The research, summarized in a recent paper in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests that the love and care we receive as infants—before we can even form conscious memories—can very closely predict the quality of our romantic relationships as adults.

The authors studied first-born children participating in a long-term research project, in which researchers regularly assessed the social and emotional development of these children throughout their lives.

When the participants were between 12 and 18 months old, researchers brought them into a lab and separated and reunited them with their mothers several times, looking to see how the babies reacted to this stressful exercise.

Those infants who explored their new environment more freely, without seeming anxious or uncertain, were said to have “secure attachments” to their mothers; infants with “insecure attachments,” on the other hand, remained distressed throughout the experiment.

Flash forward 20 years. The researchers identified the 75 participants from the original group, now in their early 20s, who were in a romantic relationship. The researchers observed them again, this time asking them to discuss a conflict with their romantic partner—eliciting a negative interaction—then shift focus to a topic on which the couple agreed.

Those partners who were securely attached to their mothers as infants were able to shift more quickly from their negative interaction to the positive one: It didn’t take long for their mood to improve and for them to shift their attention to the new topic. They were also better able to regulate their feelings than those who had been insecurely attached.

Those who had had an insecure attachment to their mothers as infants seemed to experience more difficulty dealing with conflict and emotion as adults.

What’s more, if someone grew up with a secure attachment, that wasn’t just good for him or her but for his or her partner as well: Partners recovered better from conflicts if they were romantically involved with someone who had been securely attached to his or her mother as an infant. And having a partner who recovered better from conflict was linked to greater relationship satisfaction and more positive emotions about their relationship overall.

However, the researchers point out that our romantic destinies aren’t entirely determined by the time we’re toddlers. Among participants who had had an insecure attachment as a child, those who had found an emotionally stable and committed romantic partner as a young adult were more likely to still be in their relationship two years later, at age 23.

According to the researchers, it seems that a healthy relationship can help turn things around for “developmentally vulnerable” people who grew up with less support or less consistent caregiving as children.

“Emotionally well-regulated romantic partners,” they write, “can protect individuals who have insecure attachment histories from certain romantic relationship difficulties in adulthood.”

A recent study in the journal Hormones and Behavior suggests that the presence of oxytocin—a chemical released by the body during positive social interactions, like exchanging gifts—may cause people already prone to giving to give even more. Oxytocin is one of the biological sources of that warm, fuzzy feeling we get around the holidays.

A team of researchers, led by Jorge Barraza of Claremont Graduate University’s Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, gave 132 male college students a dose of either oxytocin or a placebo. The students then played a series of games to earn money; afterward, they had the opportunity to donate a portion of their earnings to charity.

Roughly the same number of people in each group chose to donate—but those dosed with oxytocin gave 48 percent more money than people who took the placebo.

We’ve reported many times on the effects of oxytocin, which has been found to increase feelings of group affiliation and trust. Prior research has suggested that oxytocin makes people more likely to give directly to another person when they’re encouraged to empathize with that person.

But this is the first study to show that oxytocin can cause people to become more generous even when the object of their kindness is distant and only indirectly connected to them: Participants who received oxytocin didn’t know precisely when, where, or for whom their donations would be put to use, but they gave more anyway.

The study highlights the important role of oxytocin in altruism. Our bodies produce this chemical that induces us to give, even if we do not see or experience the positive effects of our gifts—a form of altruism, according to the authors, that may be “uniquely human.”

A new study suggests that, for at least some people, the answer has to do with self-compassion.

A growing body of research, pioneered by University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff, has explored the nature—and the benefits—of self-compassion. According to Neff, self-compassion is a gentle understanding and accepting of our own flaws, while also recognizing that many others experience similar problems.

This stands in stark contrast to how people often respond when their marriage ends in divorce: They treat themselves harshly, often blaming themselves and obsessing over thoughts of regret and longing. A reaction like this greatly reduces their chances of physical and psychological well-being down the line.

In a forthcoming study, published in Psychological Science, researches examined whether divorcing couples would do better if they took a more self-compassionate approach.

The researchers, based at the University of Arizona, recorded 105 divorced adults for four minutes as they spoke about their relationship history and divorce. Trained coders then scrutinized each person’s choice of words, rating their level of self-compassion.

Over a nine-month period, those participants initially judged to be low in self-compassion showed significantly faster rates of decline in their levels of self-esteem, optimism, and positive emotion.  Those with high self-compassion showed significantly less divorce-related distress and reported higher positive emotions.

“People who are high in [self-compassion] tend to experience distressing affect without becoming overwhelmed or ‘stuck’ in their experiences,” the researches write. “They view themselves and their actions empathetically, and are able to see both the highs and the lows of life as part of the human experience.”

In other words, self-compassionate people still feel the pain of their separation in real ways, but they avoid thinking too negatively and wallowing in isolation or loneliness.

Since the incidence of divorce in the U.S is so high, understanding the keys to a resilient divorce can help millions of adults lead happier, healthier lives. It may not fix everything, but this study at least suggests that the process of self-compassion—of working to accept our imperfections and see them as ties that bind us to the rest of humanity—may be an important step in the right direction.

“To the extent that these processes induce positive mood states,” write the researchers, “divorcing adults may find opportunities to grow and even flourish from the experiences surrounding the end of their marriages.”

When faced with peer pressure and a culture of violence in many schools, parents may wonder what—if anything—they can do to raise peaceful kids.

But a recent study offers some hope, suggesting that parents can often trump violent influences by advocating nonviolent conflict resolution and modeling peaceful behavior in their homes.

In the study, published in Child Development, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Illinois studied more than 5,500 students at 37 middle schools in the southern United States over a period of three years. They focused on kids at this age because past research has found that aggressive behavior escalates throughout middle school, when students are transitioning from childhood to adolescence.

