Progress Daily

A study headed by Hans-Peter Kohler compared happiness levels in adult identical twins — some of whom are parents and some who aren’t.

Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20% happier than their childless counterparts. Fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, and men enjoy an almost 75% larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter. (The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers.)

Second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness. They make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child — though still happier than women with no children.

“Is One Kid Enough?” by Marina Krakovsky

A study by George Fieldman, etc., focused on healthcare assistants in the UK who worked for two different bosses. For those who only liked one of their managers, their blood pressure jumped when working for the disliked boss.

The average rise (15 mmHg systolic and 7 mmHg diastolic) significantly exceeds the rise known to increase the risk of coronary heart disease by a sixth and the risk of stroke by a 1/3.

“There was both a statistically and clinically significant elevation during the time people had the boss they didn’t like,” says Fieldman. “People who work with bosses they’ve really hated constantly for years would probably be quite vulnerable to heart disease because of the elevation of blood pressure in the long-term.”

(Large studies, such as the “Whitehall study”, have already shown that people who work at the bottom of an organisational hierarchy are much more likely to develop coronary heart disease.)

At the start of the study, 28 female healthcare assistants rated their supervisors’ interpersonal style using a questionnaire. 13 of the workers were supervised by two different people on different days. One supervisor was perceived to have a favourable working manner, while the other was considered “unfair” by employees. Assistants in the control group worked with either one supervisor or two whose working manner was perceived similarly.

Blood pressure (BP) measurements were taken every 30 minutes for 12 hours over three working days. Assistants who had 2 similarly perceived supervisors showed a difference between bosses of just 3 mmHg systolic BP and no change in diastolic BP.

There were dramatic differences in BP between days when employees worked for the boss they dreaded and the one they liked. Systolic BP climbed from an average of 114 to 129 mmHg when people worked for the difficult boss and diastolic BP rose from 75 to 82 mmHg.

“Unfair bosses make blood pressure soar” by Shaoni Bhattacharya

A study conducted by Paul Slovic, Deborah Small & George Loewenstein found that donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries. The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim.

Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. A follow-up study by Slovic, etc., found that feelings of compassion and donations of aid were smaller for a pair of victims than for either individual alone. The higher the number of people involved in a crisis, other research indicates, the less likely we are to “feel” for each additional death.

“Numbed by Numbers,” by Paul Slovic

The microeconomic law of diminishing marginal utility states that while accumulating a good each successive unit of that good will be less satisfying to acquire than the one before it. A study at the University of Cambridge shows that when a small sum of money is on the line, poorer people learn more quickly than their wealthier counterparts.

A number of abstract shapes were flashed in front of 14 participants. After each shape appeared for 3 seconds, a picture of either a 20-pence coin (roughly 40 cents) or a scrambled image followed. A card of one particular shape was always followed by the coin, and subjects were told that they could take a 20-pence piece home if they could accurately predict when the money card was the next one up. The participants had in personal assets an average of about $1,700 in their bank accounts, which ranged from zero to nearly $6,000. The group’s average income was just over $20,000, spanning from no income for students to the equivalent of about $60,000 for the most well-off.

There was an inverse correlation between how much money a person had (assets and income) and the swiftness with which they were conditioned. The poorer people tended to figure out which card signaled money ahead within about 12 trials, says Philippe Tobler, whereas the richer people took about 35 trials.

The team next repeated the experiment while the subject’s brains were scanned by an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine. Researchers focused their scans on the midbrain (which contains neurons or nerve cells that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to reward-based learning), and the striatum (another reward-based center located under the cerebral cortex). This time, however, the participants did not have to physically respond. Once again, an inverse association between wealth and learning appeared, with poor people displaying more increased activity in the midbrain and striatum.

“Money Talks: A Brain Image of a Microeconomic Theory,” by Nikhil Swaminathan

Frans de Waal has found that consolation is universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant.

Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

“Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior,” by Nicholas Wade