Andrew Webber

A compilation of all the unusual noises -- henh! hwuah! masanoonaa! eescrong! -- Kanye West makes in his songs.

Tags: audio   Kanye West   music   video

We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, we find little evidence of a strong statistical relationship between early maternal employment and any of the emotional outcomes. However, there is some evidence that children whose mother is in full-time employment at the 18th month have worse behavioural outcomes at ages 4, 7, and 12. We suggest that these largely insignificant results may in part be explained by mothers who return to full-time work earlier being able to compensate their children: we highlight the role of fathers’ time investment and alternative childcare arrangements in this respect.

There is mixed evidence in the existing literature on whether children are associated with greater subjective well-being, with the correlation depending on which countries and populations are considered. We here provide a systematic analysis of this question based on three different datasets: two cross-national and one national panel. We show that the association between children and subjective well-being is positive only in developed countries, and for those who become parents after the age of 30 and who have higher income. We also provide evidence of a positive selection into parenthood, whereby happier individuals are more likely to have children.

Morning of Owl is a dance crew from Korea and they are from The Matrix, I think?

How did you do that? You moved like they do. I've never seen anyone move that fast.

Amazing athleticism and coordination. (via @aaroncoleman0)

Tags: dance   video

This paper builds upon Cunha's (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on the early skill formation of their children. We propose that this subjective belief is determined in part by locus of control (LOC), i.e., the extent to which individuals believe that their actions can influence future outcomes. Consistent with the theory, we show that maternal LOC measured at the 12th week of gestation strongly predicts maternal attitudes towards parenting style, maternal time investments, as well as early and late cognitive outcomes. We also utilize the variation in inputs and outputs by maternal LOC to help improve the specification typically used in the estimation of skill production function parameters.

Work done by women pays less because women do it, research shows.

But a new study from Robert Clifford, an economist at the Boston Fed, and Daniel Shoag, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, finds that when employers are prohibited from looking into people’s financial history, something perverse happens: African-Americans become more likely to be unemployed relative to others.

…What’s surprising is how that redistribution happened. In states that passed credit-check bans, it  became easier for people with bad credit histories to compete for employment. But disproportionately, they seem to have elbowed aside black job-seekers.

I can’t say that mechanism makes me feel better about the world, but there you go. Consider this:

A powerful study published last year in the Review of Economics and Statistics shows something of the opposite happening: When employers began to require drug tests for job applicants, they started hiring more African-Americans.

“The likely explanation for these findings is that prior to drug testing, employers overestimated African-Americans’ drug use relative to whites,” the study’s author explained in an op-ed. Drug tests allowed black job applicants to disprove the incorrect perception that they were addicts.

It’s possible that credit checks were playing a similar role to drug tests, offering a counterbalance to inherent biases or assumptions about black job-seekers.

Here is the Jeff Guo Wonkblog piece, here is one version of the original study.  Here is related earlier work by Daniel Klein.

The post Banning credit checks harms African-Americans appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city. The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.

That is from an interesting Geoff Manaugh NYT piece on aerial surveillance in Los Angeles. Here is Manaugh’s forthcoming book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, which I have pre-ordered.

For the pointer I thank Alex Xenopoulos.

The post How to hide from the police in Los Angeles appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

By guest blogger Richard Stephens

I have a professional interest in the naughty. In my recent book Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad I explored in a light hearted fashion the psychology around the upsides of various antisocial behaviours – things like swearing, drinking, affairs and untidiness to name a few. However, this post is about physical violence, a much more serious form of bad behaviour for which I see no upside at all.

Thankfully there is some fascinating psychology into the factors that may lead people to violence, and that may yet help society to curb such negative behaviour. While it’s true that many of the factors associated with violence are situational – things like poverty, unemployment and educational attainment – there are also personal characteristics that are strongly associated with the chances that a person will behave violently. One of these is a person’s heart rate.

A recent study published in The International Journal of Epidemiology is just the latest to find a link between lower resting heart rate and more violent behaviour. Joseph Murray at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues measured resting heart rate in over 3,000 male and female children growing up in Pelotas, a relatively poor city in a relatively rich southern state of Brazil.

