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Want Lasting Love? It’s Not More Commitment, but Equal Commitment That Matters
It’s not partners’ individual commitments that make the most difference in how well they address conflict, but rather how well their levels of commitment match up.
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True Love May Wait—But Waiting Won’t Make You a Safer Lover Later On
Whether sex education focuses only on abstinence or teaches students about contraception and other topics as well, it all shares one main message: Wait. In abstinence-only, students are exhorted to wait for sex until they’re married. In “comprehensive” or “abstinence-plus,” the idea is to delay sexual relations until . . . later. “The underlying assumption is that delay reduces sexual risk-taking”—and with it unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, says University of South Florida psychologist Marina A. Bornovalova.
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Happiness Has a Dark Side
It seems like everyone wants to be happier and the pursuit of happiness is one of the foundations of American life. But even happiness can have a dark side, according to the authors of a new review article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. They say that happiness shouldn't be thought of as a universally good thing, and outline four ways in which this is the case. Indeed, not all types and degrees of happiness are equally good, and even pursuing happiness can make people feel worse. People who want to feel happier can choose from a multitude of books that tell them how to do it.
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The Ties that Bind: Grandparents and their Grandchildren
Close your eyes for a moment, open your treasure trove of memories and take a step back in time to your childhood. Do you remember your grandfather gently scooping you up into his warm and comforting embrace? Or sitting by your grandmother’s side as she lovingly baked pies chock full of delicious, juicy warm apples sprinkled with crumbly cinnamon bits?
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Dusting for Fingerprints – It Ain’t CSI
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and -voilá- the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison. If only it were that easy. The reality is that this common but crucial part of an investigation is done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and false convictions of innocent people.
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Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind
What does consciousness do? Theories vary, but most neurologists and cognitive psychologists agree that we need awareness for integration. That is, unconscious processing can take in one object or word at a time. But when it comes to pulling together disparate stimuli into a coherent, complex scene, consciousness gets to work. Now, new research by four Israeli psychologists—Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University, and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of Hebrew University of Jerusalem—suggests that scientists have been underestimating the abilities of the unconscious mind. “Integration can happen even when we’re unaware of the stimulus,” says Mudrik.