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Separating legitimate Ebola concerns from unnecessary fear
PBS: Late today, the Centers for Disease Control reported that it is expanding its Ebola investigation to include passengers on a second flight flown by one of the nurses since diagnosed with the disease. And the airline is notifying passengers who may have flown elsewhere on the same jet. As new details emerge, and as today’s congressional hearing showed, domestic concerns over Ebola are skyrocketing. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 41 percent are very concerned about the outbreak, 36 percent are somewhat concerned. And 45 percent say they are avoiding international travel.
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Don’t Do the Things You Love
The New York Times: Do you like ice cream? Then don’t eat it — at least not every day. At least, that’s what Wendy Wood’s research suggests. In an interview with Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, the psychology professor discusses how people form habits, and how they can change them — but Mihir Patkar at Lifehacker zeros in on her advice for what shouldn’t be habitual. Ms. Wood says, “the more often you eat ice cream, the less pleasure you get from eating it.” She explains: “With repetition, our action tendencies get stronger but our feelings habituate and weaken.
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The Source of Bad Writing
The Wall Street Journal: Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network? The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
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The Dark Side of Empathy
Pacific Standard: Public figures from President Obama to Neil deGrasse Tyson have suggested a lack of empathy is one of our species’ fundamental problems. “Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes,” writes author and prominent business-world thinker Daniel Pink. “Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” A lovely thought. But new research suggests it isn’t always true. A paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that feelings of empathy toward a distressed person can inspire aggressive behavior.
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3 Reasons Holding a Grudge is Bad for Your Health
TIME: “Countless studies have shown that holding grudges and keeping in negative feelings is bad for your mental health, increasing anxiety and frustration,” says Meyers. Case in point: Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that when people were told to nurse a grudge when thinking about wrongdoers, they had stronger negative emotions and greater stress responses (namely, higher heart rate and blood pressure) than those who were instructed to imagine granting forgiveness. Read the whole story: TIME
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An Important New Insight Into How Women Remember Childbirth
New York Magazine: Just in time for Meaghan O'Connell's extremely good (and extremely difficult to read) account of getting an epidural comes a new study in Psychological Science on the question of how women remember their experiences of giving birth. According to a popular theory, the press release explains, when it comes to remembering experiences "we tend to recall the moment of peak intensity and the final moments, which we average and use to form an overall memory of the experience ... [while] the duration of an experience is not all that important to memories — a phenomenon called 'duration neglect.'" The authors of the study wanted to know whether this applies to childbirth as well.
