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People Are More Moral in the Morning
Scientific American Mind: Most of us strive to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions. A new study suggests that our moral compass is more reliable when we face those decisions in the morning rather than later in the day. In a series of studies at Harvard University and at the University of Utah, 327 men and women participated in tasks designed to measure cheating or lying behavior either in the morning or in the afternoon. For instance, in one study the subjects attempted to solve math problems, some of which were impossible, knowing they would be paid five cents for every solved problem.
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Marriage and Poverty
Inside Higher Ed: In today’s Academic Minute, Matthew Johnson of the State University of New York at Binghamton explores the link between poverty and marriage stability. Johnson is a professor of psychology at Binghamton and director of the university's Marriage and Family Studies Laboratory. Read the whole story: Inside Higher Ed
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking Michael S. Vendetti, Aaron Wu, and Keith J. Holyoak The authors examined whether inducing a general mindset using a verbal-analogy task would promote more abstract thinking on a subsequent unrelated reasoning task. Participants solved analogies with near or far semantic relations, either by indicating whether the analogy was valid or invalid or by generating a valid completion for an incomplete analogy. Participants then completed a picture-mapping task that used unrelated materials.
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Burnout Comes in Three Varieties
As of this month, more than 10 million people in the United States are unemployed, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Given that there are so many people looking for jobs, it’s curious that a large percentage of American workers want nothing more than to quit. As of this past December, 1.7% of all employed people left their jobs. That rate has been climbing -- albeit slowly -- since 2009. “Burnout syndrome” -- that is, the fatigue, cynicism, and professional inefficacy that comes with work-related stress -- may play a significant role in this trend. Some level of stress is an inevitable part of every work experience. But at what point do those stressors become overbearing?
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Floods or Family Conflict? Bad Dreams Differ By Gender
NPR: I think it's safe to say most of us do not enjoy nightmares - that cold sweat, sitting up straight in bed, our pulse racing. But when Antonio Zadra, professor at the University of Montreal, began working on a study about nightmares he found that the narrative animating those bad dreams tended to be very different between men and women. He is coauthor of a new study that has a lot to say about the differences in the way we dream. He joins us now from Montreal. Welcome to the program. ANTONIO ZADRA: Thank you for having me. MARTIN: So, what were the differences you noticed in the nightmare scenarios of men and women?
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A Happy Life May Not Be a Meaningful Life
Scientific American: Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness. Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways. ...
