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Writing Your Way to Happiness
The New York Times: The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory. Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness. The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right.
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For Couples, Success at Work is Affected by Partner’s Personality
Scientific American: What does it take to get ahead at the office? It's well-known that personality influences professional prowess, as high earners tend to be extraverted, ambitious, conscientiousand self-confident. Whether you measure success in wages or personal satisfaction, superstars in the workplace tend to be energetic and proactive, with a high need for achievement.
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Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb
The New York Times: AS much as we love our digital devices, many of us have an uneasy sense that they are destroying our attention spans. We skitter from app to app, seldom alighting for long. Our ability to concentrate is shot, right? Research shows that our intuition is wrong. We can focus. But our sense that we can’t may not be a phantom. Paying attention requires not just ability but desire. Technology may snuff out our desire to focus. The idea that gadgets corrode our attention span sounds logical.
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Paying Attention Doesn’t Mean You’ll Remember What You Saw
We can forget a piece of information just seconds after having used it to make a judgment if we don’t have expectations of using it in the future, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This finding, which has been named “attribute amnesia,” indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought. "It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you're attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true," said researcher Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State.
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Unraveling Mysteries of Safe Steering with Behavioral Science
We may take it for granted, but exactly how we steer a car has remained a mystery to researchers for nearly 70 years. The prevailing theory for how we steer towards a target was initially developed by British researcher Arnold Tustin in 1947. Tustin was a pioneer in the engineering field of control theory which focuses on the interactions between humans and complex machines.
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It’s Crazy How Easy It Is to Make People Falsely Remember Committing a Crime
New York Magazine: Memory's a pretty fluid and complex thing. We don't always remember specific details of an event well, and what details we do remember can be influenced by stuff that happened after the event itself. This is all pretty standard when it comes to memory research. What the authors of a new paper in Psychological Science just pulled off, though, takes things to a whole new level: They were able to convince study participants they had committed a crime that was completely fabricated.
