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There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)
The Atlantic: In her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, the psychologist Barbara Fredrickson offers a radically new conception of love. Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.
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Money Can Buy Happiness, If You Spend It On Other People!
Forbes: It’s easy to come to the conclusion that all of our technology, all of our wealth, all of our stuff is not really making us happy. It’s true that getting a new gadget can give you pleasure every day you use it, but having ten new gadgets is not ten times more fun. Although the notion that once ones material needs are met, income over a certain threshold (often stated as $75,000) does not make us any happier, this is only true if that additional money is spent selfishly. The research that Moffit and Brown have drawn on most directly is from a paper by Dunn, Gilbert and Wilson. Read the whole story: Forbes
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Best (and Worst) Ways to Study for a Test
Yahoo: Want to ace a school exam or bone up for a work presentation? Forget the highlighter, and make yourself some flashcards instead. That’s the upshot of a recent report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors—a team of distinguished researchers led by John Dunlosky, PhD, of Kent State University—weighed the evidence for 10 simple learning strategies. Here’s what they found. Read the whole story: Yahoo
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More Proof That IQ Levels Are Rising
Business Insider: It appears that year after year there are more gifted students being identified in New York City. But what about states other than New York? Are there more gifted students being identified all across America? And could this actually be linked to and/or explained by a broader phenomenon such as The Flynn effect, which is the consistent rise in IQ over the last 80 or so years?
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Researchers Explore Motivation and Cognition in Addiction
Read about the latest insights on addiction from Perspectives on Psychological Science and Clinical Psychological Science. Motivation and Self-Regulation in Addiction: A Call for Convergence Cătălina E. Köpetz, Carl W. Lejuez, Reinout W. Wiers, and Arie W. Kruglanski Although motivation and motivational constructs often play a central role in theories of addiction, these theories have often examined motivation as an explanation only for initiating and maintaining addictive behavior. As a result, they have overlooked the commonalities between addiction and other motivated behavior.
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Are you a niceaholic?
Chicago Tribune: You could always count on Kathy Church. When friends called to vent, she would pick up the phone. When there was a crisis at work, she'd dig in. When family members got together, she'd show up no matter how much she didn't want to. Church was always game and always nice. But as she veered into chronic people-pleasing, it ate away at the good will she was trying so hard to cultivate. Unwilling to say no to any request, Church grew stressed, unable to sleep, and resentful of the people who were taking her time and of herself for letting it be taken.
