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When a woman cheats, she’s looking for more than satisfying another man
The Washington Post: “What Makes Powerful Men Act Like Pigs,” declared the cover of the May 30 issue of Time magazine. “What’s the Matter With Men?” asked the conservative-leaning Independent Women’s Forum on May 19. “Why Men Cheat,” teased a story on the Huffington Post last week. Those looking for explanations to these questions should stop reading now. I don’t have the answers, nor am I interested in doing the difficult, ultimately fruitless and arbitrary work of providing any. For one thing, I’m not sure it really matters. The reasons behind Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to carry on a years-long affair with his housekeeper are specific and unknowable, probably even to him.
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Income inequality increases unhappiness, researchers say
Staunton News Leader: As high earners earn more, and lower or modest-income people earn less or see their incomes sit flat, the losers in the equation increasingly feel less happy and more inclined to believe that others are unfair and untrustworthy, according to a new University of Virginia-led study."Essentially, Americans are less happy during periods of greater income inequality," said psychologist Shigehiro Oishi of U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, lead author of a new study examining the effects of income disparity on happiness. "People are happier when there is more economic equality." Read more: Staunton News Leader
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The Fly-on-the-Wall Effect: When Bad Things Happen . . .
When I was a kid, and had to deal with life’s early disappointments, my parents would always call it a “learning experience.” If I failed to win a coveted academic award or athletic trophy, or if I was rejected by a former best friend, they would assure me that, as bad as I felt at the moment, the pain would help me build character over the long haul. It was a good thing. It didn’t feel like a good thing, but I trusted they knew what they were talking about. And they weren’t alone. Indeed, common wisdom holds that when bad things happen to us, we should try to examine our negative feelings in order to defuse them.
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‘Queen Bee’ Bosses Often Victims of Sexist Workplace
LiveScience: Some female bosses get a bad rap for their "queen bee" behaviors, including the cold shoulder they give to other women in the office. But new research suggests we should blame the sexist work environment, not the bosses themselves, for the behavior. To determine whether queen bee behavior is actually a response to a difficult, male-dominated environment, researchers at the Leiden University in the Netherlands gave an online questionnaire to 63 senior women working at police departments in three Dutch cities.
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Solstice Psychology: How We ‘See’ Nature
Imagine that you arrive by bus at a vacation spot you’ve never been to before. You get out and look around. What do you notice at first glance? Well, you can’t miss the large lake right in front of you; should be some good water skiing there. There’s a snow-capped mountain rising in the distance, and a copse of hemlock trees just to the left. The lodging must be in that chalet down to the right. The screened porch looks inviting, and the weather’s perfect. Now imagine you’re a criminal on the lam, and you step off the same bus. What do you see? Well mostly you see a vast open space. Other than that small stand of trees, there is very little place to hide. You feel exposed, vulnerable.
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How Do We Recognize Faces?
How do we recognize a face? Do we pick out “local” features— an eye or a mouth— and extrapolate from there? Or do we take in the “global” configuration—facial structure, distance between the features—at once? Now, a group of psychologists— Sébastien Miellet and Philippe G. Schyns at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Roberto Caldara at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland—have settled the longstanding debate between scientists who hold to the “local” strategy and those who favor the “global” one. “Face processing does not rely on a rigid system or a unique and mandatory information sampling strategy,” said Miellet.
