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Don’t Hit Send: Angry Emails Just Make You Angrier
The Wall Street Journal: One evening, after a frustrating chat with his boss, Jason Bauman sent an email to a co-worker. He wrote that his supervisor never praised him, only criticized, and said he found this frustrating. He went on for several hundred words. Mr. Bauman, the manager of a cellphone store at the time, complained that his boss was bad at his job. He said the man was jealous because he made less money than his employees. He insisted his boss had no right to give him what he called “a hard time.” “It felt really good writing the email and hitting send,” says Mr. Bauman, a 30-year-old who lives in Souderton, Pa. Not for long. Mr.
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How a coughing ape is changing our ideas about animals, humans and language
The Washington Post: The 280-pound gorilla fits awkwardly in the lab at the Gorilla Foundation, her domed head brushing up against the cabinets that hang just below the ceiling. She looks into the camera and touches a lone, large finger to her lips, waiting. “How about when you’re, um, coughing?” researcher Penny Patterson asks from off screen. Koko the gorilla raises a hand to her mouth, waits a beat, then wheezes into it, sounding every bit like an aging smoker. “That was good!” Patterson cheers, while Koko holds a massive hand out to her, as though accepting the praise. ...
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When You’re in Charge, Your Whisper May Feel Like a Shout
The New York Times: “Gail, I need to talk with you about something this afternoon. Can you come by my office at 3 p.m.?” I didn’t think much about my seemingly innocuous words, spoken to one of my department’s doctoral students one morning back when I was an assistant professor. Gail showed up right on time, walking into my office with great trepidation. I proceeded to go over some small changes in a research project we were planning. After I finished talking, Gail sternly said, “Never do that to me again!” “Do what?” I said with much confusion. ... At the time of these exchanges, I had started to study the psychological effects of power.
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Awe: the powerful emotion with strange and beautiful effects
The Guardian: The other day, I got fairly decisively lost while hiking in the French Pyrénées. Not seriously lost, since I had a functioning iPhone, and was never much more than an hour’s walk from a road where, in a crisis, I could doubtless have flagged down a grudging French motorist. (Is there any other kind?) But just lost enough to feel the first frisson of something like fear: enough to be reminded that mountain ranges are very large and solid things, whereas I am a tiny and fragile thing, and that it takes a vanishingly small amount of effort on the part of a mountain range to kill a human. ...
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Belief That Mental Illness Can Be Contagious Contributes To Isolation
NPR: Many illnesses are contagious. You'd do well to avoid your neighbor's sneeze, for example, and to wash your hands after tending to your sick child. But what about mental illness? The idea that anxiety, autism or major depression could be transmitted through contact may sound crazy — and it probably is. There's a lot we don't know about the origins of mental illness, but the mechanisms identified so far point in other directions. Nonetheless, we do know that people's emotions can be affected by the emotions of those around them — a phenomenon known as "emotional contagion" — and that specific symptoms of mental disorders, such as binge eating, can sometimes spread among peers.
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That’s a Wrap. What Did I Miss?
The New York Times: Like most parents, I imagine, I keep a running list of things I’ve done well and things I’ve flubbed. Help our children get lots of sleep? Check. Play fun, stimulating games at dinner? Score. Have peaceful, stress-free mornings when everyone goes into the day uplifted and on time? Hardly. Produce handsome scrapbooks with carefully captioned memories? Not a one. (We do have a few boxes labeled “keepsakes.”) In all this second-guessing, there’s one area where I give myself unqualified high marks: photography. Having grown up surrounded by cameras, I take lots of pictures. But there’s another area where I’m a complete failure: video.