The students filled out a questionnaire that asked them to report how frequently they acted aggressively, their school’s attitudes toward violence, the number of friends they had who engaged in aggressive behavior, and whether their parents supported fighting or nonviolence.

Not surprisingly, students who associated with aggressive peers, attended schools where violence was the norm, or had parents who supported fighting were more likely to act physically aggressive. The researchers found that violent behavior in general increased throughout the three years of middle school, especially among girls.

But when parents actively advocated peaceful conflict resolution to their kids, on average those kids acted less aggressively, even if they attended violent schools.

However, the effects of parenting varied across gender and over time. When girls who went to violent schools also had parents who explicitly supported nonviolence, those girls were less aggressive—but the same wasn’t true for boys. On the other hand, among kids who had lots of violent friends, peaceful parenting messages were linked to less aggression for boys but not girls. Furthermore, the effects of these parenting techniques decreased as kids got older: Parents who began advocating nonviolent conflict resolution only when their kids reached eighth grade did not see significantly reductions in violent behavior.

The results offer an important message to parents: If you want your kids to practice kindness instead of violence, you should stress the importance of peaceful conflict resolution strategies from the time they are still young.

Still, the study also reminds us of the considerable challenges parents face against peer pressure and a culture of violence in schools, particularly when kids reach the age at which they are likely to become more aggressive. That’s why the authors advocate modifying programs that target middle-school parents: Instead of simply teaching disciplinary practices, as many programs currently do, the authors argue that they should also teach parents how to talk with their kids about violence and model nonviolent behavior.

“Such interventions might encourage parents to persist in their efforts and could counteract this discouraging developmental trend,” they write.

Yet studies show that health care professionals wash their hands less than half the time they should; one recent study found that the hand-washing rate hovered around 25 percent in intensive care units. How can we make sure that doctors and nurses scrub their hands when they’re wearing their scrubs?

A new study offers one effective strategy: The trick, it seems, lies in stressing the health benefits to their patients rather than themselves.

In the study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, researchers compared the effects of two different signs each placed above 22 soap and gel dispensers at a hospital. One sign said, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases”; the other said, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases,” emphasizing patient (as opposed to personal) consequences.

The researchers had a team monitor the hand-washing habits of doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff before the signs went up, then put the signs up for two weeks and looked for changes.

The results show that when doctors and nurses were confronted with the signs mentioning their patients, they were 10 percent more likely to wash their hands than they had been before, and they used 33 percent more soap. The other signs didn’t produce any changes in hand-washing habits.

This challenges a longstanding assumption in the health care world: that to capture the attention of busy professionals and encourage hand hygiene, it’s necessary to appeal to their immediate self-interest.

Instead, it seems, appealing to their concern for others has far greater sway, even when we raise that concern through a very slight environmental change—as innocuous as a small sign over a soap dispenser.

This finding suggests that to promote a healthy behavior, health and safety officials should highlight its benefits not just for oneself but rather for other people, especially for a group that is perceived as vulnerable. That may be a more effective way of both improving a community’s health while also fostering an altruistic mindset.

The study’s authors suggest that their work has important implications for encouraging other positive and healthy behaviors, well beyond hand washing.

“Are people more likely to improve exercise and eating habits, quit smoking, purchase life insurance, wear seatbelts and helmets, protect the environment, or take prescription medication,” they write, “when reminded of the consequences for their families rather than themselves?”

This is an especially timely question for us here at the Greater Good Science Center, where we’ve been mourning the loss of Dr. Lee Lipsenthal. Lee was scheduled to speak at our seminar this Saturday, “Taking in the Good,” before he passed away last month from esophageal cancer.

In the time leading up to his death, Lee inspired those who knew him with his perspective on both his illness and on the limited time he knew he had left on the planet—a perspective captured in his forthcoming book, Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last, which is all about savoring life as we live it. Not coincidentally, that’s the theme of our event this Saturday as well.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his diagnosis, Lee was determined to live not in fear of death but with joy, purpose, and gratitude for life. (Christine Carter reflects on Lee and his effect on her own life in her post yesterday.)

So it was with Lee on my mind that I dug into a fascinating recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology that substantiates the link between gratitude and death.

In the study, researchers from Eastern Washington University and Hofstra University wanted to explore how to boost people’s levels of gratitude, since prior research has found that gratitude can have lasting effects on our health and happiness. In particular, they wondered whether people truly become more grateful for what they have in life when they recognize that none of it was inevitable and all of it is temporary—in other words, when they recognize their own mortality.

The researchers measured the levels of gratitude among their study participants, then placed them in one of three groups. Members of one group simply visualized their typical daily routine. Others described (in writing) their thoughts and feelings about death. And the third group actually imagined themselves dying in a real-life scenario in which they found themselves trapped by a fire “on the 20th floor of an old, downtown building,” by the researchers’ description, and made “futile attempts to escape from the room and burning building before finally giving in to the fire and eventually death.”

After going through these mental exercises, the participants again reported their levels of gratitude.

The results show that the people who simply wrote about death in a more abstract way didn’t feel any more grateful afterward; the people who just imagined a day in their life seemed very slightly less grateful.

But the gratitude scores of people who actually visualized their own deaths skyrocketed. These people seemed deeply affected by confronting their own mortality “in a vivid and specific way.”

The researchers note that their findings resonate with stories of people who have near-death experiences or life threatening diseases—they report more gratitude for life. This study shows that this gratitude is real, and dramatic.

“Because our very existence is a constant benefit that we adapt to easily, this is a benefit that is easily taken for granted,” write the researchers. “Reflecting on one’s own death might help individuals take stock of this benefit and consequently increase their appreciation for life.”

Of course, there are some obvious limitations to this study and its relevance to everyday life. For one thing, it measured just short-term gains in gratitude from a very dramatic exercise; we can’t really expect people to visualize their own deaths over and over, it would be too draining (and possibly traumatizing).

