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Where Do Feelings Come From?
We often assume that our feelings are responses to the world around us. A friend gives you a fun gift, you feel joy. A driver cuts you off in traffic, you feel frustration. But what
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Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It.
There is an upside to feeling angry. According to research published this week in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” anger is more helpful at motivating people to overcome obstacles and meet their goals than a
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Can Tracking Your Moods Make You Happier?
Tracking daily steps can motivate us to walk more. Tracking sleep can reveal problems such as sleep apnea. Can tracking our moods make us happier? There are now many tech ways to log where you fall on
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Decoding Emotions
We like to think that all humans are born with the same core emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness and disgust. But what if that’s not true? This week, psychologist Batja Mesquita offers a different model of emotions
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How Universal Are Our Emotions?
There’s nothing like migration to reveal how things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture. When I left India for college in England, I was surprised to find that pinching my Adam’s apple didn’t
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The Happiness Data That Wrecks a Freudian Theory
Does success make us miserable? Sigmund Freud was one of the first to propose this peculiar form of distress in an essay he published more than a century ago. It was a theory built around
