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The secrets of the world’s happiest cities
The Guardian: Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling On Happiness, explained the commuting paradox this way: "Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time.
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Is Drinking Alone An Early Warning Sign?
The rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous are full of stories, many of them about early drinking days. The vast majority of alcoholics first experimented with drinking as teenagers, and usually for social reasons—to fit in with their friends, to overcome shyness and feel more comfortable in gatherings, and so forth. But every once in a while, someone will tell a different sort of tale—an often wrenching tale of drinking alone from the very beginning, without friends, without social pleasure, just to drink. Such early, solitary drinking is rare, but not unheard of. Of course, most people start drinking for social purposes, and most of those go on to lives of moderate social drinking.
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We All Start Out As Scientists, But Some of Us Forget
Mother Jones: Up until fairly recently, scientists, writers and philosophers alike have viewed human babies as little more than primitive adults. Through love and attention, babies were to be shaped into autonomous thinkers—like us. It was almost as if their brains were like new computers, whose software we needed to install over time. But in the past few decades, explains University of California-Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik, science has turned this view on its head. Not only are babies' brains structurally quite different from those of adults, but they also function in a way that makes them better than adults at learning new things.
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Do you want the good news or the bad news first?
ScienceNews: “So, there’s good news and bad news.” An opening like that will send a chill through your veins, no matter what the topic. It’s especially worrying when coming from a significant other or a doctor. And the statement is often followed by a question: Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news? A new study says that you probably want the bad news first. But it also finds that, if the decision is left to the news deliverer, you can’t always get what you want.
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Work Disputes Less Troubling When They Involve the Job Itself
We all have colleagues that we simply don’t like. Those personal frictions color our attitudes throughout the day and even after work. But if a run-in with a co-worker involves a specific work-related dispute, the tensions tend to abate rather quickly, a new study shows. A research team led by Laurenz Meier, an industrial/organizational psychologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, examined how people’s reported feelings of anger varied from day to day. Meier and her colleagues asked 131 participants to keep diaries about their moods before and after work over a two-week period.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: A Dissociation of Performance and Awareness During Binocular Rivalry Daniel H. Baker and John R. Cass In binocular rivalry, a different image is shown to each eye and awareness of the images alternates between eyes over time. Interestingly, researchers find that people still show some sensitivity to images presented to the suppressed eye. To determine how this might happen, the researchers measured participants' sensitivity to probes presented to a single eye during periods of suppression or dominance.
