Humor Styles and Bullying in School:
No Laughing Matter
Staffordshire, UK; May 1, 2013—There is a clear link between children’s use of humor and their susceptibility to being bullied by their peers, according to a major new study released today by Keele University.
The findings reveal that children who use self-defeating forms of humor—such as self-disparaging language or putting themselves down to make other people laugh—are more likely to be bullied than those who use more positive forms of humor.* The study also found that peer victimization led to an increase in the use of self-defeating humour over time, showing that victims of bullying are often trapped in a vicious cycle, where being bullied deprives them of the opportunities to practice positive humour with peers and leads them to rely on self-defeating humour, perhaps as a way to get others to like them.
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Low on Self-Control? Surrounding Yourself With
Strong-Willed Friends May Help
APS, April 9, 2013—We all desire self-control—the resolve to skip happy hour and go to the gym instead, to finish a report before checking Facebook, to say no to the last piece of chocolate cake. Though many struggle to resist those temptations, new research suggests that people with low self-control prefer and depend on people with high self-control, possibly as a way to make up for the skills they themselves lack.
This research, conducted by psychological scientists Catherine Shea, Gráinne Fitzsimons, and Erin Davisson of Duke University, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Loneliness, Like Chronic Stress,
Taxes the Immune System
COLUMBUS, OH; January 13, 2013 —New research links loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health.
Researchers found that people who were more lonely showed signs of elevated latent herpes virus reactivation and produced more inflammation-related proteins in response to acute stress than did people who felt more socially connected.
“It is clear from previous research that poor-quality relationships are linked to a number of health problems, including premature mortality and all sorts of other very serious health conditions. And people who are lonely clearly feel like they are in poor-quality relationships,” said Lisa Jaremka, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University and lead author of the research.
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Surprising Connections Between Well-Being
and Giving, Getting, and Gratitude
NEW ORLEANS—We all know that getting a good night's sleep is good for our general health and well-being. But new research is highlighting a more surprising benefit of good sleep: more feelings of gratitude for relationships.
"A plethora of research highlights the importance of getting a good night’s sleep for physical and psychological well-being, yet in our society, people still seem to take pride in needing, and getting, little sleep,” says Amie Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley. "And in the past, research has shown that gratitude promotes good sleep, but our research looks at the link in the other direction and, to our knowledge, is the first to show that everyday experiences of poor sleep are negatively associated with gratitude toward others – an important emotion that helps form and maintain close social bonds.”
Social psychologists are increasingly finding that "prosocial” behavior—including expressing gratitude and giving to others—is key to our psychological well-being. Even how we choose to spend our money on purchases affects our health and happiness. And children develop specific ways to help others from a very young age. Gordon and other researchers presented some of these latest findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual meeting in New Orleans.
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Facebook Gets a Psychological Review
Anyone as used and abused as Facebook has been since its 2004 creation would certainly qualify as a candidate for therapy; so it’s no surprise to find three psychologists checking out the online social network (hereafter to be referred to as an OSN) in the May 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. These psychologists came to one important conclusion: We’ve already learned quite a bit about human behavior from Facebook, but there’s no doubt it can probably tell us a whole lot more.
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People: Who Needs Them?
It's not exactly breaking news that people are social beings. Even before the human need for social bonds was taken up for study by various sciences, it had long been recognized as a fundamental truth by writers and other observers of human nature. And yet the implications of this truth may sometimes pass unappreciated.
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