This was longitudinal study in the style of the British “Seven Up!” documentary series, with children born in 1993 periodically called back for interviews and testing as they grew up. The researchers were specifically interested in their participants’ resting heart rate, which is the heart’s beats per minute after 10 minutes of sitting still quietly. The researchers measured this three times – when the children were aged 11, 15 and 18.

A novel aspect of this study compared with earlier research (including in the UK in the 1950s and 1970s and more recent US and Swedish studies), is the sheer frequency of extreme violence in Pelotas: in 2011 the city had a murder rate of 18.9 per 100,000 population, almost 20 times higher than in England and Wales and Sweden. The new study also included women whereas the earlier research focused only on men.

The researchers identified criminal behaviour through a combination of asking the young people at the age of 18 if they had committed any crimes during the past year, and by checking with legal agencies to see if they had a criminal record. Crimes were flagged as violent if they involved assault, robbery, weapons, murder, kidnapping, non-consensual sex, serious personal threats and other rare violent acts.

For males there were clear links between resting heart rate at age 11, 15 and 18 and participation in violent crime. Males with a lower resting heart rate averaging around 59-65 beats per minute were between one-and-a-half-times and two-times as likely to have committed violent crimes compared with males with a higher resting heart rate averaging around 90-92 beats per minute. Women with a lower resting heart rate were twice as likely to have committed violent crimes than women with a higher resting heart rate.

I should add that the researchers did some additional work checking whether several situational contexts known to be associated with violent behaviour – things like unplanned pregnancy, the mother’s years in education and the family income – had any bearing on the results. But the findings stood even after taking these situational factors into account.

Why might resting heart rate be linked with violence? One theory is that having a low resting heart rate is very unpleasant to the extent that it drives individuals to seek stimulation, which may manifest as antisocial behaviour. A similar explanation was put forward by Hans Eysenck in the 1960s to explain the extravert personality trait.

Another theory is that low resting heart rate is a sign of fearlessness. Children lacking fear may be more likely to commit antisocial acts because they are unconcerned about the possible adverse consequences such as admonishment by a parent or teacher. The current study did not have any means of testing these competing theories but earlier US research found no effect of fearlessness when looking at resting heart rate and aggressive antisocial behaviour. On balance then, fearlessness seems less likely to be the underlying cause.

As the authors of the new research point out, it is surprising that a personal, physical characteristic like resting heart rate can have such a clear cut link with violent behaviour for both men and women, above and beyond societal influences like poverty, inequality, gangs, drug trafficking and corrupt justice systems.

I asked study author Joseph Murray, what the direct impacts of these findings might be – could we use what we know about resting heart rate to prevent violent outbreaks before they happen? Professor Murray said “While these were fascinating findings, I do not think that there are any direct implications for practice”, adding, “the level of current understanding about the mechanisms involved does not permit more than speculation.”

Still, this study provides a clear illustration that if we want to understand societal problems like crime and antisocial behaviour, we should look closely at the psychological and biological factors that are involved, as well as the social and societal contexts in which these behaviours are played out.

_________________________________

Murray, J., Hallal, P., Mielke, G., Raine, A., Wehrmeister, F., Anselmi, L., & Barros, F. (2016). Low resting heart rate is associated with violence in late adolescence: a prospective birth cohort study in Brazil International Journal of Epidemiology DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyv340

Post written by Richard Stephens for the BPS Research Digest. You can read more of Richard’s work in his critically acclaimed popular science book: Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad.

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According to UltraRunning Magazine, an ultra run is anything longer than a standard marathon of 26 miles, but it’s not unusual for people to participate in gruelling runs that take place in punishing environments over days or even weeks. For people who struggle to run to catch a bus, the idea of deliberately putting yourself through this kind of physical punishment, for fun, seems little short of crazy. Yet this is a sport that’s on the increase – the number of official events has doubled in the last decade.

