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What kind of people are prone to nostalgia?
rticipants listened to randomly selected excerpts of popular music and rated how nostalgic each song made them feel. Nostalgia was stronger to the extent that a song was autobiographically salient, arousing, familiar, and elicited a greater number of positive, negative, and mixed emotions. These effects were moderated by individual differences (nostalgia proneness, mood state, dimensions of the Affective Neurosciences Personality Scale, and factors of the Big Five Inventory). Nostalgia proneness predicted stronger nostalgic experiences, even after controlling for other individual…
1 min read
Does being sad lower grades in school?
is study examines the past year relationship between GPA and experiencing a combination of two primary depression symptoms, feeling sad and losing interest in usual activities for at least two consecutive weeks, among high school students during 2001–2009. The GPA loss associated with sadness, as defined above, falls from slightly less than a plus/minus mark to around 0.1 point when commonly co-occurring behaviors are held constant. Nonetheless, this effect is significantly larger than those of having considered or planned suicide…
2 minutes
What are the top 10 reasons for accepting or rejecting a “booty call”?
ughan Bell (via @NoahWG) covers a study on booty calls here. There's a September '09 expanded discussion with the study's authors that gives more insight on what they theorize might be the differing motivations for men and women: “For men… a booty call offers sexual access at a low, although not minimal, cost. For women, a booty call relationship offers more affection than a one-night stand,” the authors wrote. At the same time, an existing platonic friendship that turns sexual…
2 minutes
Recommended links:
fell behind on my RSS feeds while in San Diego, which, as regular readers can well imagine, is a potentially overwhelming problem. I'm all caught up and thought I'd share some not-abstracts that caught my eye: Technology may help James Bond but it's actually hurting real spies. Corporate espionage is easy. And if you're good at it you can win an iPad. If either of those two links interest you, you should check out Bruce Schneier's book Beyond Fear.…
2 minutes
Why do young people do such risky things?
llow @bakadesuyo There are many reasons, obviously, but I found this one to be novel and interesting -- young people think happiness declines with age so they live it up: Using data from a 2007 survey in Northern Ireland (representative sample, N = 1036), we replicate and extend the US-based findings of Lacey et al. (Journal of Happiness Studies 7:167–182, 2006). Consistent with Lacey et al., we find that young people mispredict happiness levels in old age, believing—wrongly—that happiness declines with age.…
1 min read
Do Homosexual Couples Save More?
mosexual couples are far less likely to have kids and it looks like they use that income to save for retirement: We analyze how sexual orientation is related to household savings using 2000 US Census data, and find that gay and lesbian couples own significantly more retirement income than heterosexuals, while cohabiting heterosexuals save more than their married counterparts. In a household savings model, we interpret this homosexual-specific differential as due to the extremely low fertility of same-sex couples, in…
2 minutes
Are we happier when we’re busy?
..people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy." There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose…
1 min read
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
