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Emotions May Not Be So Universal After All
TIME: From a very young age, infants have a way of making their feelings known – contorted faces and howls indicate their displeasure with a meal or a damp diaper, a gummy smile their contentment, and a furrowed brow their puzzlement over a new discovery such as their thumb. While it seems logical that these expressions are universal, the latest study suggests they may not be. In fact, expressions of the major emotions – happiness, sadness, anger and the like, may be strongly culturally driven. Maria Gendron, a post doc in the lab of psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, visited remote tribes in Namibia to come to that conclusion.
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Forget the fakery! Teens tell us they’re not cool with Photoshop
TODAY: They say comparison is the thief of joy, and there is maybe no place this is truer than inside the minds of teenage girls. The TODAY/AOL Body Image survey asked teen girls about how images in the media make them feel about themselves. The answer: Not great! Eighty percent of the teenage girls we surveyed said they compare themselves to the images they see of celebrities, and almost half of those girls said it makes them feel dissatisfied with their own appearance. Also: Teenage girls are wise to Photoshopping shenanigans, and they’re not into it: The majority of the girls surveyed said they want the practice to stop entirely.
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A one-hour class could cut the college dropout rate
Reuters: (Reuters) First generation college students get lower grades and are more likely to drop out - an "achievement gap" that threatens efforts to boost the number of college graduates. Recent research, however, suggests a simple one-hour intervention that focuses on students' social-class backgrounds could help close the divide. In an experiment at an unnamed elite private college, incoming students listened to college juniors and seniors discuss how their social class backgrounds affected their college experience, according to the paper "Closing the Social Class Achievement Gap," to be published in Psychological Science.
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Rose-Colored Words, but Gray Outcomes
The New York Times: When all the words you hear about the economy are bullish, you may want to run in the other direction. This counterintuitive finding — that positive visions of the future precede downturns — appears to be the case both for people and the economy as a whole. This bad news for unbridled optimism was laid out in a paper published in Psychological Science online in February. The study looked at the relationship between economic malaise and language in newspaper articles and presidential addresses. The finding was stark: Optimistic language was a predictor of poor performance.
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Under the Skin: How Childhood Adversity Takes Its Toll
Most of us have fond memories of our childhood homes, so it’s hard to imagine the lives of less fortunate kids. But far too many youngsters spend their earliest years in homes that are ravaged by poverty and neglect. Many of these children are physically and emotionally abused by parents who are at their wits’ end, who quarrel and drink and sometimes disappear or turn to crime. These parents’ demons take over the home, leaving little room for nurturance and love. Life is doubly unfair for these neglected and abused kids, because they are also much more likely to continue suffering as adults.
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A Thousand Words: Writing from Photographs
The New Yorker: I can’t remember exactly when I stopped carrying a notebook. Sometime in the past year, I gave up writing hurried descriptions of people on the subway, copying the names of artists from museum walls and the titles of books in stores, and scribbling down bits of phrases overheard at restaurants and cafés. It’s not that my memory improved but, instead, that I started archiving these events and ideas with my phone, as photographs. Now, if I want to research the painter whose portraits I admired at the museum, I don’t have to read through page after page of my chicken scratch trying to find her name.
