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Once-In-a-Lifetime Experiences Are Both Joyous and Depressing
Discover: Skydiving, winning a sexy sports car or scaling Mt. Everest sure sound like extraordinary experiences that would fill us with boundless joy to last a lifetime. But a new study finds that’s not always so: extraordinary experiences can actually generate unhappy feelings as well, because others in your ordinary social group are unable to relate to your stories. To test the effect of extraordinary experiences on social dynamics, researchers set up a simple experiment. They recruited 68 men and women for the study, and subdivided them into four-person groups.
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What Sends Teens Toward Triumph Or Tribulation
The Wall Street Journal: Laurence Steinberg calls his authoritative new book on the teenage mind “Age of Opportunity.” Most parents think of adolescence, instead, as an age of crisis. In fact, the same distinctive teenage traits can lead to either triumph or disaster. On the crisis side, Dr. Steinberg outlines the grim statistics. Even though teenagers are close to the peak of strength and health, they are more likely to die in accidents, suicides and homicides than younger or older people. And teenagers are dangerous to others as well. Study after study shows that criminal and antisocial behavior rises precipitously in adolescence and then falls again. Why?
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Geteiltes Leid ist doppeltes Leid (Shared pain is double suffering)
Sueddeutsche: Geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid? Im Gegenteil. Der angenudelte Spruch sollte dringend eine Auffrischung erfahren und künftig korrekt so lauten: Geteiltes Leid ist doppeltes Leid. Gut möglich, dass dieser Vorschlag die Zustimmung der drei Psychologen Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark und John Bargh erfährt. Die drei Wissenschaftler von der Universität Yale berichten nämlich im Fachmagazin Psychological Science (online), dass Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse intensiver wahrgenommen werden, wenn diese mit anderen Menschen geteilt werden. Das gilt im positiven wie auch im negativen Sinne: Ein angenehme Sache mit einem anderen Menschen zu teilen, verleiht diesem Erlebnis zusätzlichen Glanz.
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Meet Facebook’s Mr. Nice
The New York Times: Of Facebook’s 7,185 employees, Arturo Bejar may have the most difficult job. No, he is not responsible for increasing advertising revenue or keeping the website alive 24 hours a day. Mr. Bejar has a much more inscrutable task: teaching the site’s 1.3 billion users, especially its tens of millions of teenagers, how to be nice and respectful to one another. Respectful? Online? Ha! That’s never going to happen. Everyone knows that social media is an unwinnable game of who can be meaner. If Mr. Bejar thinks he can make Facebook users nice, he is — to borrow a popular Facebook comment — just stupid! Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Risky Drivers More Likely to Ignore Road Rules Even as Pedestrians
We’ve all seen it before -- distracted pedestrians who dart across the street without thinking and drivers who speed through intersections and stoplights as if they owned the road. Depending on how you typically get around, it may be tempting to generalize about the other camp and conclude that either pedestrians or drivers are more prone to unwise behavior. But new research shows that unsafe road behavior is more about the individual person than it is about the particular mode of transport: Some people are just more likely to take risks on the road, whether they’re behind the wheel or not.
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Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class
The Washington Post: Clay Shirky is, as he explains below, a “pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor.” Shirky is a professor of media studies at New York University, holding a joint appointment as an arts professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the journalism institute. He is a leading voice on the effect technology has had on society — and vice versa — and has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade. For years Shirky has allowed his students to bring laptops, tablets and phones into class and use them at will. But he just told students to put them away.
