, or maybe you'll bone up on the history of their favorite sports team so you have something to casually chat about. Alternatively, you could stay sane and change a single word in your interactions with them. Instead of asking for their opinion on your ideas, ask for their advice.
