Psychology

"Asking for help is a universally dreaded endeavor,"  M. Nora Klaver says in her anti-self-help book, "Mayday! Asking for help in times of need. Seven out of ten people admit they could have used help over the last week but didn't ask for it. Klaver reveals the myriad of reasons why we don't ask for help, how we can benefit from asking, and how to ask the right people at the right time in the right place, increasing our opportunities for meeting our needs. Some years ago, after years of focusing on her career, Klaver sought council with Sonia Choquette, author of "Your Heart's Desire"…

Though the popular conception has been that "money can't buy happiness," studies have shown that wealth can play a role in enhancing happiness.    A study of American woman by a Princeton University psychologist says money doesn't buy happiness - not caring about having no money apparently makes the difference. Women who concentrated on financial matters were less likely to be happy with their lives, according to Talya Miron-Shatz, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, even though they had plenty of money…

A move from the big city to a small village is always a culture shock, but can it affect just more than your Friday night plans? Now, I've lived in rural and urban locales. But either the local water utilities people put happy pills in the water supply here, or my overstimulation cup had overfloweth'd, because this latest move seemed more a stark contrast. While I loved my previous home, with its international flavor, amazing food, world-class culture and more, the constant stimulation of living and working in the city was getting to me. My new home is actually labeled as a borough, but is…

Research at the new School of Creative Arts Therapies at the University of Haifa: Drawing enhances emotional verbalization among children who live under the shadow of drug-addicted fathers  "The use of art seems to help with verbalizing trauma. It is usually difficult to express the trauma through speech, yet the body remembers it," said Prof. Rachel Lev-Wiesel, Head of the Graduate School of Creative Arts Therapies who carried out the study. Drawing helps children whose fathers are drug addicts to express their feelings, concludes a new study carried out at the School of Creative Arts…

Herd mentality. Angry mob. Mass hysteria. As these phrases suggest, we are not always confident that a large group of people will come up with the smartest decisions. But numerous studies have shown that a crowd of people usually gives more accurate responses to questions compared to an individual and averaging the responses provided from a group increases accuracy by canceling out a number of errors made across the board, like over- and under-estimating the answer. So how can we do that when we are on our own? What if there is no one else around to consult with before making a judgment - how…

If you want to perform at your peak, you should carefully consider how you discuss your past actions. In a new study in Psychological Science, psychologists William Hart of the University of Florida and Dolores AlbarracÃn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reveal that the way a statement is phrased (and specifically, how the verbs are used), affects our memory of an event being described and may also influence our behavior. In these experiments, a group of volunteers were interrupted prior to finishing a word game and were then asked to describe their behavior using the…

What's in a name? Perhaps more (or less) money.  Before employers have a chance to judge job applicants on their merits, they may have already judged them on the sound of their names, says  a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Labor Economics.   Immigrants to Sweden earn more money after they change their foreign-sounding names, according to  authors Mahmood Arai and Peter Skogman Thoursie (both of Stockholm University), who found an earnings increase of 141 percent for a sample of African, Asian and Slavic immigrants who changed their names to be…

Each year some 1,500 Swedes decide to end their lives.   No one can be sure what the reasons are but they often include mental and sometimes physical issues. It could also be surroundings, say researchers at Stockholm University and the University of Oxford, though that would seem to be taking a 'Keep up with the Jones'es' mentality a little far.    But various types of behavior, feelings, and attitudes are spread in social networks and the researchers have studied whether such a drastic step as taking your life can also be influenced by others. They used  register data on…

Good eating habits can result when families eat together, say researchers from the School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, who report on one of the first studies to examine the long-term benefits of regular family meals for diet quality during the transition from early to middle adolescence. In general, the study found adolescents who participated in regular family meals reported more healthful diets and meal patterns compared to adolescents without regular family meals. Data were drawn from Project EAT, a population-based, longitudinal study designed to examine socioenvironmental,…

Pleasure and desire are essential to all human behavior, says Oxford University neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach , and he challenges us to trust our animal instincts in pursuit of those. Pleasure and our sense of reward are produced by the interaction of many different brain regions, processed consciously or unconsciously.  In the day-to-day routine of life, we may feel we are continually fighting our desires for what we really want.   But doing so, he argues, is irrational and a huge waste of energy and resources, for it is pleasure and desire that underlie all our decisions and…