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Does Growing Up in a Recession Make You Nicer? Study Says People Who Enter Adulthood During a Downturn are Less Self-Obsessed
Daily Mail: Children who grow up in a recession are more likely to become well-rounded adults than those who enjoy an easy start to life, a psychological study has found. Analysis of the characteristics of 35,000 people found that those who entered adulthood during economic downturns were less likely to be self-obsessed. Growing up in hard times dampens narcissism and a sense of entitlement, US psychologists believe. Read the whole story: Daily Mail
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What’s In A Grunt — Or A Sigh, Or A Sob? Depends On Where You Hear It
NPR: And I'm Robert Siegel. Hear a laugh, you know someone's happy. Hear a sob, you know someone is sad. Or are they? It's been thought that no matter where you live in the world, people express emotions using the same repertoire of sounds. But NPR's social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, reports on new research on how emotions are expressed and understood around the globe. For a long time, scientists have assumed there is a universal grammar when it comes to emotional sound. Languages differ, cultures differ, but emotional sounds carry the same meaning everywhere you go. There's good evidence for this theory.
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Studies Show Cat People Are Smarter Than Dog People
Time: Have you ever suspected that people who hang out with slinky, clever, moody cats are actually smarter than everyone with a goofy, friendly-to-everyone dog? Your hunch was likely correct, according to a new study carried out by Carroll University in Wisconsin. The study looked for personality traits in 600 college students that coincided with choices in pet ownership. Dog lovers tended to be more lively, but cat owners were “non-conformists” who preferred expediency to following the rules. Cat lovers also scored higher on intelligence over all. So is the cat educating you, or do you just have to be smart to adequately care for such a mercurial animal? Read the whole story: Time
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Maybe Millennials Aren’t Narcissists After All?
New York Magazine: “Millennials are narcissists!” It’s the easy, go-to media narrative about the current generation of young adults. But new research, published online this week in Psychological Science, suggests that we might have it all backward. Emory University scientists argue that people who enter the workforce during economic downturns — as millennials most certainly have — are actually much less likely to be narcissistic later in life, when compared to people who started their careers during more prosperous times. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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Angry Faces Back Up Verbal Threats, Making Them Seem More Credible
We’ve all been on the receiving end of an angry glare, whether from a teacher, parent, boss, or significant other. These angry expressions seem to boost the effectiveness of threats without actual aggression, according to
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Distance From a Conflict May Promote Wiser Reasoning
If you're faced with a troubling personal dilemma, such as a cheating spouse, you may think about it more wisely if you consider it as an outside observer would, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "These results are the first to demonstrate a new type of bias within ourselves when it comes to wise reasoning about an interpersonal relationship dilemma," says psychology researcher and study author Igor Grossmann of the University of Waterloo in Canada.
