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Anger trumped terror on 9/11
If a terrorist attack provokes mostly anger instead of fear, does that mean it has failed? It's an intriguing question in light of a new study, which tracked Americans' negative emotions throughout the day of September 11, 2001. The timeline begins at 6:45 a.m., two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and continues until 12:44 a.m. the following day--covering 20 hours in all. It shows that emotions like hate and wrath were present immediately after the first attack--and increased steadily and strongly the more people learned about the nature of the attacks.
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An intuitive sense of property
Americans like to own their homes, and the rules and conventions for ownership are generally well understood. So it's easy to forget that in many corners of the globe the rules are more ambiguous--and more open to challenge. Indeed, there are an estimated one billion squatters in the world today--people who, mostly out of necessity, are living on property they do not own and cannot afford. Squatters rarely have a voice, but in a few industrialized cities where they do, their claims are usually founded on the idea of improvement.
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How to quit smoking? Think about smoking
I quit smoking many years ago, but even today I can recall the unpleasantness of that time—the cravings, the obsessive thoughts. My strategy was to keep my mind and body busy all the time, in order to keep my thoughts of cigarettes at bay. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. I relapsed a few times before I finally quit for good. There were quitters’ support groups available at the time, but the idea didn’t make sense to me. Why would I want to sit around with other dreary addicts and talk incessantly about the very thing I was trying to banish from my mind? Wouldn’t that just undermine my willpower and leave me more miserable? Well, no, as it turns out.
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Why (some) people drown their sorrows
Imagine that you just lost your job. The bad news came without warning—a company downsizing. You’re one more casualty of the recession. So naturally you’re feeling lousy, and what’s more, you need to go home and tell the family. But maybe, before you do, you’ll stop by your favorite watering hole for a martini—or two or three. You’ve got the time, after all. That’s called drowning your sorrows—or, in psychological jargon, self-medication. It’s quite normal, really, to try to regulate intense negative emotions in whatever way possible, and liquor is a quick and effective strategy. But it’s not a healthy strategy—and the fact is, not everyone does it.
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Are women shunning science?
In 2005, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers got himself into hot water. Speaking at a national conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," the former Clinton treasury official suggested that the relative scarcity of women in science careers might be explained--at least in part--by a gender difference in intrinsic aptitude for the sciences. Summers mentioned other possible explanations as well, most notably the clash between high-power jobs and family life, but it was his remarks on science ability that grabbed all the attention. Actually, "attention" doesn't fairly summarize what followed.
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Pack Up All Your Cares and Woes
Many healing traditions make use of jars—variously called God jars, or resentment jars, or worry jars. The idea is that you can—literally—compartmentalize your troubles, and by doing so take away their emotional power. If this sounds like a lot of New Age gobbledygook to you, read on. The practice is a form of metaphor therapy, which sees psychological truth in common metaphors like “bottled-up anger” and “buried sorrows.” These figures of speech are not arbitrary, a growing number of psychologists believe; instead they are examples of the way abstract psychological states overlap with physical experience.
