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The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory
Does success make us miserable? Sigmund Freud was one of the first to propose this peculiar form of distress in an essay he published more than a century ago. It was a theory built around a few case studies: a patient who fell into depression after earning a promotion at work, another patient who fell apart when she married her longtime partner—and Lady Macbeth, who was not his patient. They were, as Freud famously put it, “wrecked by success.” There are so many examples of this paradox these days that it’s easy for anyone to delude themselves into believing the most successful are the least happy. ...
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on social pain, adolescents’ political attitudes and values, disagreement and accuracy, effects of stress on voice features, learning, grief, and anxiety.
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Shared Suffering
Ukrainians are trying to confront the war’s psychological wounds even as the battles wear on. ... Kate Pokrovskaya, a 39-year-old psychotherapist, was asleep at her home in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 24 when she and her husband were awakened by the sound of explosions. Russia had launched its invasion. “At that moment, our life stopped,” she said. Pokrovskaya tried to help her patients cope with the stress and trauma of war. But she was living through it herself. “We began to sleep badly; my body was tense,” she said. “The sirens became more and more frequent, especially at night. All this was very oppressive, and mentally and physically exhausting.” ...
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Don’t Surround Yourself With Admirers
When you’re admired and well known, “people are always nice to you,” the actor Robert De Niro once confessed to Esquire magazine. “You’re in a conversation, and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying.” Sounds great! Agreement makes life smooth, and the praise and esteem of others gives us pleasure, even stimulating a reward center in our brain. Wanting to surround ourselves with admirers, if we can, is only natural. ...
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What We Gain From Pain
We've all heard the saying, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But is there any truth to this idea? This week, we explore the concept of post-traumatic growth with psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme. He finds that suffering can have benefits — but not necessarily the ones we expect. ...
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Priming the Brain to Learn
The human brain is skilled at categorizing. People can quickly recognize a new variation of something they’ve seen before, like a dog, a chair, a jacket, or a lamp. We do this even when we’ve received very little explicit teaching about what distinguishes such categories. How the brain builds this category knowledge hasn’t been well understood. Drs. Layla Unger and Vladimir Sloutsky from Ohio State University designed a set of experiments to learn how incidental exposure to new things shapes later learning about categories. The experiments had two phases: an exposure phase and an explicit learning phase.
