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AI Doesn’t Care if You’re Polite to It. You Should Be Anyway
I often catch myself prefacing my queries to ChatGPT with a “please” and concluding with a “thank you.” Apparently, I am not alone. A December 2024 survey published by TechRadar found that approximately 67% of U.S. AI users are also polite and show gratitude toward AI search engines. ... What’s true of gratitude is also true of kindness and generosity more generally. Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of the book “The How of Happiness,” conducted experiments where participants were asked to perform “five small acts of kindness per week.” She found that these small, frequent acts led to consistent and significant increases in happiness.
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Real Risk to Youth Mental Health Is ‘Addictive Use,’ Not Screen Time Alone, Study Finds
As Americans scramble to respond to rising rates of suicidal behavior among youth, many policymakers have locked in on an alarming metric: the number of hours a day that American children spend glued to a glowing screen. ... “We have known for over a decade now that screen time is a flawed measure, but we continue to tally time spent on screens instead of asking how young people are spending their time online and why they want to be there,” said Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science in informatics at the University of California, Irvine. ... Jean Twenge, a psychologist who was not involved in the new study, came to a similar conclusion.
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Feeling Betrayed By a Family Member? Here’s How To Cope
Social rejection by someone close to you can feel as acute as physical pain. If you felt as though your heart broke, or you’d been punched in the gut, that’s because social rejection and physical pain share the same neural circuitry in the brain, according to research by Naomi Eisenberger, a professor of social psychology at UCLA. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense: As social animals, we benefit from avoiding rejection. “To the extent that social rejection or exclusion is a threat to survival, feeling ‘hurt’ by these experiences may be an adaptive way to prevent them,” Eisenberger wrote. ... Write a letter but don’t send it.
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Call for Nominations: 2026 John J. Carty Award In the Social Sciences
Nominations must be submitted online by Monday, October 6, 2025 and include, a letter describing the candidate’s work and why they should receive the award; the nominee’s curriculum vitae, and a list of the nominees most significant publications.
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Do You Live In a ‘Lonelygenic Environment’? Being In Nature May Help
Loneliness has become a global public health concern. Countries including the United Kingdom and Japan have appointed “ministers of loneliness” to help tackle the problem. In the United States, then-Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a public health advisory on loneliness, stating that the risk for premature death from loneliness is akin to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. ... “There is some evidence that those who spend time in nature are less likely to report being lonely,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.
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The Growing Belief in ‘Love at First Sight’
The idea seems so old-fashioned, so sentimental: that you could fall for someone “at first sight,” deeply and instantly. It’s straight out of the classic romance dramas—Jack’s gaze freezing when he sees Rose on the Titanic’s deck; The Notebook’s Noah lighting up and asking, “Who’s this girl?” when he spies Allie across the amusement park. As a general rule, the stuff of popular love stories is not the stuff of real life. We know this, right? ... But once Gesselman stepped back and thought about the finding, she said, it made some sense to her. In 2014, dating apps were relatively new.
