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Kahneman and Bentham’s Bucket of Happiness
Scientific American: We need a new happiness. The one most people use now is confusing even our smartest scientists. The problems start with “Bentham’s bucket error” but Plato’s pastry and a rare case of reality in Freud can revive healthier pursuits of happiness. Daniel Kahneman, who has plausibly been called the “most important psychologist alive today,” has spent a decade experimenting with “hedonimetrics,” which analyzes “single happiness values” assigned to each moments felt pleasure or pain. Commendably candid, he concludes: “we have learned many new facts about happiness.
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You’ll Never Learn!
Slate: Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied.
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Are ‘Hot Hands’ in Sports a Real Thing?
The New York Times: Winning streaks in sports may be more than just magical thinking, several new studies suggest. Whether you call them winning streaks, “hot hands” or being “in the zone,” most sports fans believe that players, and teams, tend to go on tears. Case in point: Nate Robinson’s almost single-handed evisceration of the Miami Heat on Monday night. (Yes, I am a Bulls fan.) But our faith in hot hands is challenged by a rich and well-regarded body of science over the past 30 years, much of it focused on basketball, that tells us our belief is mostly fallacious. ...
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How our expressions help others locate threat
Asian News International: Wide-eyed expressions, which typically signals fear, may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others' ability to locate threats, a new research has claimed. The research - conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson - suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings of the research show that widened eyes provide a wider visual field that can help us locate potential threats in our environment.
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The Biology of Kindness: How It Makes Us Happier & Healthier
TIME: There’s a reason why being kind to others is good for you— and it can now be traced to a specific nerve. When it comes to staying healthy, both physically and mentally, studies consistently show that strong relationships are at least as important as avoiding smoking and obesity. But how does social support translate into physical benefits such as lower blood pressure, healthier weights and other physiological measures of sound health? A new study published in Psychological Science, suggests that the link may follow the twisting path of the vagus nerve, which connects social contact to the positive emotions that can flow from interactions.
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Cognitive Earthquake: Who’s Really in Need?
The Huffington Post: In January 2000, an earthquake shook China's mountainous Yunnan province. It was a moderate earthquake and killed only seven, but it leveled more than 40,000 homes and injured thousands of residents. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 1.8 million were affected by the disaster, and in need of shelter, medical attention or other aid. The scientists have a theory, which is that we respond to deaths more decisively than we respond to other, undefined suffering -- even though it is obviously not the dead who need help. They set out to test this idea, and also to see if there might be a way to increase sensitivity to those left behind.
