Here’s what happens when you evaluate students by gratefulness and materialism:
terialistic youth seem to be languishing while grateful youth seem to be flourishing. High school students (N = 1,035) completed measures of materialism, gratitude, academic functioning, envy, depression, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption. Using structural equation modeling, we found that gratitude, controlling for materialism, uniquely predicts all outcomes considered: higher grade point average, life satisfaction, social integration, and absorption, as well as lower envy and depression. In contrast, materialism, controlling for gratitude, uniquely predicts three of the six outcomes: lower grade…
1 min read
Does materialism lead to unhappiness? If so, why?
evious research has established an inverse relationship between materialism and psychological well-being. To test the hypothesis that the link between materialism and well-being is due in part to an individual’s feelings of personal control, a sample of 440 adult Americans completed a widely-used materialism scale, the Levenson (1981) locus of control scales, and measure of positive and negative affect. Mediational analyses indicated that the significant relationship between materialism and negative affect was reduced significantly when powerful others and chance loci…
1 min read
Can being happy make you less able to resist temptation?
investigate the interfering influence of elevated arousal on the impact of positive mood on resistance to temptation. Three studies demonstrate that when a temptation activates long‐term health goals, baseline positive mood facilitates resistance to temptation in (1) the choice between two snack items, one of which is more unhealthy, sinful, and hard to resist (M&Ms) than the other (grapes) and (2) the monitoring of consumption when the sinful option is chosen. However, this influence is attenuated when positive mood…
1 min read
Think you have good self-control? Yes? Now you don’t.
ur studies examined how impulse-control beliefs—beliefs regarding one's ability to regulate visceral impulses, such as hunger, drug craving, and sexual arousal—influence the self-control process. The findings provide evidence for a restraint bias: a tendency for people to overestimate their capacity for impulse control. This biased perception of restraint had important consequences for people's self-control strategies. Inflated impulse-control beliefs led people to overexpose themselves to temptation, thereby promoting impulsive behavior. In Study 4, for example, the impulse-control beliefs of recovering smokers…
1 min read
Will going to the hospital in July kill you?
e authors found that inside medical institutions, fatal medication errors spiked in July and in no other month. This July peak was visible only in counties with teaching hospitals. In these counties, the number of July deaths from medication errors was 10 percent above the expected level. No similar link was observed for other causes of death or for deaths outside hospitals. And According to sociology professor David Phillips and his student Gwendolyn Barker from the University of California, San…
1 min read
These Weekend Activities Best Help You Recover From The Work Week
ything that helps you not think about work, aids relaxation and also "mastery experiences." Doing the things you're good at. For most employees, the weekend offers the opportunity to recover and unwind from demands faced during the working week. In this study, first, we examined which factors contribute to employees' successful recovery during the weekend. Second, we investigated if being highly recovered after the weekend benefits different dimensions of job performance during the week. Using a within-person design we conducted…
1 min read
A Quick And Easy Way To Relieve Stress
ew gum: The notion that chewing gum may relieve stress was investigated in a controlled setting. A multi-tasking framework which reliably evokes stress and also includes performance measures was used to induce acute stress in the laboratory. Using a randomised crossover design forty participants (mean age 21.98 years) performed on the multi-tasking framework at two intensities (on separate days) both while chewing and not chewing. Order of workload intensity and chewing conditions were counterbalanced. Before and after undergoing the platform participants…
2 minutes
What’s worse: losing your job or being afraid of losing your job?
..perceived job insecurity ranks as one of the most important factors in employees' well-being and can be even more harmful than actual job loss with subsequent unemployment." This paper analyzes the impact of job insecurity perceptions on individual well-being. In contrast to previous studies, we explicitly take into account perceptions about both the likelihood and the potential costs of job loss and demonstrate that most contributions to the literature suffer from simultaneity bias. When accounting for simultaneity, we find the…
1 min read
