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As Prices Increase During a Recession, Mental Health Usually Decreases
In periods of economic recession, negative mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and self-harm tend to increase, according to a study in Behavioral Sciences. Adverse changes in the labor market create wage cuts and layoffs. And for those who remain employed, decreased workplace safety standards and increased workloads are catalysts for poor mental health outcomes like worthlessness, anxiety, shame, and frustration. “High inflation typically causes anger and frustration, especially toward elected officials,” says Jim Butkiewicz, macroeconomist and economics professor at the University of Delaware.
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What We’ve Learned Through Sports Psychology Research
Since the early years of this century, it has been commonplace for computerized analyses of athletic statistics to guide a baseball manager’s choice of pinch hitter, a football coach’s decision to punt or pass, or a basketball team’s debate over whether to trade a star player for a draft pick. But many sports experts who actually watch the games know that the secret to success is not solely in computer databases, but also inside the players’ heads. So perhaps psychologists can offer as much insight into athletic achievement as statistics gurus do. Sports psychology has, after all, been around a lot longer than computer analytics.
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Identifying Talent in Business, Sports, and Education
A new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology: Performance Science led by Andy Parra-Martinez at the University of Arkansas “describes the general status, trends, and evolution of research on talent identification across multiple fields globally over the last 80 years,” by drawing from the Scopus and Web of Science databases and conducting a bibliometric analysis of 2,502 documents. Bibliometric analysis is a way of understanding the structure and citation patterns of research around a given topic, in this case, talent identification research. ...
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The Remarkable Power of Holding Hands With Someone You Love
Q: I’m curious why humans hold hands. Is there a biological reason it’s such a common part of relationships across so many cultures? A: Holding hands exerts striking effects on our emotional state, especially when it’s with a romantic partner: It can help lower blood pressure, reduce pain and buffer stressful experiences. A 2021 experiment confirmed the soothing effect of holding a spouse’s hand while watching scenes from horror films such as “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” The simple gesture can limit the impact stress has on our autonomic nervous system, which regulates unconscious bodily functions such as pupil dilation.
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Finding It Tough to Motivate Yourself? These Strategies Can Help.
Many people think that motivation is the key to changing habits — and that you either have it or you don’t. But motivation is not a psychological trait or personality characteristic. It’s something you can cultivate. “It’s about setting yourself up for success,” said behavioral scientist Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.” “Create an environment that’s conducive to making the choices you want to make.
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Love Languages Are Fake, Scientists Say
The concept of "love languages," first theorized by a Baptist preacher in the early 90s, has had a vice grip on pop psychology for decades — but now, some scientists are calling bull. In a new paper published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, researchers from the University of Toronto Mississauga took on the public's "obsession with love languages." They found, per their close reading of ten relationship science studies, that there just isn't a lot of "strong empirical support" for the theory. ...
