-
When Faced With a Hard Decision, People Tend to Blame Fate
Life is full of decisions. Some, like what to eat for breakfast, are relatively easy. Others, like whether to move cities for a new job, are quite a bit more difficult. Difficult decisions tend to make us feel stressed and uncomfortable – we don’t want to feel responsible if the outcome is less than desirable. New research suggests that we deal with such difficult decisions by shifting responsibility for the decision to fate. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural belief, spanning time and place,” write researchers Aaron Kay, Simone Tang, and Steven Shepherd of Duke University.
-
The All-or-Nothing Marriage
The New York Times: ARE marriages today better or worse than they used to be? This vexing question is usually answered in one of two ways. According to the marital decline camp, marriage has weakened: Higher divorce rates reflect a lack of commitment and a decline of moral character that have harmed adults, children and society in general. But according to the marital resilience camp, though marriage has experienced disruptive changes like higher divorce rates, such developments are a sign that the institution has evolved to better respect individual autonomy, particularly for women.
-
How Does Misfortune Affect Long-Term Happiness?
NPR: We're doomed to be miserable if we don't get what we want — right? Not quite, says psychologist Dan Gilbert. He says our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned. Watch here: NPR
-
What’s your baby really thinking?
CNN: Dawn Soto often looks at her toddler's expressive face and tries to decipher his inner monologue. She wonders, "What goes through their little minds with all these new experiences?" Any parent of a young child imagines what their baby is thinking about. Recently, Anderson Cooper traveled to the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University where he watched babies take part in a series of tests aimed at answering the question: "Are we born knowing right from wrong?" He explores that question and other aspects of babies' inner thoughts in a three-part special this week on baby brains. Read the whole story: CNN
-
Are you Superman or Voldemort? Avatars may affect the real you
CNET: Video games have long provided a safe way for players to try out different personalities. In the land of pixels and pretend, we can try out the role of lithe, attractive do-gooder elf or become a hideous orc who leaves a trail of havoc (and dead elves) in our wake. Most of us probably assume that after the game is over, we return to being simple boyfriends, moms, teachers, or accountants operating according to our own moral principles, regardless of the virtual personas we took on. New research, however, indicates that this just might not be the case.
-
Can Shame Predict Whether a Released Felon Will Reoffend?
Pacific Standard: The linguistic distinction between guilt and shame is often blurred. Some of the definitions that Merriam-Webster offers are nearly identical. Guilt is “a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong,” while shame is “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” In their unending preoccupation with darkness, psychological researchers prefer to parse the details. “Shame and guilt are both self-conscious emotions that arise from self-relevant failures and transgressions, but they differ in their object of evaluation,” a new paper in Psychological Science declares.
