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You’re Expecting the Wrong Things to Make You Happy
Inc.: If you want to take a selfie to record a happy moment, you'll probably reach for your phone at that awesome concert you've been dying to see or on a memorable night out with an old friend. You'd never think to snap a shot of you sipping a cup of tea on some random Tuesday or having a quick chat with an acquaintance. But maybe, if you really want to see yourself at your peak of well being, you should start taking way more boring pictures. According to a new series of studies published in Psychological Science, recalling exactly these sort of mundane moments makes us happy.
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Hand Size Appears to Stay Constant, Provides Natural ‘Ruler’
People tend to perceive their dominant hand as staying relatively the same size even when it’s magnified, lending support to the idea that we use our hand as a constant perceptual “ruler” to measure the world around us. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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How Long Does It Take to Get to Tatooine?
The New Yorker: On an early autumn morning in 2009, Randall Munroe, a NASA physicist turned full-time cartoonist, was teaching a weekend physics class to high-school students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The course was part of an M.I.T. program designed to introduce students to topics ranging from sculpture and ancient Greek to geoengineering. Though Munroe’s lecture that day had the lively title “Solar Panels, Hand Grenades, and Blowing Up the Moon: How to Think About Energy,” for the first hour and a half he adhered to a fairly standard lecture format. What is energy? What can it do? How do you know how much you have? The students reacted as, well, typical students.
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Book Review: ‘The Marshmallow Test’ by Walter Mischel
The Wall Street Journal: When video of Adm. William H. McRaven's 2014 commencement address at the University of Texas at Austin was posted online, the speech went viral. Millions of viewers will remember the core message summed up in his memorable line: "If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed." The Navy SEAL veteran recalled that "if you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.
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Many young people are not in a position to splurge
Marketplace: The recession deprived many young people of a launching pad into career jobs and financial adulthood. And that means they also aren’t launching into some of the major investments that have traditionally been part of the American Dream; such as purchasing a first car or a first home, or starting a first retirement account. “Because the economy has hurt them so badly, they’ve had a delayed adulthood,” says Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding in New York, which conducts market research on the workplace and consumer expectations of this age cohort.
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How To Get Children To Behave Without Hitting Them
NPR: There's plenty of evidence that spanking, paddling or hitting children doesn't improve their behavior in the long run and actually makes it worse. But the science never trumps emotion, according to Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Parenting Center and author of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit. After NFL star Adrian Peterson was indicted for child abuse after disciplining his 4-year-old son by hitting him with a switch, there's been a lot of conversation about how race and culture affect parents' approach to discipline. OK, what about the science?
