Young people may crave boosts to their self-esteem a little too much, new research suggests.
Researchers found that college students valued boosts to their self-esteem more than any other pleasant activity they were asked about, including sex, favorite foods, drinking alcohol, seeing a best friend or receiving a paycheck.
“It is somewhat surprising how this desire to feel worthy and valuable trumps almost any other pleasant activity you can imagine,” said Brad Bushman, lead author of the research and professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University. [continue reading…]
January 2011
Imagine that your physician tells that merely because of your age, there’s a certain probability that you will eventually develop a given disease. You can take a new blood test to find out if you’re going to get the disease, but you’ll have to pay for it out of pocket, and you won’t be able to actually prevent the disease from occurring. Would you take the test, and if so, how much would you pay for it? Curious Continue reading
Source: The Wall Street Journal
This week in the New Yorker Evan Osnos writes about how psychoanalysis is gaining a foothold in China. Here, Osnos talks about the state of mental health in the world’s most populous country and the differences between how Americans and Chinese talk about themselves.
Link to read more or to listen to the podcast
Image: Getty Images
Source: The New Yorker
Sometimes it’s almost impossible to talk without using your hands. These gestures seem to be important to how we think. They provide a visual clue to our thoughts and, a new theory suggests, may even change our thoughts by grounding them in action.
University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Goldin-Meadow are bringing together two lines of research: Beilock’s work on how action affects thought and Goldin-Meadow’s work on gesture. After a chat at a conference instigated by Ed Diener, the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, they designed a study together to look at how gesture affects thought. [continue reading…]
