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Can Feeling Too Good Be Bad? Positive Emotion in Bipolar Disorder
Positive emotions like joy and compassion are good for your mental and physical health, and help foster creativity and friendship. But people with bipolar disorder seem to have too much of a good thing. In a new article to be published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist June Gruber of Yale University considers how positive emotion may become negative in bipolar disorder. One of the characteristics of bipolar disorder is the extreme periods of positive mood, or mania. People in the grip of mania also have increased energy, sleep less, and experience extreme self-confidence.
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How Media Can Encourage Our Better Side
Violent media—films, TV, videogames—can encourage aggression, and lots of research says so. But psychologists haven’t spent as much time looking at the ways media with more socially positive content help suppress meanness and prod us toward cooperation, empathy, and helpfulness. When and why might a game or a movie mobilize our better angels and squelch our devils? A review of the literature, including his own work, by psychologist Tobias Greitemeyer at the University of Innsbruck in Austria sorts out those questions and proposes a model to explain the cognitive processes underlying their answers.
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Work Engagement, Job Satisfaction, and Productivity—They’re a Virtuous Cycle
Engaged workers—those who approach their work with energy, dedication, and focus—are more open to new information, more productive, and more willing to go the extra mile. Moreover, engaged workers take the initiative to change their work environments in order to stay engaged. What do we know about the inner workings of work engagement, and how can employers enhance it to improve job performance? In a new article to be published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arnold B. Bakker creates a model of work engagement based on the best current research.
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Time and Numbers Mix Together in the Brain
Clocks tell time in numbers—and so do our minds, according to a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In two experiments, scientists found that people associate small numbers with short time intervals and large numbers with longer intervals—suggesting that these two systems are linked in the brain. It’s clear that time and numbers are related in daily life, says Denise Wu of National Central University of Taiwan, who cowrote the new study with Acer Chang, Ovid Tzeng, and Daisy Hung.
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Decisions, Decisions, Decisions…
Should I skip my morning workout today so I can sleep longer? Or perhaps, since it is summer after all, indulge in an ice cold Mocha Frappucino with whipped cream and chocolate syrup drizzled over it instead of my regular herbal tea? Where should I take my date on our first dinner date? Should I go to graduate school? Decisions, decisions, decisions… We all make numerous decisions everyday; unconsciously or consciously, sometimes doing it automatically with little effort or thinking and yet, at other times, we agonize for hours over another. Why do we make these choices – be it from deciding what to have for lunch or whether to say yes to that job offer halfway round the world.
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When The Brain Decides
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how we do it? How do we prevent analysis paralysis? Psychological theory suggests that we often rely on the recognition heuristic, choosing the option that we recognize over the one we don’t. So, as psychological scientist Christian Frings points out, if we have to predict whether Roger Federer or Michael Berrer will win a tennis match, we’ll probably stick with Federer because he’s a well-known name.
