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The Long-Term Cost of Short-Term Stress
Youbeauty: Life throws you curveballs all the time. Some are big—like divorce and downsizing—and some fall into the category of run-of-the-mill daily stress—spilling coffee on your laptop, say, or getting your driver’s license renewed. While it may seem that major traumas are clearly more meaningful in the long run than minor annoyances, research shows that it’s our reactions to these events, not the events themselves, that predict our future wellbeing. In fact, while you may barely remember the latte-laptop incident of 2003, how you dealt with it at the time might be an important factor in how you feel right now. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Temporary Deafness Can Impair Multisensory Integration: A Study of Cochlear-Implant Users Simon P. Landry, Jean-Paul Guillemot, and François Champoux Does temporary deafness in adults disrupt other multisensory processes? Participants who had or had not experienced a period of deafness performed a nonspeech task meant to illicit an audiotactile illusion. Participants without a history of hearing loss experienced the audiotactile illusion, whereas those with restored hearing did not. This suggests that the maintenance of audiotactile processes might require an uninterrupted bond between the two modalities.
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Your Friends Are More Important Than You Think
Yahoo: On May 14, 1998, my life changed quite substantially: "Seinfeld" ended. At that time, I felt like I lost some of my closest friends. In fact, until I discovered that I could watch an unlimited amount of re-runs, I felt like I was missing a part of myself. Maybe you've felt this way about a TV show-perhaps the recent ending of "The Office" has spurred these feelings. More seriously, I am sure you've felt this sense of emptiness when a friend has moved or when someone has passed away or even after a breakup. ... Indeed, psychological science has known for quite some time that we define ourselves-that is, we come to know who we are as a person-through our closest relationships.
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Le métro parisien rend-il honnête? (Does the Paris Metro make you honest?)
Slate: Et si l’honnêteté était une question de place? C'est la question que pose une récente étude publiée dans la revue Psychological Science. Selon les chercheurs à l'origine de l'étude, un environnement physique étendu et large (un siège auto plus large, un bureau plus grand) pourrait favoriser les comportements malhonnêtes, rapporte Quartz.
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The Happiness of Pursuit
TIME: If you’re an American and you’re not having fun, it just might be your own fault. Our long national expedition is entering its 238th year, and from the start, it was clear that this would be a bracing place to live. There would be plenty of food, plenty of land, plenty of minerals in the mountains and timber in the wilderness. You might have to work hard, but you’d have a grand time doing it. That promise, for the most part, has been kept. There would be land rushes and gold rushes and wagon trains and riverboats and cities built hard against cities until there was no place to build but up, so we went in that direction too.
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Why Brainteasers Don’t Belong in Job Interviews
The New Yorker: Imagine that you are the captain of a pirate ship. You’ve captured some booty, and you need to divide it among your crew. But first the crew will vote on your plan. If you have the support of fewer than half of them, you will die. How do you propose to divide the gold, so that you still have some for yourself—but live to tell the tale? ... This phenomenon is broadly known as “thin-slice” judgment. As early as 1937, Gordon Allport, a pioneer of personality psychology, argued that we constantly form sweeping opinions of others based on incredibly limited information and exposure.
