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Lunch break: Experience vs. memory
The Washington Post: Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of behavioral economics, explains in a TED talk how our “experiencing selves” and “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently: Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Memory Lapse
The New York Times: A while ago, I was going through my files when I came across a cache of partly crumbled photographs. One was of me holding the sight box for the M252 mortar in Garden City, N.Y., parking lot. In another, I sat with Oum in the open hatch of a UH-1W at Camp White Horse, outside Nasiriyah, Iraq. There was another of me and the guys at the 2003 Marine Corps birthday ball. I looked like a boy in those photos. At the bottom of the stack I found one photo of us standing with First Sgt. Allen. I was wearing a set of borrowed Alphas; she wore a black evening gown, First Sergeant stood adorned in dress blues, everyone was smiling, teeth shining.
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Tantrum Tamer: New Ways Parents Can Stop Bad Behavior
The Wall Street Journal: Forget everything you may have read about coping with children's temper tantrums. Time-outs, sticker charts, television denial—for many, none of these measures will actually result in long-term behavior change, according to researchers at two academic institutions. Instead, a set of techniques known as "parent management training" is proving so helpful to families struggling with a child's unmanageable behavior that clinicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are starting to adopt them. Aimed at teaching parents to encourage sustained behavior change, it was developed in part at parenting research clinics at Yale University and King's College London.
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Beautiful people ‘likely to earn more money’
The West Australian: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin says beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S. Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In Beauty Pays he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Using his research and worldwide studies he's collected, Hamermesh notes that beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse.
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Smile like your happiness depends on it
The Boston Globe: Smile, you’re on Candid Camera! That seems to be the lesson of a new study by psychologists at the University of Virginia. They found that both male and female freshmen who smiled more intensely in their Facebook profile photos were not only more satisfied with their lives as freshmen, but also more satisfied with their lives several years later as seniors, even controlling for freshman-year life satisfaction and extroversion. The connection between smiling and subsequent life satisfaction appeared to be at least partly explained by the quality of one’s social relationships. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Understanding Mindfulness Meditation
MSN News: 現在人工作壓力大，需要更多的紓壓管道，於是有越來越多人開始學習冥想、靜坐等古老的方法。一項發表在《心理科學》（Psychological Science）期刊的研究發現，透過冥想或是靜坐等方式，可以對我們的身體有相當大的助益，其中最重要的就是可以改變免疫系統，降低血壓，並且增強認知 功能。（圖片翻攝自Daily Mail網站） 在東方的宗教或是靈性修練當中，靜坐或是冥想 都是不可或缺的一環，而且逐漸在世界各地蔚為風潮，被很多人用來紓解龐大的生活壓力。哈佛大學跟久斯塔斯李比 希大學（Justus Liebig Univeristy）的研究人員發現，冥想除了可以幫助提升免疫系統外，還可以讓心理健康，證明冥想不是一個空泛的方法，而是一個有效的技巧。 主導這項研究的布麗塔（Britta Hazel）博士表示，之 Read the whole story: MSN News