It seems like the challenge presented by this study is how to heighten our appreciation for life without constantly obsessing over our own deaths, not to mention actually suffering from a life-threatening illness.

At the very least, this study—like Lee’s life and legacy—offers a powerful reminder of the importance of regularly counting our blessings. In fact, prior research has found that just thinking about the absence of a positive event in our lives or the loss of a spouse heightens people’s appreciation for those things.

In other words, write the researchers, “being confronted with the possibility that any benefit ‘might not be’—including the benefit of life itself—might increase one’s gratitude and appreciation for those benefits.”

So how to get started living a more grateful life? One of the simplest—and most research-tested—ways is to keep a gratitude journal, in which you regularly record the things for which you’re most grateful. To help you get started, check out this Greater Good article by Catherine Price, in which she reports on her own experiences starting a gratitude journal—then visit our community gratitude journal to tell us what you’re grateful for this week.

But a recent study suggests that our feelings of connection don’t just make us feel good; they also make us do good.

In the study, researchers tried a few different ways of making people feel connected to others, testing to see whether such feelings of “relatedness” motivated those people to perform kind, helpful—or “pro-social”—acts. Prior research has suggested that this sense of connection is one of three ingredients people need to really thrive in life; the other two are feeling capable of achieving their goals (known as “competence “) and feeling in control of their own actions and decisions (known as “autonomy”).

In one experiment, the researchers had participants read words associated with social connection (e.g., community, connected, relationship), then asked them how much they intended to volunteer for a charity. The results show that people were more willing to volunteer for a charity after reading those words than they were after reading a series of other, neutral words (e.g., book, lamp, shoe).

They were also more likely to want to volunteer after reading the social connection words than after reading words that evoked autonomy (e.g., freedom, choice, preference) or competence (e.g., skilled, expert, competent). 

A second experiment suggests that these positive effects go well beyond volunteering. The researchers had participants write about a time that they felt a close bond with someone else, bringing to mind that feeling of connection. Then they asked how willing the participants were to perform five pro-social actions over the coming weeks, including giving money to charity and going out of their way to help a stranger in need.

Just thinking about their close connection boosted people’s altruistic impulses: After writing about their relationship, they showed a stronger desire to help others than they did after writing about feeling competent, autonomous, or just after answering some banal questions (e.g., “I think that the color blue looks great on most people”).

And it seems like these feelings of connection do more than encourage good intentions; they also spur positive actions. In a third and final experiment, participants either read words evoking social connection or read neutral words, just like in the first experiment. Afterward, they were given the chance to anonymously donate some of the money they earned for participating in the study to the British Red Cross, which they were told was working with the researchers. 

Nearly half of the participants who had been reminded of their social connections donated to the Red Cross, whereas fewer than 20 percent of the other participants did.

Although previous studies have suggested a link between altruism and feelings of relatedness, this study is the first to find that inducing those feelings can directly cause people to be kinder and more generous.

According to the researchers, their findings highlight the basic human need for belonging. In their paper, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,  they point to other research showing that feeling socially connected reduces aggression, whereas feeling excluded increases aggression and reduces pro-social behaviors.

Taken together, they argue, these findings suggest that helping people connect with others doesn’t only benefit their own health and well-being but could benefit society as a whole. They call for more research to explore precisely how fostering social connections can boost pro-social behavior.

“Such research could promote simultaneously individual welfare and the welfare of others,” they write, “in a way that would challenge the assumption that there is some kind of conflict between the two.”

Two recent studies suggest that giving to others makes us happy, even happier than spending on ourselves. What’s more, our kindness might create a virtuous cycle that promotes lasting happiness and altruism. 

In one of the studies, published last year in the Journal of Social Psychology, researchers in Great Britain had participants take a survey measuring life satisfaction, then they assigned all 86 participants to one of three groups. One group was instructed to perform a daily act of kindness for the next 10 days. Another group was also told to do something new each day over those 10 days. A third group received no instructions.

After the 10 days were up, the researchers asked the participants to complete the life satisfaction survey again.

The groups that practiced kindness and engaged in novel acts both experienced a significant—and roughly equal—boost in happiness; the third group didn’t get any happier. The findings suggest that good deeds do in fact make people feel good—even when performed over as little as 10 days—and there may be particular benefits to varying our acts of kindness, as novelty seems linked to happiness as well.

But kindness may have a longer, even more profound effect on our happiness, according to the second study, published online in the Journal of Happiness Studies in April and conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of British Columbia.

In this study, the researchers instructed roughly half of the 51 participants to recall, as vividly as they could, the last time they spent $20 or $100 on themselves. The other participants had to recall the last time they spent the same amounts on someone else. All the participants also completed a scale that measured how happy they were.

Researchers then gave the participants small sums of money and two basic choices: They could spend it on themselves (by covering a bill, another expense, or a gift for themselves) or on someone else (through a donation to charity or a gift). Choose whatever will make you happiest, the researchers told them, adding that their choice would remain anonymous, just in case they felt pressure to appear more altruistic.

The researchers made two big findings. First, consistent with the British study, people in general felt happier when they were asked to remember a time they bought something for someone else—even happier than when they remembered buying something for themselves. This happiness boost was the same regardless of whether the gift cost $20 or $100.

But the second finding is even more provocative: The happier participants felt about their past generosity, the more likely they were in the present to choose to spend on someone else instead of themselves. Not all participants who remembered their past kindness felt happy. But the ones who did feel happy were overwhelmingly more likely to double down on altruism.

The results suggest a kind of “positive feedback loop” between kindness and happiness, according to the authors, so that one encourages the other.

