Category: Emotions
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Touching.
Every year, museums bear the cost of repairing the damage caused to their artworks by visitors touching them. Why would people want to touch objects they can clearly see? What is it that touch provides that vision does not? Philosophers, starting with René Descartes, all noted that touch provided 'a sense of reality', and made…
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Trained to be altruistic?
The decisions of individuals such as their willingness to cooperate and altruistic acts are just as important as international agreements or national regulations. This is what scientists call "prosocial behavior". Psychologists from the University of Würzburg and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have now published the results of…
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Be (pessimistic) optimistic.
Optimistic thinking is leading people to set up businesses that have no realistic prospect of financial success, shows new research which may help explain why only fifty per cent of businesses in the UK survive their first five years. (1) All life ends up in death. The most optimistic ones will experience the ultimate sorrow.…
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Happiness. Meaning of life. Genes.
For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals. The researchers identified two genetic variants for meaning in life and six genetic variants for happiness. (1) We want to be unhappy.…
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The dark self…
Both world history and everyday life are full of examples of people acting ruthlessly, maliciously, or selfishly. In psychology as well as in everyday language, we have diverse names for the various dark tendencies human may have, most prominently psychopathy (lack of empathy), narcissism (excessive self-absorption), and Machiavellianism (the belief that the ends justify the…
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