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People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much
Your social life has a biological limit: 150. That’s the number—Dunbar’s number, proposed by the British psychologist Robin Dunbar three decades ago—of people with whom you can have meaningful relationships. What makes a relationship meaningful? Dunbar gave The New York Times a shorthand answer: “those people you know well enough to greet without feeling awkward if you ran into them in an airport lounge”—a take that may accidentally reveal the substantial spoils of having produced a predominant psychological theory. The construct encompasses multiple “layers” of intimacy in relationships.
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Does Knowing Your Learning Style Help You Learn Better? Science Says No
Do you consider yourself a visual learner or a verbal learner? Perhaps you’re neither and instead you absorb information best by reading texts and taking notes on what you’ve understood. No matter which mode of instruction you prefer, you probably rely on techniques that suit your individual learning style. Although there are more than 70 different learning style frameworks, the most prominent one is the VARK model. Introduced by Neil Fleming in 1987, it categorizes learners into four main types: visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic.
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Why Having Too Much Free Time Can be as Bad for You as Having Too Little
Have you ever had one of those days — that turned into weeks — when you had approximately 645 things to do and not a single minute for leisure time? Like many of us, Cassie Mogilner Holmes sometimes feels as if she lives in that state. She also — and this will probably sound familiar — has entertained the idea of trading all those obligations for a desert island. Instead, Holmes, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, decided to research whether extra free time would actually make her happier. It turns out that reclining alone on a beach all day might not be as ideal as it sounds.
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Make Gratitude A Habit
As we prepare to celebrate the Thanksgiving season, turkey and trimmings aside, we should all sit back and reflect on for what, and more importantly, for whom, we are grateful. According to psychologist Daniel J. Levitin, “gratitude is an important and often overlooked emotion and state of mind. Gratitude causes us to focus on what’s good about our lives rather than what’s bad, shifting our outlook toward the positive”. And, those “who practice gratitude simply feel happier.” So, when you sit around the dining room table this Thanksgiving, take a good look at the family and friends around you. Was the last Thanksgiving dinner the last interaction with them you can remember?
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How to Know That You Know Nothing
If there’s one thing we might regret at the end of life, it’s that we missed out on moments that mattered—not because we weren’t physically there, but because our mind wandered off to some unknown place. In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we explore why it’s uniquely challenging to “live in the moment,” how we limit our own curiosity by assuming that we know best, and why the illusion of stability pulls us from living every day fully, and in the moment. A conversation with the Harvard University psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer helps us think through a daily struggle: How do I stay present? ...
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Natural Disasters Bring Married Couples Closer, at Least for Awhile
That’s according to a first-of-its-kind study that looked at couples in the Houston area before and after Hurricane Harvey. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, has implications for how best to help families as they navigate different types of stressors. Researchers had already surveyed 231 newly married couples about their relationship satisfaction shortly before Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast in August 2017, devastating much of the Houston area. With the advent of the hurricane, researchers saw a unique opportunity to track relationship dynamics through the aftermath of a natural disaster.