“The practical implications of this positive feedback loop could be that engaging in one kind deed (e.g., taking your mom to lunch) would make you happier, and the happier you feel, the more likely you are to do another kind act,” says Lara Aknin, a graduate student in psychology at the University of British Columbia and the study’s lead author. “This might also be harnessed by charitable organizations: Reminding donors of earlier donations could make them happy, and experiencing happiness might lead to making a generous gift.”

In the study, researchers gave surveys to 217 students in grades three through five, measuring how much the students liked to cooperate or compete with their peers, and how often they acted with aggression or kindness toward them. The students also reported how often their teachers put them in small groups to complete assignments together, a classroom strategy known as “cooperative learning” because the students have to collaborate with one another in order to get their work done.

The results, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, suggest that cooperation begets cooperation: Students who participated in more cooperative learning exercises were more likely than their peers to say they liked cooperating with other students, leading the researchers to conclude that “cooperative experiences promote the development of the personality trait of cooperativeness.”

What’s more, students who engaged in more frequent cooperative learning were also more likely to report performing kind, helpful—or “pro-social”—behavior toward their classmates.

On the other hand, students who said they liked competing were significantly more likely to act aggressively toward their peers and try to do them harm.

Students who cooperate with each other are not just more likely to do well on their shared projects, say the researchers. Prior studies suggest that participating in cooperative projects leads to positive relationships and greater psychological health. On the other hand, they report, being competitive is associated with bullying, and bullies tend to be more sad, lonely, and anxious.

Based on their results, the researchers advocate more cooperative learning in classrooms as a way to promote positive behaviors and combat bullying (which they dub “harm-intended aggression”).

“Cooperative learning experiences may be used to increase students’ cooperative predispositions,” they write. “Doing so will increase student engagement in pro-social behaviors and will reduce the incidence of harm-intended aggression among students.”

A new study suggests this rising income inequality in the United States doesn’t just affect Americans’ pocketbooks; it affects their happiness. Over the past four decades, according to the study, the American people have been the least happy in years when there was the widest gap between rich and poor.

In the study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, researchers examined 50,000 responses to the General Social Survey, which has tracked well-being in the United States since 1972. The researchers, led by Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia, zeroed in on Americans’ levels of happiness between 1972 and 2008, along with their perceptions of how fair and trustworthy other people are. Oishi and his colleagues compared these responses both with participants’ reported household income over those years and with a U.S. Census measure of income inequality.

Consistent with previous studies, the results show that the American population as a whole is less happy in times of greater income inequality. However, this wasn’t true across all income brackets: Only low-income participants—people whose income placed them in the bottom 40 percent of the entire U.S. population—reported reduced happiness in times of greater inequality. For other Americans, inequality was not reliably linked to greater happiness or unhappiness.

But what sets this study apart from previous research is that the observed link between unhappiness and income inequality was traced to psychological factors, not simply economic ones. People weren’t unhappy just because their income was lower. Instead, the authors’ analysis revealed that greater inequality was linked to reductions in trust and perceived fairness—and it was drops in those attitudes that made people feel less happy.

This finding echoes other research linking fairness and trust to happiness.

“A sense of fairness and trust are associated with happiness perhaps because they are a building block of social relationships and community,” says Oishi, “and having satisfying social relationships is important [to happiness].”

In the study, Oishi and his colleagues argue that their results may explain why economic growth has not been accompanied by increases in happiness in the United States, unlike in other developed nations. The problem, they suggest, is that gains in national wealth in the U.S. haven’t been distributed equally, and this inequality has caused Americans’ happiness to suffer.

Still, the authors acknowledge that the changes in happiness they observed could be due to factors other than declines in trust and perceived fairness, such as satisfaction with one’s job or neighborhood, for which they didn’t account. They say more research is needed to flesh out the link between inequality and happiness.

For now, they write, this much is clear: “Americans are happier when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly.

“If the ultimate goal of society is to make its citizens happy,” they add, “then it is desirable to consider policies that produce more income equality, fairness, and general trust.”

Instead, research suggests that many of us are still prone to more unconscious or “automatic” forms of racism—we can behave in racially-biased ways without even knowing it. For instance, studies show that automatic bias can cause whites to smile less, avert their gaze, and stand further away from people of color.

But a new study suggests that by simply putting ourselves in another person’s shoes, we can significantly reduce our unconscious biases—and significantly improve our real-world interactions with people who look different from us.

In the study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers showed participants a five-minute video depicting a black man named Glen and a white man named John. Both shopped in a department store, tried to buy a car, and interacted with police, but Glen clearly experienced discrimination.

Some participants were then asked to imagine Glen’s perspective—what he might be thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Others were asked to imagine what thoughts and feelings they would have if they were in Glen’s situation. A third group was supposed to remain objective; they weren’t told to consider Glen’s thoughts or emotions.

Then the researchers gave the participants’ a sophisticated test that measures unconscious biases.

The results show that participants in both perspective-taking conditions were less biased than participants who were asked to be objective. What’s more, it didn’t seem to matter how the participants went about taking Glen’s perspective: Participants who imagined Glen’s thoughts and feelings showed the same reduction in unconscious bias as those who imagined how they would feel if they were Glen.

In a variation on this experiment, the researchers found that participants showed less automatic bias even when they were simply shown a picture of a black man and asked to imagine his thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Another experiment in the study showed that perspective taking did not lead participants to ignore racial inequality, as previous studies have suggested.

The study’s final experiment showed that perspective taking actually improves real-world interactions between black and white people. First, participants—college students—were shown a photo of an African-American man and were asked either to take his perspective, remain objective, or were given no instructions. Then they wrote an essay about a day in his life.

Afterward, an African-American woman—who was working with the researchers but didn’t know what instructions each participant had received—led participants into another room with a hidden video camera and asked them questions about their introductory psychology course; soon afterward she assessed the quality of her exchange with them.

