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How to write the perfect professional thank-you note
“Researchers have been making the case for 15 years that expressing gratitude can improve well-being, but we have yet to understand why in practice people don’t walk around in everyday life expressing thanks,” says Amit Kumar, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied everything from consumer behavior to judgment and decision-making. These days, he is primarily focused on how people find joy in their daily lives.
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Help funders help you: Five tips for writing effective funding applications
In previous letters, we have given advice about launching research labs, giving talks about the research done in those labs, and writing about that research for peers and the broader world. An assumption lurking behind those pieces of advice is that you have the resources to do all that great work. In this letter, we’re addressing that elephant in the room head on: getting funding for your research. Regardless of your funding history, you probably already have some experience with the basic relevant skills. As a prospective student, you had to persuade a committee that you belonged in a certain training program.
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High Wealth Inequality Linked With Greater Support for Populist Leaders
People who live or think they live in a more economically unequal society may be more supportive of a strong, even autocratic leader, a large-scale international study shows.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring interpretation bias in anxiety and depression, neural reward responsiveness in children with suicidal ideation, and eye movements and false-memory rates.
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How to have great meetings, according to 200 scientific studies
Americans average six hours per week in meetings. And managers especially spend considerably more time in them. But attendees rate as many as half of the meetings they attend as “poor,” and organizations in the US waste an estimated $213 billion on ineffective meetings annually. What are the keys to effective meetings? Researchers at the University of Nebraska and Clemson University reviewed almost 200 scientific studies of meetings published in the last decade. Their conclusions, published last year in a Current Directions in Psychological Science journal article, offer a roadmap for getting meetings right.
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We’re All Gonna Die! How Fear Of Death Drives Our Behavior
Many people tend to push frightening realities out of mind rather than face them head-on. That's especially true when it comes to the terrifying event that no one can escape — death. Psychologist Sheldon Solomon says people may suppress conscious thoughts about their mortality, but unconscious ones still seep through. In the book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, Solomon, along with psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, illustrate how death anxiety influences people's behavior in ways they would never suspect.
