What do very happy people all have in common?
bsp; Strong social relationships. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: In a study appropriately titled “Very Happy People,” researchers sought out the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent among us. Do they all live in warm climates? Are they all wealthy? Are they all physically fit? Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My…
1 min read
What’s the best predictor of team success in the workplace?
w the team members feel about one another. Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: The better we feel about these workplace relationships, the more effective we will be. For example, a study of over 350 employees in 60 business units at a financial services company found that the greatest predictor of a team’s achievement was how the members felt about one another. This is especially important for managers because,…
1 min read
Does prohibiting something make us more likely to do it?
bsp; Via Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons: Imagine you’re sitting in front of a pan of brownies. They’re fresh. You’re hungry. You’re also on a diet, making these brownies strictly off-limits. Do you eat the brownies? It turns out that specifically because the brownies are off-limits, you’re more likely to eat them. Researchers in Belgium demonstrated this by presenting subjects with an unhealthy snack and telling half the people not to eat it.…
1 min read
Can being pissed off improve your ability to study?
bsp; Negative moods appear to enhance learning. Happy people learn slower. Background We introduce a method for quickly determining the rate of implicit learning. Methodology/Principal Findings The task involves making a binary prediction for a probabilistic sequence over 10 minutes; from this it is possible to determine the influence of events of a different number of trials in the past on the current decision. This profile directly reflects the learning rate parameter of a large class of learning algorithms including…
1 min read
Does background noise make you more or less creative?
bsp; A little helps, a lot hurts: This paper examines how ambient noise, an important environmental variable, can affect creativity. Results from five experiments demonstrate that a moderate (70 dB) versus low (50 dB) level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks and increases the buying likelihood of innovative products. A high level of noise (85 dB), on the other hand, hurts creativity. Process measures reveal that a moderate (vs. low) level of noise increases processing difficulty, inducing a…
1 min read
Is Facebook making us lonely?
the latest issue of The Atlantic Stephen Marche has a long, excellent article on the subject. I found these bits most interesting: Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes…
3 minutes
Can you quickly predict whether a man will be a tough negotiator?
bsp; Via Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It): So, okay, you're negotiating a price and would like to know how aggressive you can be. It would be helpful to know the other guy's testosterone level, right? You might be able to get a clue just by looking at his ring finger. Look for a wedding ring. Studies show that married men have lower testosterone levels than single men. Check out how long the…
1 min read
10 things that you need to know about sex:
llow @bakadesuyo 1) You can probably tell how sexual a woman is just by looking at her. 2) In fact, you can probably tell how orgasmic she is by how she walks. 3) And if she is more sexual, she's also more likely to be bisexual. 4) So few women pay for online porn that a female name on a credit card used to subscribe to a site gets the submission flagged as fraudlent. 5) Is this going by quickly? Time flies when…
1 min read