Exercise-related distress was once seen as a simple consequence of physical symptoms like metabolic discharge building up in the muscles. But we now understand that the mind plays an important role in deciding whether a symptom is acceptable or unbearable. It’s this that makes ultra-runners possible. In fact, a new in-depth case study of an ultra runner published in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology finds that with greater physical exertion comes the experience of ever more positive emotion.

The profiled runner is an unnamed woman who was new to ultra-running but had a pedigree of elite-level running in international marathons. The researchers, led by Urban Johnson at Halmstad University, examined her experiences during a 10-week run in late spring covering 3641 kilometres (2262 miles) across Europe. The route included flats and substantial rises, passing through mountain ranges such as the Pyrenees. She and her experienced running partner covered between 26 and 80 kilometres each day, typically running between five and eight hours, taking turns to push a baby buggy holding their equipment. In case it’s not obvious … that’s a lot of running.

After the run, the researchers interviewed the runner to understand what she perceived as the mental qualities that made for ultra success. She revealed four key factors: mental stamina; motivation to test one’s limits, a will that's generated by the enjoyable features of the journey; a sense of camaraderie with the partner; and self-awareness. As an example of the last factor, the running pair formalised a rule to communicate to teach other whenever they felt even a twinge of pain so that it could be immediately addressed: a “not one step further” rule. In addition, the pair did not run to targets, covering as much distance as felt comfortable day to day.

The ultra-runner also made a weekly record of her mood and exertion levels, starting three weeks prior to the run and ending three weeks after its completion. The researchers were interested in finding out from these records whether the physical impact of intensive running would produce psychological stress even in the absence of competition or targets.

During the run, the more physical exertion the runner experienced, the more her positive mood intensified. There was only one dip in positive mood during the run and this occurred during a two-week period where the close running dynamic was disrupted by the temporary participation of a third runner. Meanwhile, a measure of more negative mood states found no significant difference due to exertion, nor any differences inside or outside of the run period. So for this runner, no, intensive running was not psychologically stressful, but rather rewarding. It was only after the run was over that our ultra-runner experienced a drop in feelings of vitality, harmony, and appreciation from others, as she came down from her remarkable trip.

This case study provides insight into a person doing exceptional things, with particular drives: as the authors note drily, “the runner enjoys running!” But her breakdown of the key psychological ingredients for success in intense endeavours may resonate with you, whether you climb, act, or are founding a business.
_________________________________

Johnson, U., Kenttä, G., Ivarsson, A., Alvmyren, I., & Karlsson, M. (2016). An ultra-runner's experience of physical and emotional challenges during a 10-week continental run International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 14 (1), 72-84 DOI: 10.1080/1612197X.2015.1035736

--further reading--
What do long-distance runners think about?
Marathon runners forget how painful it was
Why you're particularly likely to run your first marathon when your age ends in a "9"

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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As if interviews weren't nerve-wracking enough as it is, prior research has shown that interviewers tend to rate anxious candidates harshly. This happens even when the anxious candidates are well-qualified to do the job, and even though their interview anxiety really ought to be irrelevant to the recruitment decision.

Of course, learning that your anxiety is going to count against you will only add to the woes of the many people who find interviews terrifying. Thankfully a new study in the Journal of Business Psychology brings some useful and potentially comforting news. The research – the first to investigate the behavioural signs of interview anxiety – finds that interviewers are largely oblivious to nervous tics, such as shaky hands or nervous laughter. Rather, interviewers' negative performance judgments are based on their perception that nervous candidates are less assertive and less warm. Knowing this, anxious people should be able to practice and prepare in a way that counters such prejudices.

The findings are based on mock interviews involving 119 undergrad students who were preparing to go on job placements during their studies. Each student was interviewed by one of 18 interviewers who work for the Canadian Co-op and Career Services that runs job placements for students, and the students and interviewers were instructed to treat the experience as if it were a real interview for one of the candidates' hoped-for placement positions.

The interviews took about 10 minutes each. Afterwards the students rated how anxious they had felt, and the interviewers rated how anxious they perceived the students to be, and how well they felt they had performed. Meanwhile, the interviews were filmed and teams of raters coded the students' body language, speech rate, laughter and rated their personalities on a number of different traits.

