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Couples’ Quality of Life Linked Even When One Partner Dies
When one spouse passes away, his or her characteristics continue to be linked with the surviving spouse’s well-being, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings also indicate that this link between the deceased spouse and surviving spouse is as strong as that between partners who are both living. “The people we care about continue to influence our quality of life even when we they are gone,” says lead researcher Kyle Bourassa, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
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A New Way to Beat the Market: Invest in Workplace Wellness
In 1979, Jim Burke the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson started a state-of-the-art workplace wellness program in order to improve employee wellbeing and cut healthcare costs. The program’s goal was to make Johnson & Johnson employees “the healthiest in the world.” The expectation was that improving employees’ health and well-being would ultimately have a positive impact on the company's bottom line. It appears that Burke was onto something: A new study finds that companies that prioritize employee health also had significantly higher stock returns.
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Can You Spot a Liar?
The Atlantic: In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just got sucked in,” he told The New York Times later. As it turns out, it’s much easier to fall for these types of cons than many people think.
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How Our Brains Respond to Race
The Wall Street Journal: When Barack Obama was elected president, there was talk of how America was becoming a post-racial society. Yet the news suggests abundantly that this is not the case. Why is progress on this issue so difficult? Recent research suggests that part of it has do with learning that occurs remarkably early in life. Scientists have used neuroimaging to study the responses of our brains to faces of different races and have uncovered a disquieting result called the “other-race effect,” or ORE. ...
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Basic Ratio Capacity May Serve as Building Block for Math Knowledge
Understanding fractions is a critical mathematical ability, and yet it’s one that continues to confound a lot of people well into adulthood. New research finds evidence for an innate ratio processing ability that may play a role in determining our aptitude for understanding fractions and other formal mathematical concepts. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Can mass trauma actually promote psychological adjustment?
The Hill: The terror attacks in San Bernardino and Paris have ratcheted upward—once again—our collective anxieties. And for the survivors of these tragedies, they have raised the specter of collateral psychological damage, such as posttraumatic stress disorder. Although the risks to survivors are indeed real, the psychological impact of these tragedies is more complicated than we realize. Most survivors of traumatic events will suffer no enduring psychological harm. More startlingly, some may actually experience direct psychological benefits from it. How do we know this?