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Happiness: surely that’s not all there is to the meaning of life
The Sydney Morning Herald: How about the meaning of life? People forget relationships are the core of our wellbeing. FED up with all the wrangling and speculation over who should be leading the Labor Party? Want something more substantial? How about the meaning of life? The question has been an object of contemplation by clerics and philosophers throughout the ages, of course, but in more recent times many psychologists and even a few economists have taken to studying it. For at least the past 30 years some psychologists and economists have been researching the nature of happiness. A spate of books has been written on the subject (including one by yours truly).
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Updating the Psychology of Self-Control
The Wall Street Journal: An influential theory of self-control holds that willpower is like a muscle — it is depleted through exertion, and it can be replenished by ingesting simple carbohydrates. There’s a book out now that explains this so-called “energy model” of willpower, at length — co-written by Roy Baumeister, one of its main academic proponents. But some academic psychologists are now challenging the prevailing model of self-discipline. In one experiment, as Wray Herbert explains, in his Huffington Post column, test subjects whose willpower was stressed, and waning, got a boost by simply washing their mouths out with a sugar solution.
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Eyes have power to make us feel connected
Journal and Courier: As a student at Purdue University, Olivia Maple spends about 40 minutes a day walking back and forth to class on campus. Although she sees passersby, she tries not to make eye contact. "It's kind of awkward," said the 21-year-old senior. "I don't want them to think I was staring at them for no reason. I just kind of stare off, not looking at anyone in particular." In our busy, tech-saturated world, making eye contact can seem like an uncomfortable task, but new research from Purdue shows that even the slightest glance from a stranger can make a person feel more connected. However, being looked through -- even by a stranger -- makes someone feel more disconnected.
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Solving the mystery of ‘Little Albert’
Macleans: He is one of the most famous babies in history, but until recently his real name was unknown. Almost every undergraduate who takes a psychology course has met “Little Albert,” the pseudonymous infant who was the subject of a famous experiment by John B. Watson (1879-1958). Watson founded the theoretical school of “behaviourism,” which sought to reduce psychology to observable laws, excluding interior mental states altogether, and considered the mind to be infinitely suggestible and plastic.
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Research shows toddlers understand right from wrong at just 19 months
Daily Mail: Children know the difference between right and wrong before they reach the age of two, according to new research published today. Scientists have found that babies aged between 19 and 21 months understand fairness and can apply it in different situations. They say it is the first time that having a sense of fairness has been identified in children at such a young age. Researchers say babies will watch a scene for longer if they think it contains something unfair, so in two experiments the tots were timed on how long they watched a live scenario about fairness. In the first, 19-month-olds saw two giraffe puppets given either a toy each or both toys to one of the giraffes.
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Why Online Dating Doesn’t Work
Scientific American: Online dating might give you something, but it's probably not a soul mate. Most sites rely on what’s called an "exclusive process"—they use an algorithm to find romantic matches based variables, from interests to fetishes. But now a team of psychologists from five universities has performed a systematic review. And they say that most claims for the power of the "exclusive process" don’t pan out. Their report is in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Listen to the podcast here: Scientific American
