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Want to be happier? Think like a bronze medalist
Athletes who win silver medals must be happier than those who win bronze, right? Not exactly. People in one study rated athletes’ emotions — based on their facial expressions — immediately after they learned where they placed. On a 1- to 10-point agony-to-ecstasy scale, bronze medalists scored 7.1 on average, while the silver medalists averaged just 4.8. Later, on the awards podiums, the bronze medalists still got higher happiness scores, 5.7 to 4.3. Why? Psychologists believe it stems from “counterfactual thinking,” or imagining the outcome that didn’t happen.
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Love and dating after the Tinder revolution
How many couples will have met online this Valentine's Day? More than ever before is the safe answer, as online dating continues to sweep the world. But is data crunching the best way to find a partner? In the future, a computer program could dictate who you date, and for how long. This was the premise of a December 2017 episode of Black Mirror, the dystopian sci-fi TV series. But technology already has radically changed romance, with online dating growing massively in popularity ever since Match.com blazed a trail in the mid-90s. Now apps, such as Tinder, with their speedy account set-ups and "swipe to like" approach, have taken dating to another level.
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The First Step Toward a Personal Memory Maker?
Decent memory is a matter of livelihood, of independence, most of all of identity. Human memory is the ghost in the neural machine, a widely distributed, continually changing, multidimensional conversation among cells that can reproduce both the capital of Kentucky and the emotional catacombs of that first romance. The news last week that scientists had developed a brain implant that boosts memory — an implantable “cognitive prosthetic,” in the jargon — should be astounding even to the cynical. App developers probably are already plotting yet another brain-exercise product based on the latest science.
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Medical Professionals Benefit from Self-Directed ‘Job Crafting’
Employees can shape their environments to improve their experience at work and their performance.
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Harvard’s Dr Irene Pepperberg on ‘talking’ whales
Dr Irene Pepperberg, comparative psychologist at Harvard University, discusses talking animals.
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Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research
In 2015, Nick Brown was skimming Twitter when something caught his eye. A tweet mentioned an article by Nicolas Guéguen, a French psychologist with a penchant for publishing titillating findings about human behavior, for example that women with large breasts get more invitations to dance at nightclubs, or blond waitresses get bigger tips. Now, Guéguen was reporting that men are less likely to assist women who tie up their hair. Brown, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, sent an email about the study to James Heathers, a postdoc in behavioral science at Northeastern University in Boston whom he had met a few years earlier.