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Misery may really love company, study suggests
MSNBC: Does misery really love company? An intriguing new study suggests that may be the case. Researchers who study how people's sense of well-being varies from place to place decided to compare their findings with suicide rates. The surprising result: The happiest places sometimes also have the highest suicide rates. "Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life," suggested Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England. Or, put another way by co-author Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., those surrounded by unhappy people may not feel so bad for themselves. Read the whole story: MSNBC
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The Yin and Yang of Emotional Intelligence
It’s hard to believe it, but Princess Diana and Charles Manson have something in common: they’re both emotionally intelligent. They are good at identifying and regulating their own and others’ emotions. Although people often associate having emotional intelligence with having a good moral character, a study published in Psychological Science found that emotional intelligence can be used for good or for evil. In the first experiment, volunteers were measured on their moral identity and took part of a game that directly assessed their moral kindness behaviors.
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What Makes a Face Appealing to the Opposite Sex?
Bloomberg: While it may be true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a new computer model helps reveal what's behind peoples' ideas of facial attractiveness. Many studies have concluded that people are drawn to "average" faces and those who fit the conventional notion of attractiveness for a person's gender -- "masculinity" in men and "femininity" in women. But psychologists Christopher P. Said of New York University and Alexander Todorov of Princeton University believe attractiveness is more complex than that, so they created a computer model to identify and measure those complexities.
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I think it’s time we broke for lunch…
The Economist: AROUND the world, courthouses are adorned with a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales and a sword: Justice personified. Her sword stands for the power of the court, her scales for the competing claims of the petitioners. The blindfold (a 15th-century innovation) represents the principle that justice should be blind. The law should be applied without fear or favour, with only cold reason and the facts of the case determining what happens to the accused. Lawyers, though, have long suspected that such lofty ideals are not always achieved in practice, even in well run judicial systems free from political meddling.
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A Generation’s Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics
The New York Times: A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.” Where 19th-century Shakers had sung “ ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,” Mr. Cuomo offered his own lyrics: “I’m the meanest in the place, step up, I’ll mess with your face.” Instead of the Shaker message of love and humility, Mr. Cuomo sang over and over, “I’m the greatest man that ever lived.” The refrain got Dr.
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The flip side of dietary supplement use
The Washington Post: You know those people who take a million dietary supplements a day and act kind of healthier-than-thou about it? A study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, might take some wind out of their sails. In a set of small but clever experiments, researchers from three educational institutions in Taiwan worked to examine whether people who take dietary supplements might treat that behavior as a kind of safety net that entitled them to indulge in foods and activities that aren’t so conducive to good health. Read the whole story: The Washington Post
