-
How long will you live? Ask your friends.
When actor James Gandolfini died in the summer of 2013, at age 51, a prominent cardiologist described him as “a heart attack waiting to happen.” The award-winning Sopranos star was overweight and inactive, and on the evening he died, he had indulged himself in a diet of rum, beer and fatty foods. In short, he didn’t take care of himself, and this lack of discipline no doubt contributed to his untimely death. Scientists have long known that personality is a good indicator of future health and mortality. In fact, personality traits are better predictors of lifespan than either intelligence or socioeconomic status.
-
Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don’t Think They’re Smart
The Atlantic: For most students, science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) subjects are not intuitive or easy. Learning in general—and STEM in particular—requires repeated trial and error, and a student’s lack of confidence can sometimes stand in her own way. And although teachers and parents may think they are doing otherwise, these adults inadvertently help kids make up their minds early on that they're not natural scientists or “math people,” which leads them to pursue other subjects instead. So what's the best way to help kids feel confident enough to stay the STEM course?
-
DISCOVERING THE ECOLOGY OF THE MIND
Science 2034: The forthcoming movie “Inside Out” from Disney-Pixar explores the life of a young girl through characters who each represent an emotion like joy, fear, anger or disgust. While boiling each emotion down to a distinct personality with specific duties makes for an entertaining movie, science is beginning to reveal the flaws in this traditional essentialist view of how our emotions work. Indeed, research in my Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University reveals that emotions such as anger and sadness are not fixed mental categories, each with its own universal biological fingerprint.
-
Can Money Buy You Happiness?
The Wall Street Journal: It’s an age-old question: Can money buy happiness? Over the past few years, new research has given us a much deeper understanding of the relationship between what we earn and how we feel. Economists have been scrutinizing the links between income and happiness across nations, and psychologists have probed individuals to find out what really makes us tick when it comes to cash. The results, at first glance, may seem a bit obvious: Yes, people with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who struggle to get by. But dig a little deeper into the findings, and they get a lot more surprising—and a lot more useful.
-
Is academic science sexist?
Science: There has never been a better time for women to enter academic careers in math-intensive science fields. That’s the message Cornell University psychologist Stephen Ceci says he was hoping to get across in last Sunday’s controversial op-ed inThe New York Times, “Academic Science Isn’t Sexist,” co-authored by Wendy Williams, also a psychologist at Cornell. But that’s not how the article, which attempts to summarize a 67-pagepaper they co-authored with economists Donna Ginther of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and Shulamit Kahnof Boston University, came across to some readers.
-
New Insights Into the ‘It’s So Cute I Could Eat It’ Phenomenon
New York Magazine: Last year, psychology at long last acknowledged the existence of "cute aggression," that urge to nom-nom-nom a baby or a kitten or some other impossibly cute thing. This week, some of those same researchers expand on their earlier work with a new paper in Psychological Science that identifies why something so adorable would provoke such weird and slightly violent impulses. It seems this incongruous feeling is much like nervous laughter or tears of joy: It helps us regulate our emotions and bring us back down to a more even-keeled state after an unsustainable emotional extreme. Read the whole story: New York Magazine