Of the many body language and speech cues that the researchers looked at, only a few were related weakly to the students' self-reported feelings of anxiety – making fewer hand gestures, nodding less, pausing longer before answering and speaking more slowly. The paucity and modest relevance of the behavioural cues is likely because anxiety can manifest in very different ways in different people – one person might compensate by being quiet, still and hesitant while another person might be fidgety and talk fast and loose.

Three behavioural cues were weakly related to the interviewers' perceptions of the students' anxiety – licking or biting of the lips, body shifts and slower speech rate. This means the only nervous tic that interviewers accurately interpreted as a sign of anxiety was slower speech. Extensive preparation of answers should be a simple way for candidates to combat this issue.

In contrast, the character vibes given off by the students (as rated by the judges coding the videos) were more strongly and consistently related to the students' feelings of anxiety and to the interviewers' perceptions of their anxiety. Essentially, those students who came over as less warm and less assertive tended to be perceived as more anxious, and vice versa. Moreover, these two key traits of warmth and assertiveness seemed to explain why the interviewers tended to give poorer performance scores to those students they perceived to be anxious.

The researchers said this result has "great implications" for job candidates. "Often interviewees are worried that they are engaging in nervous tics that are revealing of their anxiety," they explained, "when in fact the impression that they convey of themselves as assertive (or not) appears to be more indicative of their anxiety." In other words, anxious interviewees needn't worry too much about any little nervous tics they might have, and should focus instead on the larger impression they make – by learning to come over as assertive and friendly, it is likely they will conceal their anxiety and receive a fairer appraisal from the interviewers.

_________________________________

Feiler, A., & Powell, D. (2016). Behavioral Expression of Job Interview Anxiety Journal of Business and Psychology, 31 (1), 155-171 DOI: 10.1007/s10869-015-9403-z

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Just as people throughout history have been subject to prejudice and persecution because of their religious beliefs, recent evidence suggests that atheists today are discriminated against because of their lack of faith. For instance, in a 2012 study, nearly one in two atheists and agnostics reported having experienced discrimination at work, in the family and elsewhere. Another US study that asked respondents to imagine their children marrying people from different social groups found that participants were most disapproving of the idea of their child marrying an atheist.

Building on these kinds of past results, most of which stem from the US, a new British study published in The International Journal for The Psychology of Religion, has found that many people's distrust of atheists seems to be deeply held, and what's more, even many atheists seem to have an instinctual distrust of other atheists. For background, Britain is a country where 13 per cent of people today consider themselves convinced atheists.

Leah Giddings and Thomas Dunn recruited 100 participants from Nottingham Trent University: their average age was 21 and 70 were women. Forty-three per cent were atheist, 33 per cent were Christian and the remainder subscribed to other faiths. The researchers presented the participants with a vignette about a man who one day backed his car into a van and failed to leave his insurance details, and later on, when he found a wallet, he removed the money from it for himself. In short, this chap wasn't very trustworthy or moral. Next, half the participants were asked to say whether it was more probable that the man was (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and religious (let's call this the teacher+religious condition). The other half of the participants had to say whether they thought it was more likely that the man was (a) a teacher or (b) a teacher and an atheist (the teacher+atheist condition).

Logically speaking, in both conditions the correct answer is always (a) because (b) is a subset of (a) and therefore less likely by definition. However, it's well known in psychology that many people struggle to answer these kinds of questions logically because they're swayed by the connotations of the secondary category that's mentioned in (b) – an error that's known as the conjunction fallacy.

What was particularly revealing in this study is that participants in the teacher+atheist condition were much more prone to committing the conjunction fallacy (66 per cent of them did so), than the participants in the teacher+religious condition (just 8 per cent of participants in this condition fell for the conjunction error). These results suggest that at a superficial level, the description of the distrustful man sounded to many of the participants like a typical atheist, and hence many of them said they thought it more likely that he was both a teacher and an atheist than a teacher.

