Is there a way to increase your attention span?
ditation. And it can show results in as little as five days. The ability to focus one’s attention underlies success in many everyday tasks, but voluntary attention cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. In the laboratory, sustained-attention failure is manifest as a decline in perceptual sensitivity with increasing time on task, known as the vigilance decrement. We investigated improvements in sustained attention with training (~5 hr/day for 3 months), which consisted of meditation practice that involved sustained selective…
1 min read
How can you increase your sense of meaning in life?
more nostalgic: The present research tested the proposition that nostalgia serves an existential function by bolstering a sense of meaning in life. Study 1 found that nostalgia was positively associated with a sense of meaning in life. Study 2 experimentally demonstrated that nostalgia increases a sense of meaning in life. In both studies, the link between nostalgia and increased meaning in life was mediated by feelings of social connectedness. Study 3 evidenced that threatened meaning increases nostalgia. Study 4…
1 min read
Can a boring job give you a heart attack?
notony on the job is associated with greater risk of myocardial infarction: The project was designed to test the assumption that certain psychosocial characteristics of occupational groups are associated with elevated myocardial infarction risk. All cases of myocardial infarction below the age of 65 in men living in the region of greater Stockholm during the years 1974-1976 were identified (deaths as well as survivals) in the official registries of hospitalizations and deaths. For each case two controls without infarction (in…
1 min read
What are the happiest jobs? What are the unhappiest?
a Forbes: 1. Clergy: The least worldly are reported to be the happiest of all 2. Firefighters: Eighty percent of firefighters are “very satisfied” with their jobs, which involve helping people. 3. Physical therapists: Social interaction and helping people apparently make this job one of the happiest. 4. Authors: For most authors, the pay is ridiculously low or non-existent, but the autonomy of writing down the contents of your own mind apparently leads to happiness. 5. Special education teachers: If…
2 minutes
Who is happier: lottery winners or paralyzed accident victims?
ttery winners... but not by nearly as much as you might guess. Some time after winning their money, lottery winners weren't all that much happier than people who hadn't won -- and accident victims weren't anywhere as unhappy as the researchers had assumed. Shouldn't lottery winners be ecstatic and paralyzed accident victims be miserable? No. What the authors of the study found was that: 1) Much of happiness exists outside of objective life circumstances. Attitude and perspective mean a lot…
2 minutes
Is being selfless the smartest way to be selfish?
is study shows doing volunteer work increases happiness -- not just correlation; they demonstrated causation as well. So if you're being self-centered and thinking only of how you can increase your own happiness, well, you may want to go help others for nothing in return: Here, we directly address the issue of causality and take advantage of a natural experiment: the collapse of East Germany. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first…
2 minutes
What notably reduces pain? (Hint: you might already do it.)
earing. Via Time Magazine: In a previous study, psychologist Richard Stephens at Keele University in the U.K. and colleagues found that people who were asked to dunk their hand in ice-cold water were better able to tolerate the pain — and they left their hands in the buckets for a full 40 seconds longer — if they were allowed to swear, compared with people who were asked to utter a non-curse word. In the new study, Stephens repeated the previous…
2 minutes
How you can deal with angry people without losing your cool:
ll yourself they are having a bad day and that it's not about you. Via US News: Telling yourself that an angry person is just having a bad day and that it's not about you can help take the sting out of their ire, a new study suggests. This strategy of finding another way to regard an angry person is an approach commonly suggested in cognitive behavioral therapy. For example, you can tell yourself that the angry person has just…
1 min read
