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Can You Teach Happiness?
As head of Silliman College at Yale University, Laurie Santos interacts closely with students. Over the past few years, she's grown more concerned about their mental health. “I came to realize that college students were more depressed, anxious and overwhelmed than students realize,” says Santos, who is also a professor of psychology. “I was really worried about what I was seeing.” So she designed a new class, called the Science of Well-Being, that teaches students, in essence, how to be happier. Launched in January, the class has quickly become one of the most popular courses at the college.
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Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate
Mindfulness meditation, a Buddhism-inspired practice in which you focus your mind entirely on the current moment, has been widely embraced for its instrumental benefits — especially in the business world. Companies like Apple, Google and Nike provide meditation rooms that encourage brief sessions during the workday. Chief executives publicly extol its benefits. And no wonder: The practical payoff of mindfulness is backed by dozens of studies linking it to job satisfaction, rational thinking and emotional resilience. But on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting.
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America is a nation of narcissists, according to two new studies
Is America a narcissistic country? On a day when America gathers together to celebrate itself, this seems a fair question. The answer is a resounding yes, according to new research — but some states are more narcissistic than others. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers asked more than 2,800 residents how much their home state contributed to the history of the United States. Residents of Delaware believed on average that their state helped create 33 percent of the nation’s history. Georgians believed their state played almost as central a role, with 28 percent.
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Replication Study Shows No Evidence That Small Talk Harms Well-Being
People who engage in more substantive conversations tend to be happier but idle small talk isn’t necessarily negatively related to well-being, researchers find.
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A Stanford researcher says we shouldn’t start working full time until age 40
For people smack in the mad mid-life rush of managing full-time careers, dependent children, and aging parents, nothing feels so short in supply as time. But there is time to get it all done, says psychologist Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. The only problem is that we’ve arranged life all wrong. A woman who is 40 years old today can expect to live another 45 years, on average, while 5% will live to see their 100th birthday. The average 40-year-old man will live another 42. For many people, most of those years will be healthy enough to continue work that doesn’t involve intense physical labor.
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Raising Kids Who Want To Read — Even During The Summer
You sneak them into backpacks and let them commingle with the video games (hoping some of the latter's appeal will rub off). You lay them around the kids' beds like stepping stones through the Slough of Despond and, for good measure, Vitamix them to an imperceptible pulp for the occasional smoothie. Books are everywhere in your house, and yet ... they're not being consumed. Because it's summer, and kids have so many other things they'd rather do.
