14
Smith and Kim's (2007) review article in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin titled "Comprehending Envy" might be a good starting point. They define envy as
an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of
inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a
desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group of ...
14
Is husband and wife intelligence corelated?
By way of background, Mascie-Taylor (1989) report IQ correlations between husbands and wives in two british samples to be r=.40 and r =.37 respectively. I had a little difficulty discerning the sample size as it's not reported in the 1989 paper. But from another paper I got the sense that each sample might have ...
12
The other answers cite minor effects related to your phenomena, but there's something more pervasive going on.
In Carney et al's research report "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance", it was found that "power posing" increases testosterone and cortisol levels which leads to, among other things, a greater ...
12
Brinol et al (2009) suggest that your intuitions generalize.
From the abstract:
Building on the notion of embodied attitudes, we examined how body
postures can influence self-evaluations by affecting thought confidence,
a meta-cognitive process. Specifically, participants were asked to
think about and write down their best or worse qualities while ...
12
Maybe we should ask a vietnam vet if he feels less stress in nature than inside a building.
I think the reason we feel tense inside is because we've been conditioned to expect stressful situations to happen while inside, so we're on guard for it (ie tense). Nothing bad has ever happened to us while sitting on a park bench listening to the birds chirp. Now,...
11
Does the relationship between positive mood and motivation for sex differ between males and females?
In men, Mitchell et al (1998) found that positive mood induced by music affected greater sexual arousal, and that musically induced negative mood affected reduced sexual arousal. In women, Ter Kuile et al (2010) found similar results for women.
However, your question is not quite addressed by these studies. Whereas these studies address the effect of mood on ...
11
If you take a look at games like minecraft, they have quite a lot of players who do not work (students, college students, etc). These people first mine thousands of blocks, then rearrange them in a creative way. There's absolutely no need to do so, it is entirely voluntary, yet people end up moving hundreds of thousands of blocks to do something creative or ...
9
One of the claims that is somewhat easy to validate empirically is that "432 Hz sounds better than 440 Hz." This informal experiment tests this in a straightforward way. People listen to pitch-shifted versions of songs at a variety of different frequencies and rate their preference for the song. Importantly, they don't know which frequency the song has been ...
8
Dysphoria following drug use
Though their acting mechanisms can be vastly different, the general basis of drug addiction is its influence on the reward system, particularly through dopamine pathways[1]. It's thought that the stimulation of the dopamine system leads to dopamine depletion[2] and without dopamine, there's no rewarding behavior and thus no ...
8
[This started as a comment but became really long, hence an answer.]
The hostility is real but the premise that more than a small minority of people forgo “working” by laziness is in fact very questionable, in several ways. People might dream of winning the lottery but there is very little evidence that they generally avoid “work”. In fact, with the same ...
8
I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:
no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms
This often results in patients who visit ...
7
i think death is what motivates people to work:
working is doing something and trying to be remembered, much like Picasso, Einstein... Every human would want to do something in his life, something to be remembered for, everyone wants to make a change, make a difference, the ultimate dream of every human being able is to change the world. And that's why they ...
7
In this article, the authors note that natural sounds promote faster stress recovery than artificial sounds. One of the main reasons is because the natural sounds are more familiar than the artificial sounds. According to Eleanor Ratcliffe, natural sounds (such as bird song) may evoke memories of different seasons. This in turn, produces positive affect.
...
7
I think it can go both ways. According to Tesser's Self Evaluation Maintenance Theory, any two people in a relationship make themselves feel better by comparing themselves to each other. The key idea is that if you are closer to a person then you will tend to feel more jealous. For example, suppose your best friend got a really fancy car. You will naturally ...
7
[Edit]: Parts of this answer respond to removed content in older versions of the OP, and to comments. The current version of the OP deserves some elaboration of this answer. (And, IMHO, other answers too!)
There are other spiritual "worlds" than those that are dualistic. By common psychological definitions of spirituality, the existence of an "...
5
There is little evidence that stress affects structural MRI (reduction in the volume of the hippocampus). The review article (Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition Lupien et al., 2009) synthesizes the current knowledge in the field. Another article might be of interest (MRI measurement of hippocampal volume in post-...
5
There are definitely studies on this, but I don't have the references at hand. I've heard about this in the online Harvard courses on positive psychology by Tal Ben-Shahar.
In terms of "crashing", there are studies about baseline-happiness, showing you bounce back up after a setback, and back down, after a positive event, like winning the lottery. Only ...
5
One method of estimating assertiveness would be to look at scores on self-report tests that aim to measure assertiveness. Measuring in this way suggests that assertiveness, as with other traits, is on a continuum. Thus, classifying someone as assertive or not assertive would involve a judgement call.
Nonetheless, once you have an estimate of the proportion ...
5
It's mostly a fairly vapid truism (see the rhetorical sense). Here's a diagram from a popular theory from a positive psychologist at my doctoral alma mater of [what really makes people happy (or not):
(source: edbatista.com) (Lyubomirsky, 2008)
Thus the truer truism would be, "You can make yourself happier, to some extent..." but it's tricky enough to ...
4
It's not a bias. It is natural human nature. At least the 2 year old's case is.
It's just like how you would not have thought of going to Six Flags (An amusement park) unless it was mentioned to you.
When the 2 year old hears ice cream, the kid thinks of the sweet taste, or the pleasure ice cream brings. In the kid's case, the case is impatience or ...
4
Why do we anchor our happiness to short term situational comparisons rather than large scale events?
Research on well-being has explored happiness from different temporal perspectives.
Much of the literature looks at how people respond to measures of life satisfaction, quality of life, and measures of tendencies to experience positive and negative emotion. These tend to reflect longer term evaluations and emotional experiences. This shows up in for ...
4
Since you asked a vague question, I will provide a relatively vague answer.
A standard way to test fairness experimentally, is by having people play the ultimatum game. This is an interaction between two participants, one is randomly assigned to be Alice and the other is Bob. Alice is given a couple of days wage in money (either the local currency or other ...
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