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Happiness, Comparatively Speaking: How We Think About Life’s Rewards
You win some, you lose some. You get the perfect job—the one your heart is set on. Or you get snubbed. You win the girl (or guy) of your dreams—or you strike out. Such are life’s ups and downs. But what if you win and lose at the same time? You land a good job—but not a great one. Or you do get a plum offer—but not the one you wanted? A study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says you’ll find a way to be happy anyway. “Good outcomes have relative value and absolute value, and that affects our happiness,” explains Carnegie Mellon assistant professor Karim S.
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Greased Palm Psychology: Collectivism and Bribery
Cultures that downplay self-determination and stress shared responsibility may serve as a catalyst for passing money under the table, a study suggests.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Hierarchical Encoding in Visual Working Memory: Ensemble Statistics Bias Memory for Individual Items Timothy F. Brady and George A. Alvarez Current models of visual working memory assume that people encode memories of objects individually. Yet, new research has shown that items surrounding an object can influence a person’s recollection of it. When observers were asked to recall the size of a single circle after viewing an image with multiple circles, they tended to report a larger size if the other circles were large and a smaller size if the surrounding circles were small.
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Watch Your Language! Of Course–But How Do We Actually Do That?
Nothing seems more automatic than speech. We produce an estimated 150 words a minute, and make a mistake only about once every 1,000 words. We stay on track, saying what we intend to, even when other words distract us—from the radio, say, or a road sign we pass while driving. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows for the first time why we so rarely speak those irrelevant words: We have a “verbal self-monitor” between the mental production of speech and the actual uttering of words that catches any irrelevant items coming from outside of the speaker.
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New Study Highlights Gender Differences in Depression
Depression erodes intimate relationships. A depressed person can be withdrawn, needy, or hostile—and give little back. But there’s another way that depression isolates partners from each other. It chips away at the ability to perceive the others’ thoughts and feelings. It impairs what psychologists call “empathic accuracy” —and that can exacerbate alienation, depression, and the cycle by which they feed each other. Three Israeli researchers—Reuma Gadassi and Nilly Mor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Eshkol Rafaeli at Bar-Ilan University—wanted to understand better these dynamics in relationships, particularly the role of gender.
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What Choice Do We Have?
Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. "When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?" says Krishna Savani of Columbia University.
