By Emma Young
As an English-speaker, I might “see red” with anger, go “green” with envy or, on a bad day, “feel blue”. To me, it seems natural to associate certain colours with particular emotions — but is the same true for people around the world? And if so, do we all make the same emotion/colour matchings? These questions have been investigated in a new study, published in Psychological Science, which has produced some fascinating results.
By Emma Young
Edith Piaf famously regretted nothing. But regret is an important emotion, because it can lead us to avoid repeating mistakes, or to heal damaged relationships. It’s also an emotion that many of us feel on a regular basis. “Regret is ubiquitous and powerful,” write Teresa McCormack at Queen’s University Belfast and colleagues in a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. “It is one of the most frequently mentioned emotions in conversation and affects a huge variety of everyday choices.”
Though there’s been plenty of work on regret in adults, much less is known about how it develops in children. In this new review, McCormack and her colleagues consider what we do know about its development, and outline the major gaps still left to fill. There are implications not just for the basic understanding of regret but also for informing educators in nurseries and schools. After all, even young children are expected to feel bad about harming others — but, depending on their age, there are limits to just what they can feel in such a scenario.
Continue reading “Here’s How The Experience Of Regret Develops Through Childhood”
One of the classic findings in memory research is that we’re better at remembering information when we’re in a similar context to that in which we learned it. This was perhaps most famously demonstrated in a 1975 study, which found that people who learned a list of words while scuba diving had better memory for the words when again underwater, compared to when on land (similarly, those who had learned the list on land were better at remembering it on land).
But it’s not just the external environment that matters: our internal states can also provide memory cues. For instance, people who were intoxicated when learning information were better at recalling that information when drunk than when sober, and there’s also evidence that our recall is better when our mood matches how we felt at learning.
Now a new study published in Child Development has found that the same is true even of babies in their first year of life. The findings have implications for understanding infant memory — and could even help to explain why we can’t remember anything from our early years.
Continue reading “Babies’ Moods Can Determine How Well They Remember Things They’ve Learned”
By Emma Young
You were hoping to go out with friends on Saturday night, but your partner really wants to have a quiet night at home instead…
Your life’s going great, but then your partner is offered their dream job in a town you’d happily never visit, let alone live in…
So what do you do? Do you stand your ground? Or you do you sacrifice your own goals for the sake of your partner’s?
It’s a dilemma familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a relationship. It would seem reasonable, then, to assume that research could tell us what the likely impacts would be on individual wellbeing, and on the health of the relationship itself. However, as the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Bulletin point out, there are two conflicting hypotheses for how sacrifices should pan out.
Continue reading “How Making Sacrifices For A Partner — Or Saying You Will — Affects Wellbeing”
By Emma Young
Of all “cross-modal” findings, the most famous is surely the bouba-kiki effect — that we tend to pair round, blobby shapes with the sound bouba and spiky shapes with kiki. However, research has not yet revealed why this effect is common among adults who speak very different languages — and even in infants as young as four.
Various theories have been put forward. One holds that levels of emotional arousal may be key — that both kiki and a spiky shape trigger relatively high levels of arousal, compared with bouba and a blob. Now a new study, reported in Psychological Science, provides compelling evidence for this idea. The researchers also take their findings further, arguing that they could have important implications for understanding the early evolution of languages.
Continue reading “We Find Some Word Sounds More Emotionally Arousing Than Others”
By Emma Young
Music and humans go back a very long way. The earliest accepted instruments, made from bones, appear on the European scene about 40,000 years ago. But for perhaps at least a million years before that, our ancestors had the throat architecture that in theory would have allowed them to sing.
All kinds of ideas have been put forward for why and how music came to matter so much to us. But what’s abundantly clear is that it does matter; there isn’t a society out there that doesn’t make and listen to music. And new research is now revealing all manner of psychological and neurological effects… Continue reading “Musings On Music: Seven Insights From Psychology”
When it comes to leading a happy and fulfilled life, many of us focus on long-term goals: what job we want, whether or not we want children, or how to reach a certain level of skill at a particular hobby or interest. There’s a reason so much research looks at how to achieve the things you value in life.
As such, we often (try to) eschew short-term pleasures, deeming them a distraction from loftier goals. But according to a study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the pursuit of those more immediate pleasures could be just as important for our wellbeing.
Continue reading “Small Pleasures Are Just As Important For Our Wellbeing As Long-Term Goals”
Looking for the perfect gift can be a pleasure and a curse: the joy of picking exactly the right thing vs. the anxiety that you’ve completely missed the mark. Whether to get somebody something luxurious but impractical or something with utility is another common dilemma.
It’s also one that may have unintended consequences: while some practical gifts — those that save someone time, for example — can be appealing and well-received, others may fall short. If you were thinking of getting that special someone a gift with the intention of saving them money, for example, think again — you might end up making them feel ashamed, according to research recently published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
Continue reading “Receiving Money-Saving Gifts Can Make People Feel Ashamed And Embarrassed”
By guest blogger Itamar Shatz
It feels bad to know that you’ve messed up, especially when other people have to pay a price for your actions. Unfortunately, this feeling is something that most of us end up experiencing at one point or another — when we’re placed on a team with other people at school or at a job, for instance, and make a mistake that forces our team members to do more work as a result.
However, recent research, published in Social Psychology by James Wirth at Ohio State University and his colleagues, shows that there is a trait that can reduce those negative feelings, called “self-compassion”.
The spread of bad news — fake or otherwise — is likely to be on everybody’s minds at the moment. Whether it’s legitimate updates on the spread or symptoms of coronavirus, or sensationalism more to do with page clicks than scientific fact, it can be hard to tune out of the news cycle — and to know what information you should be passing on to friends and family.
Past research has found that alarming information is likely to spread further than positive information; we’re also more likely to share news that confirms our own beliefs and biases. But what impact does the experience of stress have on the sharing of negative or alarming news? A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests a complex relationship between the two.
