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Using Money to Buy Happiness
Scientific American: We live in America with two bits of contradictory received wisdom — that you’d be a lot better off if you made more money, and that money can’t buy you happiness. Now two scholars suggest another way of thinking about the relationship between cash and joy: To a large degree, how you spend is just as important as how much you spend. Michael Norton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and coauthor – with Elizabeth Dunn – of Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Teens’ Self-Consciousness Linked With Specific Brain, Physiological Responses
Teenagers are famously self-conscious, acutely aware and concerned about what their peers think of them. A new study reveals that this self-consciousness is linked with specific physiological and brain responses that seem to emerge in adolescence. “Our study identifies adolescence as a unique period of the lifespan in which self-conscious emotion, physiological reactivity, and activity in specific brain areas converge and peak in response to being evaluated by others,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Leah Somerville of Harvard University.
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Senior Moment? Ageist Stereotypes Can Hurt — Or Help — Older Adults’ Memory
Of the many negative stereotypes that exist about older adults, the most common is that they are forgetful, senile, and prone to so-called “senior moments.” In fact, while cognitive processes tend to decline with age, new research reveals that simply reminding older adults about ageist ideas actually exacerbates their memory problems. The new findings are forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Do You Wanna Know a Secret?
The New York Times: The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing huge amounts of data about Americans’ phone and Internet use has sparked a lively debate about the proper role of secret information in a free and open society. The crux of the debate is whether the value of secret information justifies the sacrifice of personal privacy. If secret information yields valuable intelligence that can be used to protect Americans, the reasoning goes, then it is worth sacrificing privacy for security. But there is a major problem with evaluating information labeled “secret”: people tend to inflate the value of “secret” information simply because it is secret.
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What Did Narcissus Say To Instagram? Selfie Time!
NPR: In these hyper-connected, over-shared times dwell two kinds of people: those preoccupied with taking and uploading photos of themselves and those who have never heard of the selfie. ... But Pamela Rutledge doesn't see it that way. The director of the nonprofit Media Psychology Research Center, which explores how humans interact with technology, sees the selfie as democratizing the once-snooty practice of self-portraiture, a tradition that long predates Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. She sees some key differences between selfies and self-portraits of yore. Unlike painted portraiture, selfies are easily deletable.
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Training Can Increase Empathy
Scientific American: Can you train someone to be a nicer person? A recent study using meditation techniques shows that it might be possible. The research is published in the journal Psychological Science. [Helen Y. Weng et al, Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering] One group of subjects learned to practice what’s called “compassionate meditation” by focusing on a specific person while repeating a phrase like, “May you be free from suffering.” Read the whole story: Scientific American