In general, the woman felt she had more positive interactions with participants who were perspective takers. Analysis of the video also showed that perspective takers had more positive body language.

The results identify concrete social benefits of “putting oneself in another person’s shoes,” according to Andrew Todd, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa.

“I think our work provides some much needed first steps toward identifying a practical strategy that individuals can implement during encounters with outgroup members,” he says.

Still, he cautions that “it’s unlikely that perspective taking is a cure-all de-biasing strategy for everyone or in every intergroup situation.”

Todd says that more research is needed to determine under what circumstances, and for which people, perspective taking will be most effective in reducing prejudice.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examines the warm, uplifting feeling we get from watching someone act with courage or compassion—a feeling psychologists refer to as “moral elevation.” Researchers have found that elevation induces positive emotions, makes people believe in the goodness of humanity, and inspires them to act more altruistically.

In the study, researchers explored whether people are inspired to do good by simply thinking about acts of goodwill without witnessing them firsthand. They also attempted to determine whether common acts of kindness would be enough to elicit feelings of moral elevation, or whether the deeds had to be extraordinary.

Participants read articles and watched videos depicting acts of common or uncommon kindness. Some read about an organization that establishes neighborhood gardens, while others saw a music video illustrating how the singer’s entire budget was used to aid impoverished communities around the world. Participants then had the opportunity to give money to others or keep it for themselves.

The results show that hearing about these good deeds made the participants more likely to give away their money—but only if they had been exposed to an extraordinary good deed, not just an everyday act of kindness. What’s more, participants who saw themselves as highly moral people tended to give money more often than those who did not.

This study has important implications for the news media, which tend to report negative events more often than positive ones. The results suggest that even a subtle shift by the media could have profound effects.

“We have reason to believe that even a seemingly weak stimulus, like a story of moral goodness, can evoke moral elevation responses in nonexperimental settings,” write the authors. Therefore, if the news were to report on impressive good deeds more frequently, perhaps we would see a far-reaching ripple effect among readers.

We also spend a lot of time and energy trying to accumulate as much wealth as possible, and this pursuit has become one of the most controversial issues among researchers of happiness (or “subjective well-being,” as they call it). While it seems obvious that money can buy us many of the things that make life more enjoyable, most of us (myself included) shudder to think that a material object can have such a strong influence on our happiness.

So, how important is wealth to happiness?

In an effort to understand how economic hardships could affect well-being, Gallup Polls—one of the largest polling agencies in the country—collected one million responses assessing Americans’ happiness and how much they felt they were thriving, struggling, or suffering. They looked at the period from 2008 until 2010, with a particular focus on the effect of the 2009 economic recession.

Overall, the poll tells us a few things we already knew:
1. People are happier during the weekends (happiness fluctuated by 10 percent or more from weekdays to weekends!)
2. Americans have relatively, but not incredibly, high well-being on average.

We rank 15th out of 97 countries that have been measured for well-being, according to the World Values Index. With a mean of about 60-70 percent, we show room for improvement, but overall, most Americans seem pretty happy and satisfied with their lives.

During the recession, the polls show a slight dip in well-being (about 4 percent) in conjunction with a greater number of individuals who reported struggling as opposed to thriving. (Important note: Always read your graphs carefully. The results for this measure are on a scale ranging from 1-10; the authors categorized thriving as scores 7-10, and struggling as 5-6, which is a bit sneaky).

So how do we interpret these findings, and where do they fit into what we know about money and well-being? Research in this area provides mixed results. In a comprehensive review of the literature, the father-son team of Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener showed that while nations with greater wealth generally have higher well-being, wealth within a nation correlates very little with well-being. In fact, countries that show economic growth do not show corresponding increases in well-being.

Even more telling, people who focus on accumulating material wealth show lower levels of well-being. On the other hand, people who lose their job consistently show a drop in happiness, which certainly occurred as the recession took full force.

Gallup suggests that their results reflect significant changes in the well-being and happiness of the American people during the recession. However, it appears that although small drops in happiness were certainly associated with the economic recession, it was fairly robust even in the face of economic hardship. If anything, the poll suggests that although the economy was plummeting, individuals were able to find happiness in other areas, such as social support, which is one of the strongest predictors of well-being.

These results help remind us that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that even in the face of economic hardship, we can find joy amongst friends and family.

She’s finally old enough to get the nuances of hide-and-seek—most importantly, don’t jump screaming from your hiding spot until you’ve been found—and we’ve built some pretty sweet castles together with her Magna Tiles.

But when playtime’s over and it’s time to do parenting’s dirty work—by brushing her teeth, say, or helping her on the potty—my services are no longer required. “No, I want mommy to do it!” is something I’ve gotten used to hearing.

This is pretty demoralizing. I’d taken for granted that my wife and I would share the hardships of parenting as well as its joys, in the same way that we had shared the cooking, cleaning, and other household chores before our daughter came along. Ours is a generation of equals, after all, rewriting gender roles inside and outside the home—isn’t it? If I’m just a playmate, I feel like not much of a parent—and not much of a partner.

But new research is helping me see things differently. In a series of studies, Ohio State professor of child development Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan and her colleagues have found that when fathers regularly play with their kids, their relationship with their partner improves—which is good for the family as a whole, according to prior research.

But that’s only half of the story. In an unexpected twist, Schoppe-Sullivan and her colleagues also found that when dads take on more of the traditional caregiving duties—the teeth brushing and diaper changing—the couple’s relationship seems to suffer.

“That was surprising: that father involvement in caregiving predicted a worsening relationship between the mother and father,” says Schoppe-Sullivan. “But it was a pretty clear finding any way we analyzed the data.”

In one of Schoppe-Sullivan’s most recent studies, published earlier this year in the journal Development Psychology, she and co-author Rongfang Jia looked at roughly 100 middle-class families that had a four-year-old child and a mother and father living together.