To test the strength of this apparent prejudice towards atheists, the researchers asked the participants the same question again, and they also presented them with information about the proportions of the population who are religious or atheist. To participants in the teacher+atheist condition, this barely made any difference to their answers, suggesting their instinctual prejudice towards atheists was robust. Even though they were given a chance to think more rationally, they still fell for the fallacy. By contrast, the participants in the teacher+religious condition committed the conjunction fallacy even less often when they were asked the question for a second time.

The prejudice shown towards atheists in this study was more pronounced among those who professed a stronger belief in God, but it was also present, albeit to a lesser extent, among the non-religious. Another thing – the non-religious participants, like the religious, showed more instinctual distrust toward atheists than towards religious people (that is, they committed the conjunction fallacy more often in the teacher+atheist condition than the teacher+religious condition).

The researchers said their findings "suggest anti-atheist distrust is deeply and culturally ingrained regardless of an individual's group membership". This raises the question – why are people, at least in the UK and the US, so distrustful of atheists? The researchers speculated that it may be because most people assume that religious folk believe they're being monitored by a higher being, and that this will therefore encourage these people to behave morally, whereas this supervision is absent for atheists. Also, perhaps people's distrust of atheists stems from the fact that, unlike religious people, atheists lack a coherent set of known moral rules (of course they have their own individual moral code, but as a group they don't have a code that they all follow).

"Looking to the future," the researcher said, "it is also important to explore how these perceptions and attitudes toward atheists manifest behaviourally, whether people act on these prejudices and in what contexts. It is only once the nature and extent of the issue is better understood that we can take measures to address it."

_________________________________

Giddings, L., & Dunn, T. (2016). The Robustness of Anti-Atheist Prejudice as Measured by Way of Cognitive Errors The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 26 (2), 124-135 DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2015.1006487

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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You may find the current publishing phenomenon of adult coloring books is all the rage, but did you ever stop to consider...the dark side of adult coloring books?

No Christian would put one in their house and sit and stare at it for an hour, chanting the sacred word! But if the enemy can get a Christian to stare at a mandala because they are coloring it, he can have them absentmindedly focus their attention on the image and they will unknowingly open up their subconscious to this image in almost the same way.

Christian blogger The Last Hiker has a few thoughts on the dangers of mandalas, in particular the grave risk of coloring them.

No, they didn’t forget to fill in the map for Scandinavia, those are the actual metrics.  Source here.

The post European place names with the word “saint” in them appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

VancouFUR, Vancouver's principal furry convention, occurred at a hotel that was also housing Syrian refugee families (many with small children). The kids loved it, and so did the convention attendees.

I think it's time for some HIGH ENERGY apparel!

…Please clap.

If you've ever pulled a door that you should have pushed, you're not alone. Vox and 99% Invisible collaborated on this video about bad door design. I read Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things just as I was starting my design career and it probably had more influence than anything in how I approached designing for the web. (via @ophelea23)

Tags: design   Don Norman   video

“and this one is in the shape of the word ‘gamer,’ and bios starts up with a shotgun noise, a chainsaw noise, and a sexy moan. you can disable the shotgun noise though”

We evaluate utilitarian judgments under the dual-system approach of the mind. In the study, participants respond to a cognitive reflection test and five (sacrificial and greater good) dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. There is judgment reversal across the dilemmas, a result that casts doubt in considering utilitarianism as a stable, ethical standard to evaluate the quality of moral judgments. In all the dilemmas, participants find the utilitarian judgment too demanding in terms of cognitive currency because it requires non-automatic, deliberative thinking. In turn, their moral intuitions related to the automatic mind are frame dependent, and thus can be either utilitarian or non-utilitarian. This suggests that automatic moral judgments are about descriptions, not about substance.

We aim to investigate if men receive preferential treatment in promotions using the Italian system for the access to associate and full professor positions that is organized in two stages: first, candidates participate in a national wide competition to obtain the National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), then successful candidates compete to obtain a position in University Departments opening a vacancy. We investigate the probability of success in the two stages in relation to the candidate’s gender, controlling for several measures of productivity and a number of individual, field and university characteristics. Whereas no gender differences emerge in the probability of obtaining the NSQ, females have a lower probability of promotion at the Department level. Gender gaps tend to be larger when the number of available positions shrink, consistent with a sort of social norm establishing that men are given priority over women when the number of positions is limited.

