U.S. News & World Report (Healthday): Reading a book can satisfy the crucial human need for belonging, a new study has found. The research involved 140 university students who were given 30 minutes to read a selected passage from either the vampire novel Twilight or the wizard novel Harry Potter More
Humans need to belong. Yet they also commonly leave others out. Animals abandon the weakest to ensure the survival of the fittest. So do kindergartners and ’tweens, softball players and office workers. Common though they are, rejection and exclusion hurt. Endured for a long time, ostracism leaves people feeling depressed More
Having power over others and having choices in your own life share a critical foundation: control, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The paper finds that people are willing to trade one source of control for the other. For More
It’s hard to believe it, but Princess Diana and Charles Manson have something in common: they’re both emotionally intelligent. They are good at identifying and regulating their own and others’ emotions. Although people often associate having emotional intelligence with having a good moral character, a study published in Psychological Science More
The Economist: AROUND the world, courthouses are adorned with a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales and a sword: Justice personified. Her sword stands for the power of the court, her scales for the competing claims of the petitioners. The blindfold (a 15th-century innovation) represents the More
The New York Times: A couple of years ago, as his fellow psychologists debated whether narcissism was increasing, Nathan DeWall heard Rivers Cuomo singing to a familiar 19th-century melody. Mr. Cuomo, the lead singer and guitarist for the rock band Weezer, billed the song as “Variations on a Shaker Hymn.” More
