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American Marriages Are Much Better — and Much Worse — Than Ever
New York Magazine: When your partner is your best friend — someone who really gets you, you know? — it’s a wonderful thing. And yet thinking of marriage as the ultimate BFF-ship potentially comes with its own set of problems, setting some lofty expectations for the relationship. It often means that this is theone person to whom you look to meet your deepest psychological and personal growth requirements; it’s the tippy-top of the old Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, in other words. When it works, it’s bliss.
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Moral Suspicion Trickles Down the Corporate Ladder
New research finds that a high-ranking supervisor’s unethical misdeeds can trickle down to tarnish the reputations of the upstanding rank-and-file employees working under them. In the late 1990s, Enron was considered one of the most innovative companies in America, but the fraudulent actions of a few Enron executives resulted in one of the biggest corporate scandals in recent history. Almost 20,000 Enron employees lost their jobs and retirement savings as a result of the company’s collapse in 2001.
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What ‘Learning How to Think’ Really Means
The Chronicle of Higher Education: It has always been taken as self-evident that higher education is good for students and society at large, and that American colleges and universities are doing an excellent job of providing it. No more. Commentators, politicians, and parents are expressing serious doubts, about whether colleges are teaching what they should be teaching and about whether they are teaching it well. Demands for accountability are everywhere, spurred in part by the absurdly high cost of a college education and the trillion dollars in student debt. What are students getting for all that money? What should they be getting? ...
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Pixar’s Mood Master
The Atlantic: In 1943, Disney released an eight-minute film titled Reason and Emotion. The film personified the ability to think and the ability to feel as, respectively, a bespectacled, suit-wearing prig and an impulsive, lascivious caveman. “Within the mind of each of us,” intoned the narrator, “these two wage a ceaseless battle” for control of the (in the film, quite literal) mental steering wheel. ... He pared down the possibilities with the help of two psychologists: Paul Ekman, whose pioneering work on facial expressions inspired the Fox series Lie to Me, and Ekman’s protégé Dacher Keltner, of UC Berkeley.
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Study: Green Space Around Schools May Boost Mental Abilities
The New York Times: NEW YORK — Putting more green space around an elementary school may help students develop some mental abilities, a study suggests. Researchers tested students repeatedly over the course of a year on attentiveness and working memory, which is the ability to keep something in mind temporarily for performing a task. Overall, students whose schools were surrounded by more green space improved more than pupils from schools with less green space. The study tracked more than 2,000 students in 36 primary schools in Barcelona, Spain. The pupils were in the second to fourth grades when the study began. ...
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Friends, then benefits
The Economist: BEAUTY opens many doors. Study after study has concluded that the comely earn more, are better liked, are treated more indulgently and are even given more lenient sentences in court than their plainer counterparts. The door it opens widest, though, is the romantic one. As both common sense and evolutionary theory suggest should happen, beautiful people attract beautiful partners. But not always. Occasionally, handsome men choose plain women, and vice versa. Why this should be vexes psychologists and biologists alike. A study by Lucy Hunt of the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues, soon to be published in Psychological Science, suggests an answer.