"WHAT IF, SET FIRE TO 10 000 SPARKLERS!" (3:04 SLYT)

How abortion opponents secretly bought a Va. abortion clinic to deceive women. (WaPost) Just five minutes after signing the final papers at closing, the doctor called her office to check her messages. "Triple A Women for Choice," a voice answered. The doctor thought she made a mistake and redialed. "Triple A Women for Choice," the voice said again. Whoever bought her practice had the phones forwarded to the pregnancy center within minutes of the sale, before the lawyers even had a chance to close their briefcases.

In the first few seconds of this video, Margaret Leng Tan introduces herself:

I'm the first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juilliard and now I play the toy piano. Life works in mysterious ways.

You can hear more of Tan's toy piano music on Spotify. (via @robinsloan)

Tags: Margaret Leng Tan   music   video

If you're keeping tabs at home, this is the third video I've posted to kottke.org featuring self-destructing washing machines. While not quite as good as this one -- "it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself" -- there's a sublime moment where this chaotic neutral washing machine seemingly defies gravity by hanging in the air like Michael Jordan.

Tags: mesmerizing   video

Christmas Classics: Scrooginald

Website - Patreon

Critical goals still unconquered at the day’s end are the path to a spoiled evening, according to new research published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. But thankfully the paper outlines an effective tactic we can take to minimise their impact.

We all know our worklife can disrupt our free time by supplying unwanted thoughts that pop up when we should be relaxing. But what’s doing the popping: Concerns about pay, whether to bring Christmas cards in, flashbacks to spreadsheets? Severe events such as bullying can certainly cast a shadow beyond working hours. But Ball State University’s Brandon Smit has identified a more common culprit – uncompleted goals.

Taking his inspiration from classic lab studies showing that uncompleted goals are particularly likely to linger in mind, Smit surveyed 103 employed people, asking them to report which goals had been ticked off and which unfinished at the close of each day, and then just before bed to report on how much these goals had occupied their thoughts that evening. As you might expect, the incomplete goals intruded more, unless they had been rated as fairly unimportant. This effect applied only participants who reported a higher level of job involvement; those uninvested were immune.

This is no great surprise, but what can we do about it? In one sense it is advantageous for our minds to keep uncompleted goals "live" in our system, that way they are easily triggered which makes sure we don’t forget them. The trouble is, when a TV advert references "limited time offers" or "customer service", these goals force themselves into mind when we’re unable or don’t want to act on them.

To help prevent this, Smit asked a subset of his participants, once they'd described their incomplete goals, to clearly plan where, when and how they would tackle each one, for example: ‘‘I will go into work and start at 10:00 AM in a call center in my office. Log into my computer and call customers back…” By specifying the context for action, this helped the high-involved participants to put the goals out of mind during off-work hours, and as a result their uncompleted goals produced fewer intrusions, almost as if they had the same status as completed goals. Data from a simple measure of work detachment also suggested that, using Smit’s strategy, the participants found it easier to let go of work in general.

All in all, then, fretting about unfinished goals appears to be one piece of the work-life conflict puzzle, but how big a piece it is remains to be seen. Aside from the specific effect of the planning intervention on detachment, there was actually no relationship between the number of goal-related interruptions participants reported experiencing and their overall levels of work detachment. This is perhaps because unmeasured factors are doing hidden work: take a project review meeting, for instance. This can raise many questions (Do I need to raise my game? Am I being lined up for that promotion?) that may occupy a worker’s mind during his or her leisure time, even though such meetings tend to happen after important goals have already been completed. This suggests we need to gather a more holistic picture of work-life conflict, involving goals, people issues and existential concerns.

