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Why I Gossip at Work (And You Should Too)
LinkedIn: Ask people to generate a list of social sins, and sooner or later, gossip is bound to come up. Sure, it pales in comparison to coveting thy neighbor, but the Bible does warn us that we should “not go about spreading slander.” And if your mother is like mine, she probably told you that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say it at all. But what if our moms were wrong? In a series of new studies, social scientists have introduced a form of gossip that actually makes people better off. Imagine that you’re given $10. You can pass as much of the money as you want to Joe. The amount that you give him will be tripled, and he can then share as much as he wants with you.
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Improving the Science and Practice of Youth Mental Health Care
John Weisz uses psychological science to help children and adolescents overcome emotional and behavioral problems—including depression, anxiety, and misconduct. Following his Deployment-Focused Model of intervention development and testing, Weisz uses randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses to identify interventions that will succeed in the community clinic and school settings where young people most often receive mental health care.
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How We Really Make Decisions
For centuries, philosophers, economists, and social scientists assumed that human beings are generally rational. Daniel Kahneman upended that assumption with findings that continue to reverberate through several scientific disciplines and have enormous implications for public policy. In his groundbreaking work with the late Amos Tversky, Kahneman, one of the most influential psychologists of our time, showed that when we face uncertain situations, we don’t examine the information in ways that are characterized as rational.
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Cracking the Speech Code
How exactly do we learn to speak? Patricia Kuhl has spent her career developing answers to that question. Kuhl is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and for her studies that show how young children learn. She is co-director, with her husband Andrew Meltzoff, of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Kuhl’s lab investigates how infant and adult brains process speech. She has also conducted research on language development in autism.
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The Happiness Formula
Ed Diener has focused his career on uncovering the essential ingredients to subjective well-being, a term that includes positive feelings and life satisfaction. Nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” Diener developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and other measures of psychological well-being. In one noteworthy study, conducted with Martin E.P. Seligman, he found that students with the highest levels of happiness and fewest signs of depression had strong ties to friends and family. Another important finding is that there are some universals in what predicts happiness around the globe, such as trust and respect, but there are also some culture-specific causes as well.
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Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience
The fourth Summer Institute in Cultural Neuroscience will be held July 14–15, 2014, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Application deadline is March 15, 2014. For more information visit culturalneuroscience.isr.umich.edu/home.htm.
