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Patriots Are Happier?
MSN: Do you fly the stars and stripes in your front yard? You might be happier than your neighbors. The more satisfied people are with their country, the more content they are with their lives, a new study in Psychological Science finds. Read the whole story: MSN
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How to cut your losses on a bad investment
The Globe and Mail: Your dream house has turned out to be a money pit. The roof is crumbling. The foundation is sinking. The plumbing needs a complete overhaul. You’ve already gone way over budget, and completing the job will put you further into debt. When do you cut your losses? Read the whole story: The Globe and Mail
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Autism: Take a Puppet for a Friend
La Stampa: Social cognition is a complex construct that goes far beyond some of the acquired expertise on how to behave in certain situations and adapting to the demands of the environment, but involves the ability, typically human, to engage in interpersonal relationships and to understand the thoughts and emotions of others. This capacity is manifested in very simple form in the early months of a child's life, but at different stages of development, it becomes increasingly complex.
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Happiness Gets Better With Age
Older people tend to be wiser, but did you know they tend to be happier too? A recent paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests this may be because older adults are better at regulating their emotions. Older individuals seem to be better at predicting how a certain situation will make them feel, so they’re good at avoiding unpleasant situations and putting themselves instead in (sounds a little awkward when reading but grammatically correct) enjoyable ones with people they like. Being happier as one gets older also has some health benefits.
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Following the Crowd: Brain Images Offer Clues to How and Why We Conform
What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private. Now three Harvard University psychological scientists have used brain scans to show what happens when we take others’ opinions to heart: We take them “to brain”—specifically, to the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. These regions compute what we value and feel rewarded by, both primitive things like water and food and socially meaningful things like money.
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Are We More—or Less—Moral Than We Think?
If asked whether we’d steal, most of us would say no. Would we try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves. Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? A study by Rimma Teper, Michael Inzlicht, and Elizabeth Page-Gould of the University of Toronto Scarborough tested the difference between moral forecasting and moral action—and the reasons behind any mismatch.