They asked the fathers how frequently they played in certain ways with their child—like chasing each other around the house or having the kid ride on dad’s shoulders—and how frequently they performed certain caregiving tasks, such as giving a bath or getting their child dressed.

In a separate part of the study, both parents had to work together to help their pre-schooler with two challenging tasks. The researchers observed these interactions to see how the parents related to one another during the challenge.

Then they brought the families back into the lab one year later to have them do it all over again.

They found that when fathers were more involved in play, their relationship with their partner was warmer, more supportive, and more cooperative one year later; the couple got into fewer conflicts and undermined each other less.

In contrast, when fathers were more involved in caregiving duties, the couples was less supportive of one another and more prone to conflict one year later.

Why would helpful dads actually put a strain on their relationship? Schoppe-Sullivan offers a few possible explanations.

“Caregiving could cause conflict because it encroaches on the mother’s territory,” provoking what’s sometimes dubbed “Maternal Gatekeeping,” she says. “Or maybe dads are doing work they didn’t anticipate doing and don’t want to be doing.”

She also notes that while her study ruled out many other explanations, one factor it didn’t consider was whether there was some family problem—a child with special needs, for instance—that was generating more paternal caregiving and more conflict.

Schoppe-Sullivan stresses that the results don’t let dads like me off the hook from ever having to give another bath. This research may just suggest that families like mine—and our culture as a whole—have more work to do toward true equality.

“It may not be as easy as saying, ‘OK, let’s share the parenting,’” she says. “Or, ‘Dads, you should help more, you slackers.’ It may be a charged area. Dad may not know how to approach it. Mom may encourage it verbally but discourage it in action.”

So while my wife and I—and the majority of other couples, according to surveys—aspire to a more equal division of household labor, we shouldn’t underestimate the practical and emotional challenges we’ll face along the way. “We need to prepare parents better for what’s to come,” says Schoppe-Sullivan.

Still, she’s optimistic, pointing out that her mixed results on father involvement may suggest that our society is in the midst of tackling these challenges.

“This could be part of a big transition,” she says. “If we do another study in 10 years, we might not find any evidence that any type of father involvement in co-parenting is bad.”

Perhaps the bottom line for dads like me is that, while prior research has linked father involvement to the well-being of a family as a whole, this study shows there are lots of different ways to be positively involved. As Schoppe-Sullivan told me, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” model for every family.

In other words, those shoulder rides may be more significant than I realized.

“This research certainly reinforces the importance of play,” says Schoppe-Sullivan. “We shouldn’t dismiss a father’s contribution as, ‘Oh, they’re just playmates.’”

That’s not always true, according to a forthcoming study, which suggests that people with high emotional intelligence—meaning that they have a strong ability to identify what they’re feeling and keep their emotions from getting the better of them—can use that skill for good or bad.

The study consisted of two separate experiments. In both experiments, participants first took a survey that measured how well they could manage their emotions to suit the needs of a given situation—a skill called “emotion regulation,” which is an important part of emotional intelligence. If a co-worker fails to deliver an important part of a project you’re working on together, explain the researchers, and you respond by strongly encouraging him to do better without blowing your top—that’s emotion regulation.

In the first experiment, the participants also completed a questionnaire that assessed how strongly they wanted to see themselves as a caring, moral person, which the researchers call their “moral identity.”

Then they played a game that pitted the common good against their own self-interest: They could take a limited number of points from a common lottery pool. The more points they took, the greater their odds of winning a lottery. But if all the points got depleted from the pool—which would happen if everyone took the highest number of points available to them—there would be no lottery at all.

The results, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science later this year, show that people with a strong moral identity were more considerate of others—and they were significantly more considerate if they were also good at regulating their emotions.

The second experiment involved a different set of participants, who took a questionnaire that determined how motivated they were to manipulate others for their own personal gain—a trait known as “Machiavellianism.” Then they reported how often they’d behaved badly toward co-workers, such as by embarrassing them publicly.

The researchers found that people who had stronger Machiavellian impulses were more likely to treat others poorly—and this was especially true if they were also skilled at regulating their emotions.

Taken together, the results suggest that simply having high emotional intelligence doesn’t mean people will act with kindness and compassion toward others. In fact, emotional intelligence might even promote bad behavior.

“Although Machievellians have low emotion regulation knowledge on average,” write the researchers, “Machievellians who know how to regulate emotions effectively are especially harmful.”

So why might emotion regulation give this boost to good and bad behavior alike?

“We think that the ability to regulate emotions just helps people accomplish their goals,” says Stéphane Côté, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of organizational behavior and psychology at the University of Toronto. “When people want to accomplish their goals, there are emotions that are helpful and those that could get in their way.”

For instance, says Côté, guilt or compassion could get in the way of a Machiavellian’s selfish goals; being able to control those emotions could help them act on their nasty desires, just as a moral person would want to temper his selfish impulses in order to help other people.

“It’s the same skill, but it can help people accomplish different goals,” he says.

Côté acknowledges that this research will probably surprise people who assume that emotional intelligence is synonymous with kind, helpful—or “pro-social”—behavior.

“If people’s assumption is that people with high social skills will be more pro-social,” he says, “that’s a faulty assumption.”

Still, he doesn’t think it’s misguided to try to promote positive behavior by teaching emotional intelligence, which is what many social-emotional learning programs try to do in schools.

“Emotional skills are part of the puzzle,” he says, “but they’re not all of the puzzle. These skills are very useful, but like any skill, they will be used pro-socially only if they’re combined with other types of education,” like in ethics.

You might think that’s a question more appropriate to an adult therapy session than a conversation with a toddler, but a recent study might make you think twice. The study suggests that encouraging young kids to identify and discuss emotions might make them more likely to act kindly toward others as they get older.

