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‘Inoculating’ Against Road Rage
People’s inability to contain their explosive anger behind the wheel has led to stabbings, beatings, shootings, and fatal crashes. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reported that, "at least 1,500 people a year are seriously injured or killed in senseless traffic disputes." In some cases, road rage is essentially the result of cognitive distortions, and there are promising evidence-based interventions that teach aggressive drivers to recognize that dysfunctional thinking, as researchers Christine Wickens, Robert Mann, and David Wiesenthal pointed out in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Why Children Need Playhouses
The Wall Street Journal: My backyard playhouse didn’t have a turret. Or a Palladian window. Or AC or running water or the stained-glass windows found in the $30,000 miniature mansions that some parents are having custom-built for their offspring these days. My own parents clearly didn’t care much what my playhouse looked like: It was a sagging, wooden moving crate, maybe 5 feet tall and open at one end, that they’d salvaged, plopped beside the prickly raspberry bushes behind our suburban Alberta home, and painted a muddy ’70s brown. They showed even less interest in what my three neighborhood friends and I did within it.
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Can Envy Be Good for You?
The New Yorker: How do we respond when we encounter people who are more successful than we are? Often, we imagine two paths: admiration and envy. Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment—we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility. Envy, by contrast, is thought to be inherently bad—a “feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. If he can, Bertrand Russell wrote, the envious person “deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself.
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Here’s the Secret to Creative Problem-Solving
TIME: When you’re presented with a particularly thorny challenge at work, “think outside the box” is a common piece of advice. But figuring out how to do that can be nearly as tough as figuring out the answer you’re seeking in the first place. Now, science offers a solution to help anyone tap into their creative thought process to solve problems.
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That time your boss caught you watching cat videos and said, ‘don’t work too hard’
Forbes: “Don’t work too hard!” Imagine that your boss says this phrase to you: What do they mean? Well, it all depends on the context. If you had been burning the midnight oil and pulling a series of late-nighters, it is likely said with great sincerity. Your boss may be expressing deep concern that you are wearing yourself out and need to get some rest. But consider a different context: your boss says “don’t work too hard” after you are caught watching a cat video on YouTube. In this case, the phrase is intended to be sarcastic – your boss is suggesting that you might not be working hard enough. Read the whole story: Forbes
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How Parents Give Their Kids Math Anxiety
New York Magazine: If figuring out how to split the bill fairly at a restaurant is enough to leave you feeling sweaty and nervous, maybe you are not the most qualified person to help a young kid with his or her math homework. A new study, published online this week in the journal Psychological Science, confirms this, suggesting that kids internalize their parents’ math anxiety — and that when math-anxious parents try to help their kids with their math homework, it often ends up backfiring. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
