Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.
Speaking of Psychology: Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose?
Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It's the feeling behind countless number one hits. It's what's resurrecting old TV shows and being capitalized on by politicians. We all know the feeling. Some of us maybe a little too well. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic connected world? Is there such a thing as the good old days? Here to help explain is Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and develops the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia.
Full article.
The Hidden Cost of Being a Jerk:
Nobody wants to be a jerk. But why not? It is often advantageous to be antisocial, to take that last cookie, pocket the money from the purse found on the subway, or steal a cab from an elderly lady at the airport because you’re in a hurry. So why not just do it? There are no repercussions, are there? Some people believe that we have a reason not to behave this way because there is some kind of supreme being who keeps track of our good and bad actions. There is a non-religious version of this attitude as well, exemplified by the NBC sitcom
The Good Place, where everything you do entails you either gaining or losing points, and then, depending on your grand total, ending up either in the Good Place (something like Heaven) or in the Bad Place (something a lot like Hell).
Full article.
Hack Your Unconscious: Why Negative Feelings Linger:
In Part One of Hack Your Unconscious: Why Negative Feelings Linger, we learned two curious facts about how we process emotions. 1. Affective salience dictates that we process emotional information much more quickly than factual information. In any environment, emotional stimuli will catch and hold our attention more readily than any other stimuli. And what’s more, in the hierarchy of all emotions, negative emotions come first. There is evolutionary survival value to this, but it also affects how we process feelings and how long we sometimes simmer in them. Full article.
10 Simple Productivity Hacks to Get Through a Bad Day:
Everyone goes through that phase when all the odds seem to play against you. Some people often struggle to get things done when they are having a bad day largely because they obsess over things that went wrong. A conversation that turned into a misunderstanding plays in an endless loop wondering, what if they had said this instead of that, would things have turned out differently? However, deadlines don’t postpone themselves, and important tasks still require attention although you are emotionally unsettled. It’s hard to complete tasks, but there are simple hacks that you can try out to hack your productivity on a bad day.
Full article.
The Zeigarnik Effect Explained:
Your own experience of revising for exams might tell you that sessions of uninterrupted concentration can help you to better remember key pieces of information. Indeed, many students will engage in periods of “cramming” - intensive revision just before a test - in the belief that essential subject facts and figures will be memorized ready for exam day. However, this commonly held wisdom has been contradicted by an observation made in a psychological study. Now known as the Zeigarnik effect, it was found that interruption during a task that requires focus can in fact improve, rather than heed, a person’s ability to remember it afterwards. Full article.