That said, this research does offer helpful insights for under-pressure professionals. While switching off work phones and leaving our briefcase at the office may be useful in developing work-life boundaries, this study reminds us that our heads will still carry work memories with us, ready to trigger. The solution tested here by Smits resembles the “open loop” concept popularised by management consultant Dave Allen (an open loop is anything that pulls at your attention when it shouldn’t). The implication is that if you capture and schedule your work activities, you’ll be more likely to find some much needed peace during downtime.

_________________________________

Smit, B. (2015). Successfully leaving work at work: The self-regulatory underpinnings of psychological detachment Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/joop.12137

--further reading--
When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?
How do male scientists balance the demands of work and family?
Work/Life Separation Is Impossible. Here's How to Deal with It

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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It saddens me to see funerals where attendees only say generic nice things about the deceased. Such as that he or she was a good neighbor, parent, or professional. I’d rather hear more specific descriptions and evaluations, some of them mildly negative, or at least not obviously positive. The usual platitudes suggest that people didn’t actually notice the deceased very much as a distinct person. “You say Fred from accounting’s funeral is Saturday; which one was Fred again?”

At my funeral, I prefer attendees to signal that they actually noticed me as a distinct person, and that they engaged that distinctiveness to some degree. I want them to have enough confidence in my reputation and the wider perception of my value to point out features of me that are not obviously positive. I want to have been a specific vivid person to them, who they often liked but sometimes didn’t. I’d like them to share specific anecdotes that remind them of my specific distinct features, both good and bad.

I feel similarly about book reviews. It saddens me to think of someone putting in all the effort it takes to write a book, but then even when their book seems to get a lot of attention, reviews mostly just rephrase the book jacket summary, or give generic praise like “must read” and “interesting”. It makes one suspect that most book reviewers haven’t actually read the book. Or if they read it, the book skimmed past their attention without making much of an impact, like an easy-watching TV show.

My first book comes out in May, and instead of having people generically “like” it, I’d much rather that my book had an impact on their thoughts, so that they became different in some way after reading it. I want them to have engaged my ideas enough that they actually grappled with some of the difficult issues I raise. They weren’t just carried along by my entertaining show, but they actually thought about what I said at some point. And readers who engage difficult issues discussed by an author almost never end up agreeing with that author all the way down the line. So the fact a reviewer disagrees with me on some points is a credible sign that they actually read and engaged my book. Which shows they thought my book worth engaging.

Yes, in a sense what I’m asking for here is counter-signaling. Acquaintances distinguish themselves from strangers by acting generically nice to you, such as by dressing nice, being polite, etc., but friends distinguish themselves from acquaintances by feeling free to speak their minds to you and dressing comfortably around you. At my funeral, I want people to see I had friends, and for my book I desire more impact on readers than just “I read some books on X and Y lately; they were okay, though I forget what they said.”

And yes, when signals are ranked by quality, then asking explicitly for a high quality signal is risky, because that can force people to say explicitly “Yes, some people deserve that high of a signal, but not everyone, and not you, you aren’t good enough.” But that is the risk I now take by saying: love me or hate me, but notice and remember me. Respect me by engaging me.

Yesterday the weather was unseasonably warm and pleasant here in Virginia. I opened the windows at home, and felt pleased by the fresh air. I thought I was happier because of the nice weather.

A new paper just took an unusually detailed look at how 11,000 diverse Australians’ answers to the question “‘All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life?” related to the weather at the 96,000 times and places they were asked. The authors found no effects when the word “life” was replaced with any of these: “job overall, employment opportunities, financial situation, home in which you live, feel part of local community, neighbourhood in which you live, how safe you feel, your health, amount of free time.”

But the authors did find effects related to that overall life satisfaction version. There were no effects of rain/snow, temperature, humidity, or windspeed, but people seemed a bit happier on days that were overall sunnier, and happier with lower air pressure, “typically associated with clouds, rain and strong winds.” Men had three times the preference for sunny weather, and when people moved to very different climates, that climate change had no effect on their happiness, controlling for weather at the time of their answer!

