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When Thankfulness Can Hurt Us
U.S. News & World Report: Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University, is one of those guys. The good kind. The type who, when the waiter brings the check, doesn’t miss a beat and offers his credit card before his friends do. But sometimes, one of Kashdan’s friends takes the gesture as a challenge and insists on paying the bill himself. That’s where things can go wrong. Instead of “thank you” and “you're welcome,” it’s “I got it” and “no, no, no, I got it.” Instead of warmth and appreciation, it’s discomfort and confusion.
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Complex jobs ‘may protect memory’
BBC: A study of more than 1,000 Scottish 70-year-olds found that those who had had complex jobs scored better on memory and thinking tests. One theory is a more stimulating environment helps build up a "cognitive reserve" to help buffer the brain against age-related decline, The research was reported in Neurology. The team, from Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, is now planning more work to look at how lifestyle and work interact to affect memory loss. Those taking part in the study took tests designed to assess memory, processing speed and general thinking ability, as well as filling in a questionnaire about their working life.
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Debate Persists Over Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders, Long After ‘Sybil’
The New York Times: The notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound. Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating personas.
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How to Defeat the Impulse Buy
The New York Times: As Thanksgiving approaches, so does the holiday shopping season. Once again, a day traditionally meant to celebrate gratitude will inaugurate a month of rampant consumerism. As a psychologist who studies decision making, I’m acutely aware that marketers know how the mind works, and they aren’t hesitant to use that knowledge to stoke consumers’ desires and lessen their self-control. Tactics emphasizing scarcity (“only 10 televisions at this price in stock”) and delayed cost (“0 percent interest until 2016”) are employed to great effect.
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Taking Notes May Impede Your Ability to Remember Stuff
Entrepreneur: We take notes because we want to remember all kinds of stuff: A niece's birthday, the answer to a test question, what to buy at the grocery store, etc. etc. But a new study published in the journal Memory & Cognition suggests that instead of enhancing our memory, writing stuff down actually makes us more forgetful because we know we can just look at our notes later. In the study, researchers had participants play multiple rounds of Concentration (the game where you need to remember the identity and location of pairs of cards in order to match them).
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Can Absence Make the Mind Grow Fonder?
The Atlantic: Of our modern marketplace, The Economist wrote: "Choice seduces the modern consumer at every turn." But what happens when we stop consuming something? Does that make us want it more? Or less? The question of whether something becomes more attractive the less you have of it depends on many factors. Having access to a favorite thing (for me, that'd be tomato soup) usually doesn't decrease someone's desire for it. Xianchi Dai and Ayelet Fishbach are authors ofa new study on this seemingly simple question: "When a product becomes temporarily unavailable, does desire for it increase or decrease over time?" The gut reaction to reading that statement is probably: Yes!
