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2022’s Top Research Includes Flavor-Sensitive Fetuses and Less-Lonely Older Adults
The most impactful psychological science research published in 2022 reveals that new understandings of human behavior continue to resonate with wide audiences.
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Wharton Professor Adam Grant Makes Case for Four-Day Week
Executives looking to boost productivity on their teams might want to consider an experiment: cutting a day of work from the week. A four-day workweek could increase employee wellbeing while improving the pace of work inside companies, said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit Tuesday, Mr. Grant said that when companies ran pilots of four-day weeks, many found that company performance either improved or was sustained, while employees became more focused. ...
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Want to Learn From Your Mistakes and Be More Successful? Science Says Avoid the Dreaded Ostrich Effect
I owned Blue Apron stock a few years ago. I'm unsure, but I think I purchased it at around $20 per share. (You'll see why I'm unsure in a moment.) Since I owned it in my Roth IRA, any gains weren't taxed, so for a while I made small profits selling during spikes and buying back during dips. Because I was basically day-trading the stock, I checked it multiple times a day. Then the price dropped by a few dollars a share, and then a dollar or so more. So I stopped checking so often. Soon my stake was down about 50 percent. I rationalized -- and consoled myself -- by deciding it was a long-term play, and I didn't look at it for a few months.
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The Acute Grief of a Friend Breakup
If I remember correctly, my first breakup was with a kid named Anthony sometime in the seventh grade. I’ve forgotten the specifics, but I think our friends did the dirty work for us, feverishly ferrying our directives across the middle-school hallway like carrier pigeons. I don’t remember how long we were together — three weeks? Four? — but I’m pretty sure that I cried afterwards. I know that I cried after my last breakup, this time carried out over the phone with a guy named Dan sometime in that foggy precipice between college and adulthood. There were plenty of breakups in between — a few over the phone, several in person, some fizzling out slowly, others blowing up like a grenade.
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How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health
Awe can mean many things. It can be witnessing a total solar eclipse. Or seeing your child take her first steps. Or hearing Lizzo perform live. But, while many of us know it when we feel it, awe is not easy to define. “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s vast, yes.
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She’s a Happiness Professor. Her Lessons Are Helping Her Beat Burnout
A dental emergency was Laurie Santos’ wake-up call. It wasn’t even her own: One of Santos’ students at Yale University needed her sign-off before getting some work done. Instead of feeling sympathy for her student, Santos mostly felt annoyed about the extra paperwork she’d need to complete. That reaction was unusual and concerning for Santos, a psychologist who teaches Yale’s single most popular course, on the science of happiness. She knew that cynicism, irritability, and exhaustion—all of which had been gnawing at her recently—were telltale signs of burnout, a condition that almost 30% of U.S.
