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If We Feel Too Busy, It’s Probably Due to Having Too Much Free Time
Scientific American: Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves with selfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science. Researchers interrupted more than 200 students in class and asked them to complete different five-minute tasks. Some had to cross out the letter “e” in pages of text. Others wrote a letter to a sick child. When surveyed afterward, the group that wrote letters perceived themselves to have more time in general than those who did the crossing out.
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Hitting Your Kids Increases Their Risk of Mental Illness
TIME: What if we, as a society, could cut down on the incidence of mental illness by backing away from hitting, grabbing or pushing our children? That’s a prospect raised by a new study in Pediatrics, which finds that harsh physical punishment increases the risk of mental disorders — even when the punishment doesn’t stoop to the level of actual abuse. What qualifies as appropriate punishment is a hot-button topic among parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes corporal punishment, but studies have shown that up to 80% of parents report that they rely on it to some extent.
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Why Getting Respect Is Better Than Getting Rich
Forbes: Would you rather have money or respect? According to a new report by researchers at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and published in the journal Psychological Science, how much you are respected and admired by those around you contributes more to your overall happiness than the contents of your bank account. The researchers conducted a series of four studies among enrolled college students and MBA graduates, using peer ratings, self-reporting, leadership positions, total household income and questions related to their well-being to determine measures of peer respect and personal wealth.
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¿Se es mas sabio con la edad? (Are we wiser with age?)
ABC España: Todos recordamos la serie Kung Fu, con el anciano e inteligente maestro chino dando consejos a su «pequeño saltamontes». Hace dos años, Igor Grossmann, de la Universidad de Waterloo (Canadá), se preguntó si realmente era así, si con la edad uno se hace más sabio. Grossman realizó una investigación en los Estados Unidos y llegó a la conclusión de que los norteamericanos de edad avanzada eran más listos que los más jóvenes. Ahora, sin embargo, ha realizado un experimento parecido en Japón y ha llegado al resultado de que los «pequeños saltamontes» amarillos son tan avispados como sus mayores prácticamente desde el principio.
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How Knowing a Foreign Language Can Improve Your Decisions
Scientific American: Researchers have sought to understand the range and limits of these emotional language effects. Lower proficiency and/or late acquisition of the foreign language seems to be a crucial constraint. For people who grew up bilingual, skin conductance responses and self-reports were similar when listening to emotional phrases in either language. One method for finding new types of emotional-language effects is to examine areas where cognitive neuroscience reports that people can switch between analytical processing and emotional processing. Gut, automatic or instinctive reasoning is grounded in an emotional good-bad response.
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Just staring into space? Perhaps not – daydreaming helps children concentrate, and makes them perform better in tests
Daily Mail: Daydreaming could help children oncentrate - and even perform better in tests, researchers claim. The children also feel less anxious and more motivated to perform, according to a review of studies on the value of time to reflect. Education should focus more on giving children time to think, claim researchers at the University of Southern California. A study found that introspection - time to reflect - may be harder and harder to come by but can also be an increasingly valuable part of life. Researchers from the University of Southern California studied literature from neuroscience and psychological science to explore what it meant to our brains to be 'at rest'.