The study, published in the journal Social Development, involved 102 pairs of mothers and children living in the UK.

When the children were two years old, and again when they were three, the researchers measured their verbal ability and their ability to understand emotions. The researchers also observed interactions between the mothers and children and examined whether the children would share toys or food with a stranger his or her own age.

The researchers, who are based at the University of Cambridge, followed up with the children when they were four years old, again measuring their verbal abilities, emotion understanding, and relationship with their mothers. But this time the researchers also conducted an experiment to see if the children would share stickers with a friend or keep the stickers for themselves.

They found that children who showed a greater understanding of emotions at age three were more likely to share with a friend at age four. They also found that kids who had stronger verbal skills or seemed closer and more in-tune with their mothers at age two were also more likely to share at age four, as long as they’d also demonstrated a strong understanding of emotions at age three.

Taken together, the results suggest to the researchers that “children’s abilities to detect and reflect on feelings” are strongly linked to kind, helpful—or “pro-social”—behavior.

So “how do you feel?” might not be such an inappropriate question for children after all: The researchers suggest that talking about emotions might be a key to developing this type of emotional intelligence in kids. Young kids who have a close, connected relationship with their mothers frequently discuss their feelings and other people’s feelings, note the researchers, and these types of conversations might deepen their understanding of emotions—which, in turn, makes them more likely to help others.

Am I making you hungry?

According to a new study, these words do more than whet our appetite. They fulfill our hunger for social connection.

The study, published online last week by the journal Psychological Science, explored the emotional reasons why comfort foods make us feel so good.

The results suggest a strong link between comfort foods and the comfort we get from loved ones; in fact, simply thinking of comfort foods can make us feel significantly less lonely.

In the study, researchers at the University of Buffalo asked undergraduate students to write about a fight with a loved one—an attempt to make these students feel socially vulnerable and threatened. Then they had some of the students write about a comfort food of theirs, while others were asked to write about a new food they’d like to try. Afterward, all the students filled out a survey that recorded how lonely they felt at the moment.

The researchers, Jordan Troisi and Shira Gabriel, found that students who thought about their comfort food felt significantly less lonely than the students who thought about a new food.

However, this was true only for the students who were able to form close, secure relationships with others—something that had been assessed earlier in the study. For people who had a harder time forming secure connections to others, comfort foods didn’t have the same effect.

Based on their results, Troisi and Gabriel argue that people associate comfort foods with close friends and family, quite possibly because those foods were originally eaten with (or prepared by) our loved ones; the memory of the person and the memory of the food become intertwined. And it’s these associations with loved ones that make comfort foods so comforting—it’s as if the foods become a surrogate for the people we hold dear.

“Therefore, the physiological experience of ingesting, or even thinking about ingesting, comfort food automatically activates the experience of psychological comfort that was initially encoded along with the food,” the authors write.

But if people don’t find much comfort in their relationships to begin with—which was the case for some of the study participants—comfort foods won’t be able to work their magic.

In another experiment they ran with a different group of undergrads, Troisi and Gabriel found further evidence of the link between comfort foods and relationships.

Some students in this experiment ate chicken soup, some didn’t; then all the students completed a task in which they had to insert missing letters into word fragments. The words could either be completed to spell words associated with relationships (e.g., like, include, welcome) or non-relationship words.

Among the students who’d previously said they considered chicken soup to be a comfort food, students who ate chicken soup were significantly more likely to spell relationship words than were students who hadn’t eaten the soup. Their comfort food had made them think about their relationships, perhaps subconsciously, suggest the researchers.

Students who didn’t consider chicken soup to be a comfort food weren’t more likely to spell relationship words, regardless of whether they’d eaten the soup or not.

Taken together, these results suggest that it’s not simply the taste or texture of comfort foods that give them their power; it’s the social and emotional associations they conjure up for us.

A recent study validates this idea. Based on a careful review of the research on parenting, developmental psychologists Joan Grusec, of the University of Toronto, and Maayan Davidov, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, identify five distinct modes of interaction between parents and their kids, each of which helps a child to mature in important ways. They argue that, rather than having a single parenting “style,” parents take on different roles in different situations.

Their analysis, published in the journal Child Development, helps give parents a better grasp on their complicated and shifting roles—and offers ways to help them raise happier, more well-adjusted, and caring children.

Here are the five parenting “domains” that Grusec and Davidov identify.

1. Protection and comfort. Like other species, humans evolved behaviors that enable children to draw an adult’s attention for help and survival.

Not all cries are for protection, but when parents respond sensitively to a child’s feelings of being threatened, there are many short- and long-term benefits: The child’s neurobiological system becomes “trained” to eventually cope with stress on his own; he is more empathic to other people’s distress; and he tends to want to cooperate with and be close to his parents.

Comforting a troubled child is a tonic for the parent-child relationship—an investment in future cooperation, positive emotional development, and general well-being.

2. Control. Sometimes a parent has to exert his or her power over his or her children to enforce discipline. This may mean drawing from a bag of tricks of positive reinforcement, disapproval, reasoning, withdrawing privileges, or time-outs.

Researchers caution that the discipline has to be carefully matched to the misdeed or else parents can interfere with their child’s budding sense of autonomy: Too little discipline and the behavior is not affected; too much discipline and parents can undermine their child’s ability to want to set limits for himself.

A second challenge is that children differ in what they respond to, depending on their age, sex, temperament, mood, self-image, and the nature of the problem. One child responds to a severe look, the other child needs to have stronger consequences.

In the control domain, then, effective parents know the child well enough to choose the method and the volume necessary to help that child correct his misdeed. When discipline is well-crafted, children grow to do the right thing on their own, even overriding impulses to do otherwise.

3. Reciprocity. Despite the regular need for parents to exert control, Grusec and Davidov’s analysis also highlights the need to comply occasionally with the requests that children make of us and with their attempts to influence us.

