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The Aging Advantage
Pacific Standard: At the San Francisco offices of the global design firm IDEO, overlooking the blue expanse of San Francisco Bay, 150 people spend each workday bettering how we live by re-thinking everyday tangibles like IKEA kitchens, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, and, years ago, Crest toothpaste tubes. More recently, though, IDEO has started to think more widely about how we might engineer large cultural shifts in areas that aren’t traditionally thought of as “designable”—how we approach topics like religion, aging, and even death.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Enhanced Default Approach Bias Following Amygdala Lesions in Humans Laura A. Harrison, Rene Hurlemann, and Ralph Adolphs Monkeys that have amygdala lesions -- a part of the brain involved in memory, emotion, and learning -- show a tendency to approach stimuli that are normally considered threatening. The researchers examined whether amygdala lesions produce a general default bias to evaluate stimuli positively or a specific positivity bias -- in this case, a face-approach bias.
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Telecommuting Works Best in Moderation, Science Shows
Organizations are increasingly offering employees a variety of work-from-home options despite sometimes conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of telecommuting. A comprehensive new report reveals that telecommuting can boost employee job satisfaction and productivity, but only when it’s carefully implemented with specific individual and organizational factors in mind. A key factor in determining the success of a telework plan, for example, is the proportion of time that an employee works remotely versus in the office.
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Self-Control Competes with Memory
Research findings suggest that memory encoding and self-control share and vie for common cognitive resources: inhibiting our response to a stimulus temporarily tips resources away from encoding new memories.
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After Trauma, New Strength as Well as New Scars
The Wall Street Journal: Who is happier, the winner of a lottery jackpot or someone confined to a wheelchair after an accident? The answer seems obvious—the lottery winner. But it isn’t that simple. For her 2013 doctoral thesis at Harvard, a young psychologist named H’Sien Hayward surveyed 50 individuals who had been paralyzed in accidents decades earlier, 50 lottery winners who had received an average prize of $6 million about a decade earlier, and a control group of 50 people who hadn’t experienced a major calamity or windfall.
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Frühchen sind später häufig arbeitslos (Preterm babies linked with less wealth)
The world: Are children born prematurely, they are later in life less economically successful. At least that is the result of a long-term study of the British University of Warwick near Coventry with more than 15,000 volunteers. The local group of researchers investigated the level of education, profession and the standard of living of 8573 people aged 42 years, who were born in 1958, and by 6698 people of the vintage 1970. These included both those who arrived early to the world as well as those that were not born prematurely.
