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How to find true friends (and love) in 45 minutes
WIRED UK: Can you make someone become intimately close to you -- even fall in love with you -- in less than an hour? Just ask Arthur Aron. Dr Aron -- known to friends as Art -- runs the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in upstate New York, and he has love on his mind. Passionate love, unreciprocated love, romantic attraction, unexpected arousal, pure lust -- all aspects of human intimacy that fascinate this much-published psychology professor specialising in what causes people to fall in and out of love and form other deep relationships ("the self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in personal relationships", as his CV puts it).
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Unenthusiastic Employees in the Office
LiveScience: How engaged are you at your job? The answer may not only affect your productivity and job satisfaction but may also be partly in your control, research has suggested. People who approach their work with energy and dedication are more productive and more willing to go that extra mile, according to research published in the August 2011 issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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People Seem More Likely to Follow Rules They Can’t Beat
U.S. News & World Report: People who believe a rule or restriction is absolute are more likely to accept it than those who think the rule has some wiggle room, according to a new study. The findings may help explain a number of human behaviors and actions, including the Arab Spring uprisings, according to the authors of the study to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. In the study, participants read articles that said lower speed limits in cities would make people safer. Some of them also read that government leaders had decided to reduce speed limits.
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You’re Just One in 7 Billion!
Did you take a deep breath before pushing and shoving your way into a crowded train this morning? Stepped on a few toes or nerves perhaps? Phew, well, if you thought dodging elbows and trying to hop on that crowded morning rush hour train was bad, try thinking about this – the world’s population recently hit 7 billion and in an already crowded planet, that poses quite a problem. According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population more than doubled just in the last fifty years. This staggering growth is certainly a cause for alarm and has scientists, economists and sociologists scrambling to find a solution to combat the problems that come with an overcrowded planet.
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Memory Lapse
The New York Times: A while ago, I was going through my files when I came across a cache of partly crumbled photographs. One was of me holding the sight box for the M252 mortar in Garden City, N.Y., parking lot. In another, I sat with Oum in the open hatch of a UH-1W at Camp White Horse, outside Nasiriyah, Iraq. There was another of me and the guys at the 2003 Marine Corps birthday ball. I looked like a boy in those photos. At the bottom of the stack I found one photo of us standing with First Sgt. Allen. I was wearing a set of borrowed Alphas; she wore a black evening gown, First Sergeant stood adorned in dress blues, everyone was smiling, teeth shining.
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Tantrum Tamer: New Ways Parents Can Stop Bad Behavior
The Wall Street Journal: Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial—for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions. Instead, a set of techniques known as "parent management training" is proving so helpful to families struggling with a child's unmanageable behavior that clinicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to adopt them. Aimed at teaching parents to encourage sustained behavior change, it was developed in part at parenting research clinics at Yale University and King's College London.
