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Gloomy Thinking Can Be Contagious
NPR: When students show up at college in the fall, they'll have to deal with new classes, new friends and a new environment. In many cases, they will also have new roommates — and an intriguing new research study suggests this can have important mental health consequences. At the University of Notre Dame, psychologist Gerald Haeffel has recently obtained results from a natural experiment that unfolds every year at the university. In a in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Haeffel and co-author Jennifer Hames report that roommates can have strong effects — both positive and negative — on one another's mental health. Like many schools, Notre Dame assigns new students their roommates.
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The Perils of Giving Advice
The Wall Street Journal: I know what you should do and here's my advice. How many times have you heard that (and groaned)? Advice giving, especially unsolicited, is tricky. Being on the receiving end can be annoying and make us defensive. But giving advice can be frustrating, as well, particularly when the intended beneficiary of our wisdom makes it clear it isn't welcome—or takes the same recommendations we've been giving for months from someone else. The whole advice issue is typically hardest to navigate with the person we know the best: our spouse or partner. ...
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About Face
Boston Magazine: Forty-six years ago a young San Francisco–based cowboy of a psychologist named Paul Ekman emerged from the jungle with proof of a powerful idea. During the previous couple of years, he had set out trying to prove a theory popularized in the 19th century by Charles Darwin: that people of all ages and races, from all over the world, manifest emotions the same way. Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise.
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People Prefer ‘Carrots’ to ‘Sticks’ When It Comes to Healthcare Incentives
To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed -- as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people -- makes a big difference. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing. Researcher David Tannenbaum of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles wanted to investigate how framing healthcare incentives might influence people’s attitudes toward the incentives.
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The Less We Know, the Surer We Are, Study Finds
Business Week: Here’s a study that rings true: People tend to hold more extreme positions on complex policies when they don’t know very much about them, according to a research article in the academic journal Psychological Science. Having people attempt to explain how the policies work is enough to reduce their sense of certainty, as well as the extremity of their political positions. Research subjects stated their positions on six political policies on a scale from strongly against to strongly in favor, and then rated their understanding of the policies. After that they were asked to provide a detailed explanation of two of the policies.
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What’s the most ‘natural’ way to learn? It might surprise you
The Washington Post: Here is a counterintuitive piece on what we consider the “natural” way to learn, from cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. He is a professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His latest book is “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.” This appeared on his Science and Education blog. Which of these learning situations strikes you as the most natural, the most authentic? 1) A child learns to play a video game by exploring it on his own. 2) A child learns to play a video game by watching a more experienced player.