The authors suggest that life satisfaction answers differ from the others because “cognitive demands of assessing overall life satisfaction lead respondents to apply heuristics that are based on contemporaneous transient factors.” I think this means that we use weather to guess our happiness, when in fact we aren’t any happier. The authors support this by noting that these differences reduce as people get more experienced answering surveys, though I didn’t find that result very compelling.

Other interesting results include that people report being happier when someone else is sitting next to them while they answer the survey, that they get progressively less happy over the course of a day, and that they are no happier on weekends. Married people were happier, but people with more dependents were less happy. Middle-aged folks were less happy, and also it seems were mid-education-level folks, controlling for age and income. Here is the paper’s main regression:

At Philosop-her, Meena Krishnamurthy invites women in philosophy to introduce themselves and their work. For example, Elizabeth Barnes, "Confessions of a Bitter Cripple": "I have sat in philosophy seminars where it was asserted that I should be left to die on a desert island ... I have been told that, while it isn't bad for me to exist, it would've been better if my mother could've had a non-disabled child instead ... And these things weren't said as the conclusions of careful, extended argument ... They were the kind of thing you skip over without pause because it's the uncontroversial part of your talk."

Further examples:

Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, "Doing Philosophy in American Sign Language": "ASL does not have name signs for Plato or Aristotle, but Greek Sign Language does! One way that I determined the name signs of philosophers was to ask deaf academics I met at international conferences whether philosophers from their country had name signs in their native signed language. Naming conventions differ among signed languages just as they do with spoken languages, but it is acceptable to use namesigns from another signed language, even when they do not conform to the norms of one's own signed language."

Lucy Allais, "Kant on Giving to Beggars": "Since there are beggars at so many street intersections, and since Jo'burg life involves driving everywhere, every day involved some time thinking about whether and why to give. I had never worked in political philosophy, and though I had started working in ethics (after years of writing primarily about Kant's theoretical philosophy, mostly interpreting his transcendental idealism), it was mostly through writing on forgiveness, which felt like the opposite of a systematic approach to theoretical ethics ... But as I began to think through his position ... I found materials for a surprisingly rich account of the troubling nature of interactions with beggars."

Sheridan Hough, "The Exhausted (First) World: a Plea for 21st-Century Existential Philosophy": "From social justice to Bayesian epistemology, it does matter how the student (and the instructor) relate to, and inhabit, the arguments and explanations that they explore: not simply a matter of 'what does it mean?' But 'what does it mean for me?' ... [T]he point of locating oneself in a project, and in a view of the world, is to go forth and do something with it, and about it--to write essays, organize protests, demand economic reforms, to join a struggle (intellectual or physical), to be present in one's own life."

Talia Mae Bettcher, "Other 'Worldly' Philosophy": "But it's also thought the philosophical questions themselves bring the perplexity ... The perplexity that vexes me, however, wasn't revealed by the questions of some philosopher. My entire life has already been saturated with perplexity. As a trans woman, my life and experiences haven't conformed to the common sense that's been accepted for much of my life."

Japa Pallikkathayil, "Morality and the Market": "Suppose, for example, I discover that you are having the garage sale because you are being unjustly evicted from your home (your landlord is violating the terms of your lease but you lack the resources to defend yourself). There are two respects in which this situation should unsettle my use of market norms. First, you lack the control over your resources that you are entitled to have. In this way, your willingness to accept $10 for the vase becomes suspect - it may not reflect the discretion you are entitled to have over your ends. Second, I should worry about being the beneficiary of injustice. Although I am not the perpetrator of the injustice, using the injustice to further my ends taints them."

Lisa Herzog, "Ethics for 'cogs in the wheel' - theorizing organizations": "Several of my interviewees told me about cases in which they faced moral questions that had to do with the distribution of knowledge in organizations. Should they reveal a piece of information although it might hurt them to do so? Did they have a duty to go the extra mile if a colleague was sloppy in handling information, but something morally important - for example the successful treatment of a patient in a hospital - was at stake? I started to systematically analyze the ways in which knowledge is handled in organizations, and the moral questions it raises. Organizations are spaces of divided labor, which means that gaps in the transmission of knowledge can have grave moral consequences."