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Growing Up on Easy Street Has Its Own Dangers
The New York Times: When Thomas Gilbert Jr. was arrested on Monday and charged with killing his wealthy father with a gunshot to the head, the rubbernecking and tut-tutting began almost immediately. The pair had argued about financial issues in the past, according to police. Tabloid reports suggested that there had been a disagreement over the 30-year-old’s allowance before he apparently pulled the trigger. So Twitter responded as Twitter does.
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To Thine Own Self: The Psychology of Authenticity
One of the core principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-Step addiction recovery program, is authenticity. At least two of the steps emphasize the importance of honest moral inventory, and the AA “chip”—the medallion handed out to commemorate periods of continued sobriety—reads: “To thine own self be true.” The people who created AA back in the 1930s were not scientists or philosophers, but the early literature contains many insights that scientists have verified in intervening years. The link between authenticity and morality and psychological health is not intuitively obvious.
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AWE: FOR ALTRUISM AND HEALTH?
Slate: By now you’re probably mulling over some of your New Year’s resolutions – do five planks a day, eat more quinoa, keep better track of expenses. Let me add one more to your list: seek more daily awe. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world. Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings – e.g., gods humans invoked in the village ritual houses that sprang up some 10,000 years ago, the spirits Greek families felt guarded over their fates, and encounters with the divine at the center of the world’s great spiritual traditions.
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Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
The New Yorker: In May, 2002, Martin Seligman, the Director of the Positive Psychology Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, was giving a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base. It had been sponsored by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and some hundred listeners were in attendance. The topic of Seligman’s talk was simple: for a good part of his career, he had studied a concept that came to be known as learned helplessness, the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control.
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Your Friends Sort of Know When You’ll Die
Pacific Standard: Your friends know you better than you know yourself. They even know how long you’ve got to live. Well, roughly speaking they do. It’s not that they’ve got extrasensory perception, time machines, or membership in the secret conspiracy that surrounds you. It’s just that psychological traits like conscientiousness and emotional stability are decent predictors of longevity, and your friends’ beliefs about your traits are, when averaged, more reliable than your own. Researchers know that personality traits affect health—conscientiousness, for example, turns out to be a pretty good predictor for risk of death.
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Why the modern world is bad for your brain
The Guardian: Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves.
