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Brief Intervention May Prevent Increased Risk of Depression in Teens
A one-time intervention that educates teens about the changeable nature of personality traits may prevent an increase in depressive symptoms often seen during the transition to high school.
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The Bonding Power of Shared Suffering
Pacific Standard: Managers: Are you having trouble melding your employees into a cohesive group? Is getting them to trust and cooperate with one another proving to be a challenge? Well, newly published research offers an effective, if not especially ethical, solution to your problem: Inflict some pain. A new study from Australia suggests rituals such as arduous initiation rites serve a real purpose. It reports experiencing physical discomfort is an effective way for a group of strangers to cohere into a close-knit group.
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How Smiling Can Backfire
Scientific American: If you’re reading this at a desk, do me a favor. Grab a pen or pencil and hold the end between your teeth so it doesn’t touch your lips. As you read on, stay that way—science suggests you’ll find this article more amusing if you do. Why? Notice that holding a pencil in this manner puts your face in the shape of a smile. And research in psychology says that the things we do—smiling at a joke, giving a gift to a friend, or even running from a bear—influence how we feel. This idea—that actions affect feelings—runs counter to how we generally think about our emotions.
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Awe, With And Without The Gods
NPR: In a 2006 article for the Los Angeles Times, Sam Harris identified 10 myths about atheism, among them the idea that "atheists are closed to spiritual experience." Harris explained: "There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly." ... So why the persistent idea that awe is inextricably linked to theism? And are "scientific awe" and "religious awe" fundamentally different, or deep down one and the same? To be sure, awe is a multifaceted emotion, and one that's only recently become the target of systematic psychological research.
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Learning How to Exert Self-Control
The New York Times: PARIS — NOT many Ivy League professors are associated with a type of candy. But Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia, doesn’t mind being one of them. “I’m the marshmallow man,” he says, with a modest shrug. I’m with Mr. Mischel (pronounced me-SHELL) in his tiny home office in Paris, where he spends the summer with his girlfriend. We’re watching grainy video footage of preschoolers taking the “marshmallow test,” the legendary experiment on self-control that he invented nearly 50 years ago. In the video, a succession of 5-year-olds sit at a table with cookies on it (the kids could pick their own treats).
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Don’t just photograph life’s highlights, study suggests
The Boston Globe: We assiduously document life’s obvious highlights: Our cellphones are filled with photos of the first day of school, graduations, weddings, and birthdays. A new study by a team of Harvard Business School researchers suggests, however, that we underestimate the pleasure we will gain from rediscovering our most mundane moments. In fact, the most boring, everyday stuff may give us more pleasure in retrospect than our extraordinary experiences.
