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What Becoming a Parent Really Does to Your Happiness
Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what having kids means for happiness. Some of the most prominent scholars in the field have argued that if you want to be happy, it’s best to be childless. Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play: What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness?
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The Friendship Checkup: How to Reevaluate Relationships and Take Steps to Repair Them
As the pandemic has led us to reassess what’s important in our lives, many people have been reevaluating their friendships, reflecting on who they really value and which relationships are healthy or balanced. While the pandemic may have spurred these current reexaminations, experts say that taking a close look at one’s circle of friends is something we should do from time to time, because our friendships can have a substantial effect on our health and well-being, for better or worse.
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Will Thanksgiving’s Pandemic-Era Gratitude Last?
Joni Mitchell has written a lot of great lyrics, but one line seems especially apt this Thanksgiving. In “Big Yellow Taxi,” the singer/songwriter's jaunty 1970 tune about loss – of trees, of healthy food, of a love interest – she repeats and repeats, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Mitchell is challenging us to not take things for granted. There is a wildly simple way to do that. It’s called expressing gratitude. Sure, that may sound eye-rollingly New Agey. But in truth, there has never been a better time to be genuinely thankful than this holiday season, one that arrives in the throes of a wrenching two-year global pandemic.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on youth irritability, visualizing data, narcissism, cultural adaptations and responses to collective threat, experiments in economics, inhibitory control in memory, and the development of communication.
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Other People Don’t Think You’re a Mess
We all have weaknesses, and all know hardship. But it’s difficult, even on a good day, to admit we are struggling, to ask for help or to apologize when we are out of line. After a year and a half of overwhelming stress caused by a global pandemic, many of us have become even more familiar with feeling vulnerable and have grown adept at avoiding difficult conversations. We may blow up to let off steam, for instance, and not take responsibility for the harm our actions cause. Or we may sulk when people close to us fail at guessing our needs.
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Learning a New Skill Can Be Hard. Here’s How to Set Yourself Up for Success
This is one of my favorite questions to ask people: What was the last thing you taught yourself how to do? I (Rommel) like it because the answers are usually less about the actual skill and more about the motivation behind learning it. It's a question I leaned on a lot when I was booking contestants on the NPR game show Ask Me Another. But I don't really get to ask it anymore. Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and I'm not meeting as many new people these days. The pandemic might also be a factor. Plus, Ask Me Another recently ended, and it got me thinking about my time on the show and "the question" that so often cracked people open in a really interesting way. ...
