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DISCOVERING THE ECOLOGY OF THE MIND
Science 2034: The forthcoming movie “Inside Out” from Disney-Pixar explores the life of a young girl through characters who each represent an emotion like joy, fear, anger or disgust. While boiling each emotion down to a distinct personality with specific duties makes for an entertaining movie, science is beginning to reveal the flaws in this traditional essentialist view of how our emotions work. Indeed, research in my Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University reveals that emotions such as anger and sadness are not fixed mental categories, each with its own universal biological fingerprint.
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Can Money Buy You Happiness?
The Wall Street Journal: It’s an age-old question: Can money buy happiness? Over the past few years, new research has given us a much deeper understanding of the relationship between what we earn and how we feel. Economists have been scrutinizing the links between income and happiness across nations, and psychologists have probed individuals to find out what really makes us tick when it comes to cash. The results, at first glance, may seem a bit obvious: Yes, people with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who struggle to get by. But dig a little deeper into the findings, and they get a lot more surprising—and a lot more useful.
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Is academic science sexist?
Science: There has never been a better time for women to enter academic careers in math-intensive science fields. That’s the message Cornell University psychologist Stephen Ceci says he was hoping to get across in last Sunday’s controversial op-ed inThe New York Times, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist,” co-authored by Wendy Williams, also a psychologist at Cornell. But that’s not how the article, which attempts to summarize a 67-pagepaper they co-authored with economists Donna Ginther of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and Shulamit Kahnof Boston University, came across to some readers.
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New Insights Into the ‘It’s So Cute I Could Eat It’ Phenomenon
New York Magazine: Last year, psychology at long last acknowledged the existence of "cute aggression," that urge to nom-nom-nom a baby or a kitten or some other impossibly cute thing. This week, some of those same researchers expand on their earlier work with a new paper in Psychological Science that identifies why something so adorable would provoke such weird and slightly violent impulses. It seems this incongruous feeling is much like nervous laughter or tears of joy: It helps us regulate our emotions and bring us back down to a more even-keeled state after an unsustainable emotional extreme. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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How Parents Teach Children to Tidy Up Toys
The Wall Street Journal To keep the toys tidy, Susan Lutz Klauda finally turned to her Excel spreadsheet skills. Dr. Klauda, a 35-year-old Washington, D.C., education researcher, decided she was “fed up with the toys overtaking our living room,” especially after the birth of her second child earlier this year. She created a spreadsheet that labeled more than 100 household toys by category (arts & crafts, building sets and games) and developmental level (baby, toddler or preschool). Then she brought most of them to basement storage. Every couple of weeks, she selects a few to bring upstairs.
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Whether you face your past or walk into your future, time and space are complex
The Guardian: Time is a deeply confusing thing for us humans to think about – and the ways in which we talk about it don’t always help. For instance, here’s a heads-up to my editors: if you commission an article from me, then try to “move the deadline forward”, don’t expect me to send it to you sooner.