Research shows when parents acquiesce to their children’s reasonable wishes, children tend to happily comply later when something is asked of them. However, giving children rewards when they cooperate can backfire and undermine their genuine desire to work together.

Children who are respected in this way tend to be happier, and have more positive social skills, fewer problems, and less conflict. Studies show, for example, that mothers who play with their sons in some equal give-and-take have less conflict with them.

4. Guided learning. Sometimes being a good parent is being a good teacher, whether it’s training a youngster to tie shoes, use the potty, navigate sticky social situations, or learn about feelings.

Effective parents “scaffold” their instruction: They assess what the child already knows, they teach to just the next step, and they support the child until he or she is successful. Not only can children learn many new skills this way, but under close, gentle guidance, they come to understand the parent’s holistic picture of the problem, which creates a deep kind of meta-learning.

Studies show, for example, that mothers who talk with their children about specific emotional issues in a coherent and meaningful way—and include details, interpretations, and feedback—help to advance their children’s general understanding of emotional life.

5. Group Participation. Children easily and naturally learn a lot about what is expected of them by participating in groups, including their extended family, circle of friends, neighborhoods, churches, and extra-curricular activities.

As parents guide them through the rituals, routines, and practices of different kinds of organizations, children implicitly learn all kinds of norms—gender roles, cultural expectations, ideas about social class, appropriate public behavior—which help them create a firm sense of social identity.

In reality, there are probably many more domains, and it is likely that more than one operates at any given time. The roles are not exclusive to parents—any adult caregiver, or even an older child or sibling, can have the same impact. The emphasis on certain domains will change with development, and parents will be better at some than others.

Still, giving more definition to parents’ vast sea of emotional labor can help us improve our form, enabling us to stay upright, balanced, and facing forward.

But infectious laughter isn’t just good for a quick giggle. New research suggests that it provides important social benefits—benefits that might have served our ancestors well through millions of years of evolution.

In a recent study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers investigated whether chimpanzees, some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, are prone to the same type of contagious laughter as humans, where we reflexively imitate someone else’s laugh even if we’re not feeling the same emotion that they are.

Prior research suggests that this type of laughter—say, a polite guffaw in response to a joyous bellow—could promote cooperation and positive communication, making laughter and smiles essential to emotional intelligence. This kind of laughter had been observed in humans but never before in our primate relatives.

The researchers observed 59 chimpanzees of various ages, split among four colonies at a sanctuary in Zambia. Two of these colonies were new—the chimps in them had only lived together for five years—and two were old, where the chimps had lived together for more than 14 years.

As the researchers watched pairs of chimpanzees playing together, they consistently found that one chimp would laugh in response to another’s laughter. But this second laugh was distinct from the original laugh; it was shorter and had a different vocal quality.

This kind of contagious, responsive laughter showed “a striking similarity to [the] conversational laughter of humans,” write the authors, who are all based in the department of psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. “Both vocalizations are significantly short and seem to promote social interactions.” Indeed, the chimpanzees would play together for a longer period of time when one of them laughed in response to the other’s laugh, suggesting that their shared laugh reinforced their social bond.

Chimpanzees in the new colonies were more likely to imitate laughter than were chimps in the older colonies. “It therefore seems likely that laugh replications have a more important role in the social communication of chimpanzees when their social partners are less predictable and/or when the need for social cohesion increases,” the authors write.

The study is the first to document this kind of polite, contagious laughter among non-humans. The results indicate that this type of laughter could have deep evolutionary significance, according to Marina Davila-Ross, the study’s lead author.

“These findings suggest that laughter first emerged into an expression of positive social communication that provided our ape ancestors important advantages,” says Davila-Ross, “before it evolved to become an ubiquitous tool of human communication with not only positive functions, but also negative ones (e.g., to mock).”

But are these criticisms justified? A recent study in the journal Pediatrics set out to determine whether all video game playing is bad for kids’ health, and which factors determine whether certain kids might be more at risk.

Researchers surveyed more than four thousand public high school students in Connecticut. The students provided anonymous information about their gaming habits, indicators of their health (such as their body mass index), and risky health behaviors (such as their use of drugs and alcohol).

The results suggest that physical and mental health problems linked to video games depend on a student’s psychological investment in those games. Those who were more deeply invested in the games, deemed “problematic” gamers, were more at risk than “recreational” gamers.

The researchers classified a student as a problematic video gamer if he or she agreed with all of the following statements:

• I have been unsuccessful in cutting back.
• I experience an irresistible urge to play.
• I experience tension that is only relieved by playing.

Just over half of the respondents reported playing video games for at least one hour a week. Although the majority of the students reported none of the symptoms associated with problematic gaming, roughly five percent of gamers reported all three symptoms; nearly six percent of the boys and three percent of the girls fit the bill.

The survey results show that problematic gamers are much more likely to smoke cigarettes, be aggressive, and show symptoms of being depressed. Interestingly, problematic gaming was not linked to a student’s grades, extracurricular activities, or the use of drugs and alcohol.

Among recreational gamers, the prevalence of these types of problem behaviors differed across genders. Compared to non-gamers, recreational gaming girls were more likely to get into a serious fight or carry a weapon. At the same time, this group had a lower risk of depression.

Compared to non-gamers, recreational gaming boys were no more likely to use alcohol or drugs, be overweight, or show symptoms of depression than non-gaming boys. They were also less likely to report being a regular smoker.

This research challenges the popular belief that video game playing leads to exclusively negative outcomes for youth. The researchers suggest that future studies should focus on determining safe levels of gaming, identify risk factors for problematic gaming, and develop ways to intervene before the problem takes root.

What’s more, given video games’ tremendous popularity among kids, the researchers suggest that more research should explore how these games could promote positive mental and physical health.