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The more money we have, the fewer problems we see
The Washington Post: “Money doesn’t buy happiness” is a cliche for a reason. The Nobel laureate psychologist/economist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton have found that “emotional well-being” (that is, what emotions people report themselves as having felt the previous day) maxes out at around $75,000 of annual income, even though peoples’ evaluations of how well their lives are going rise indefinitely with income. “We conclude,” Kahneman and Deaton write, “that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness.” But this kind of analysis can be problematic when it’s used to compare whole societies, rather than individual people.
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Tips For Improving Your Teens’ Sleep Schedule
The Wall Street Journal: Many parents wrestle with helping their teenagers get enough sleep, especially when high school classes start before dawn. Battling early school start times and teens’ changing body clocks, which pressure them to fall asleep later, can be overwhelming for parents. I interviewed experts and parents for today’s “Work & Family” column on groggy teens, and they offered some helpful tips. Few teens want parents setting their bedtimes; my own adolescents long resisted my requests to stop texting or Web-surfing late at night. But educating teens on how sleep loss damages health, energy and appearance can encourage them to set their own limits, parents say.
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Study: People Who Wait to Have Sex Are ‘Less Dissatisfied’ in Marriage
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: A lot of "marriage promotion" and youth health movements are predicated on notions of how adolescent sexual gallivanting influences romantic/marital relationships as adults. The dominant notion is that starting earlier means problems later. But there's more to it. Some of what we've heard from previous research: Having sex at younger ages is associated with earlier marriage and cohabitation, more divorce, and more extra-marital pregnancy. METHODOLOGY: Dr.
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Reasoning Is Sharper in a Foreign Language
Scientific American Mind: The language we use affects the decisions we make, according to a new study. Participants made more rational decisions when money-related choices were posed in a foreign language that they had learned in a classroom setting than when they were asked in a native tongue. To study how language affects reasoning, University of Chicago psychologists looked at a well-known phenomenon: people are more risk-averse when an impersonal decision (such as which vaccine to administer to a population) is presented in terms of a potential gain than when it is framed as a potential loss even when the outcomes are equivalent.
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APA Call for Nominations for Awards for Year 2013
Deadline: February 15, 2013 The Society for General Psychology, Division One of the American Psychological Association is conducting its Year 2013 awards competition, including the William James Book Award for a recent book that serves to integrate material across psychological subfields or to provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology, the Ernest R. Hilgard Award for a Lifetime Career Contribution to General Psychology, the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology, and the Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Unifying Psychology, which is an American Psychological Foundation Award managed by the Society for General Psychology.
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Treating Anxiety
Many of us battle with fear and anxiety in our daily lives, but David Barlow was one of the first clinical psychologists to take this fight into the laboratory. Not only did he conduct much of the research characterizing the etiology of anxiety, but Barlow also can be credited with many of the breakthroughs in the treatment of anxiety disorders. His use of situational and interoceptive exposure as a treatment for panic disorders laid the foundation for the wider development of empirically validated cognitive behavioral therapies that have come to replace less scientifically sound treatment methodologies.
