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Feeling Small in the Face of Nature Makes People More Generous
Smithsonian: From the majestic towers of Monument Valley to the stars painted on the ceiling of Grand Central Station, awe-inspiring wonders are all around. Sometimes taking a moment to stop and appreciate something like the Grand Canyon or a clear, starry night can make you feel like a tiny part of a massive universe swirling around. And that sensation of being a small speck might actually make you a kinder, more generous person. ... "Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function,” said Paul Piff, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at UC Irvine, in a statement.
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What’s “Fair” Depends on Where You Come From
The mentality that “you get what you earn” is widely accepted as what is “fair” in most Western societies. But is this concept of distributive justice universally considered fair, or is it a culture-bound phenomenon? Marie Schӓfer and colleagues wanted find out. Their research, recently published in Psychological Science, examined how children in three different societies made merit distributions. The researchers chose to look at German children as a representation of modern Western culture, children from the Samburu African tribe to represent gerontocratic society (rule by elders), and children from the ≠All Hai||om African tribe to represent an egalitarian society.
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‘Inoculating’ Against Road Rage
People’s inability to contain their explosive anger behind the wheel has led to stabbings, beatings, shootings, and fatal crashes. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reported that, "at least 1,500 people a year are seriously injured or killed in senseless traffic disputes." In some cases, road rage is essentially the result of cognitive distortions, and there are promising evidence-based interventions that teach aggressive drivers to recognize that dysfunctional thinking, as researchers Christine Wickens, Robert Mann, and David Wiesenthal pointed out in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Fostering Attention for Human Needs
Decades at the forefront of attention research have convinced APS William James Fellow Michael I. Posner that attention can literally save lives: He witnessed a group of smokers reduce their cigarette consumption by 60% after just 2 weeks of mindfulness training. He confirmed an increase in brain activity in areas related to self-control among these study participants. Posner’s Keynote Address kicked off the the 27th APS Annual Convention in New York City, where 5,300 attendees met to discuss cutting-edge research on behavioral development, attention, clinical interventions, and more.
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Why Children Need Playhouses
The Wall Street Journal: My backyard playhouse didn’t have a turret. Or a Palladian window. Or AC or running water or the stained-glass windows found in the $30,000 miniature mansions that some parents are having custom-built for their offspring these days. My own parents clearly didn’t care much what my playhouse looked like: It was a sagging, wooden moving crate, maybe 5 feet tall and open at one end, that they’d salvaged, plopped beside the prickly raspberry bushes behind our suburban Alberta home, and painted a muddy ’70s brown. They showed even less interest in what my three neighborhood friends and I did within it.
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Can Envy Be Good for You?
The New Yorker: How do we respond when we encounter people who are more successful than we are? Often, we imagine two paths: admiration and envy. Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment—we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility. Envy, by contrast, is thought to be inherently bad—a “feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. If he can, Bertrand Russell wrote, the envious person “deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself.
