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The Source of Bad Writing
The Wall Street Journal: Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network? The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
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The Dark Side of Empathy
Pacific Standard: Public figures from President Obama to Neil deGrasse Tyson have suggested a lack of empathy is one of our species’ fundamental problems. “Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes,” writes author and prominent business-world thinker Daniel Pink. “Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” A lovely thought. But new research suggests it isn’t always true. A paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that feelings of empathy toward a distressed person can inspire aggressive behavior.
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3 Reasons Holding a Grudge is Bad for Your Health
TIME: “Countless studies have shown that holding grudges and keeping in negative feelings is bad for your mental health, increasing anxiety and frustration,” says Meyers. Case in point: Research published in the journal Psychological Science found that when people were told to nurse a grudge when thinking about wrongdoers, they had stronger negative emotions and greater stress responses (namely, higher heart rate and blood pressure) than those who were instructed to imagine granting forgiveness. Read the whole story: TIME
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Call for Papers: 28th World Congress of the International Association for Suicide Prevention
The 28th World Congress of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) will be held in Montreal, Canada, June 16–20, 2015. This biannual event, sponsored by the World Health Organization, is the world’s largest gathering of researchers, practitioners, helpline workers, program planners, graduate students and persons concerned with suicide bereavement. Over 700 persons from different disciplines around the world will meet to discuss new discoveries and technologies in suicide prevention. The official languages are English and French and there will be simultaneous translation for all plenary sessions and a selection of parallel sessions.
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An Important New Insight Into How Women Remember Childbirth
New York Magazine: Just in time for Meaghan O'Connell's extremely good (and extremely difficult to read) account of getting an epidural comes a new study in Psychological Science on the question of how women remember their experiences of giving birth. According to a popular theory, the press release explains, when it comes to remembering experiences "we tend to recall the moment of peak intensity and the final moments, which we average and use to form an overall memory of the experience ... [while] the duration of an experience is not all that important to memories — a phenomenon called 'duration neglect.'" The authors of the study wanted to know whether this applies to childbirth as well.
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Teenage Girls Are Exposed to More Stressors that Increase Depression Risk
Adolescence is often a turbulent time, and it is marked by substantially increased rates of depressive symptoms, especially among girls. New research indicates that this gender difference may be the result of girls’ greater exposure to stressful interpersonal events, making them more likely to ruminate, and contributing to their risk of depression. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
