Progress Daily

In 1956, the average teenager’s weekly income/allowance was $10.55, equal to the disposable income of a family in the early 1940s.

About 10% of burials in NYC in 1889 were in potter’s fields. In 1900, 1.75 million children between the ages of 10 and 15 — almost 1/5 of all children in that age cohort — were in the work force. Children provided 1/4 to 1/3 of the incomes for working-class families, which spent more than 90% of their household earnings on food, shelter and clothing. In 1900, Americans spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine, and less than 2% of Americans took vacations.

By the end of the ’50s, the number of Americans enrolled in colleges exceeded the number of US farmers.

A 1962 Gallup poll found that only 10% of mothers hoped their daughters would emulate the choices they had made in their lives.

More than two-thirds of women who turned 18 during the ’50s claimed to have slept with only one man by their 30th birthday. Compared to only 2% of women who reached adulthood during the ’70s.

“Land of Plenty,” George F. Will’s review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance

A recent study suggests that marriage provides a greater psychological boost to depressed people than to happy people, even if the marriage is so-so.

Previous studies have suggested that the psychological perks of marriage depend upon marriage quality — a happy marriage gives rise to a happy couple, and vice versa.

Other studies have shown that depressed people, who tend to communicate poorly and require more caring and support than happy people, also end up in unhappier marriages.

Adrianne Frech and Kristi Williams looked at a sample of 3,066 men and women who had been interviewed and tested for depression once in either 1987 or 1988 and then again 5 years later. In the interviews, they were asked about the quality of their marriage (if they were married).

On average, controlling for differences in depression, subjects who had gotten married over the five-year span between the two interviews reported improved psychological well-being in the second interview — scoring an average of 3.4 points lower on the 84-point depression scale — than their counterparts who did not marry.

The depressed who married scored an average of 7.6 points lower on the depression scale than the depressed who did not marry, while those who were happy and got married scored only 1.9 points lower on the scale.

In other words, marriage provided a much bigger psychological boost to the depressed subjects than to the happy subjects.

“The depressed benefit more from a transition into marriage despite their having, on average, worse marital quality,” Frech noted.

“New Depression Rx,” by Melinda Wenner

Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman scanned the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

When the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, is basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Non-human animals sometimes sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

Antonio R. Damasio has shown that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lack the ability to feel their way to moral answers.

When confronted with moral dilemmas, the brain-damaged patients coldly came up with “end-justifies-the-means” answers. When confronted by a difficult issue — such as whether to shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by terrorists before it hits a major city — these patients appear to reach decisions without the anguish that afflicts those with normally functioning brains.

According to Joshua D. Greene, moral decision-making often involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy.

In one 2004 brain-imaging experiment, Greene asked volunteers to imagine that they were hiding in a cellar of a village as enemy soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a baby was crying in the cellar was it right to smother the child to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing everyone?

The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process such difficult choices is the inferior parietal lobe, which has been shown to be active in more impersonal decision-making. This part of the brain was “arguing” with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror.

Marc Hauser has found that people all over the world process moral questions in the same way. Different cultures build on that framework in much the way children in different cultures learn different languages using the same neural machinery.

“If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural,” by Shankar Vedantam

Richard Davidson has found that the brains of monks who are the most experienced meditators are different from other brains. They have a much stronger “gamma” wave, a form of electrical activity in the brain that is associated with consciousness and pulling together information and perceptions from different regions of the brain. They also have much greater activity in the left than the right prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead), a mark of well-being and happiness.

Meditation can change brain circuits linked to attention.

Davidson taught volunteers Vipassana meditation, in which you first focus on an object such as your breath. You then let your focus expand, and let thoughts or perceptions engage your attention, but keep yourself from reacting emotionally or judgmentally.

The volunteers practiced Vipassana meditation for three months, for 10 to 12 hours a day. Another group got only a quickie one-hour course, then practiced Vipassana for 20 minutes a day for a week. Before the training, Davidson tested the volunteers on “attentional blink.” In this glitch, if you pay close attention to one thing it’s hard to notice something that comes hard on its heels, typically within half a second. For instance, Davidson had the volunteers watch a screen where capital letters flashed, one at a time, for one-twentieth of a second. Once or twice in the rapid-fire stream of 15 or so letters, a number snuck in. At the end, the volunteers typed which number or numbers had snuck in.

In general, if a second number creeps in less than half a second after the first, you don’t notice it. The meditators significantly improved their ability to detect the second number amid the barrage of letters, even when it came less than half a second later (the period when paying attention to the first number ordinarily keeps you from noticing the second). In addition, the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target fell in the meditators.

“Meditating Your Way to a Better Brain,” by Sharon Begley

A recent Princeton study found that boys who grew up in an intact, married family were half as likely to end up in prison as young adults. Robert Sampson observed, “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.”

In the last half-century, suicide has more than tripled among teens and young adults; one recent Harvard study found the single “most important explanatory variable” was the “increased share of youth living in homes with a divorced parent.”

One study found that young adults whose parents were divorced were nearly twice as likely to report that they had a poor relationship with their mother compared to young adults who were raised in an intact, married family (30 versus 16 percent).

On the other hand, the best social-scientific evidence suggests that children do better when their parents part ways if their relationship is characterized by serious physical or emotional abuse.

But according to Paul Amato and Alan Booth two-thirds of divorces do not involve such abuse.

“The Ring Thing,” by W. Bradford Wilcox

Chris Lowry thinks a particular sort of bacterium might alleviate clinical depression.

Dr Mary O’Brien was trying out an experimental treatment for lung cancer that involved inoculating patients with Mycobacterium vaccae. This is a harmless relative of the bugs that cause tuberculosis and leprosy that had been rendered even more harmless by killing it. When Dr O’Brien gave the inoculation, she observed not only fewer symptoms of the cancer, but also an improvement in her patients’ emotional health, vitality and general cognitive function.

Dr Lowry’s hypothesis was that the immune response to M. vaccae induces the brain to produce serotonin. This molecule is a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger between nerve cells) and one symptom of depression is low levels of it.

Dr Lowry injected his mice with M. vaccae and examined them to find out what was going on. First, they looked for a rise in the level of cytokines, which are molecules produced by the immune system that trigger responses in the brain. As expected, cytokine levels rose. They then looked directly in their animals’ brains for the effect of those cytokines.

Cytokines act on sensory nerves that run to the brain from organs such as the heart and the lungs. That action stimulates a brain structure called the dorsal raphe nucleus. Dr Lowry found a group of cells within it that connect directly to the limbic system, the brain’s emotion-generating area. These cells release serotonin into the limbic system in response to sensory-nerve stimulation.

The consequence of that release is stress-free mice. Dr Lowry was able to measure their stress by dropping them into a tiny swimming pool. Previous research has shown that unstressed mice enjoy swimming, while stressed ones do not. His mice swam around enthusiastically.

This offers the possibility of treating clinical depression with a vaccination. (Besides cancer and depression, M. vaccae is being looked at as a way of treating Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.)

Depression is becoming more common, as are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. A lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs may be leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.

If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may be made depressed by the consequent lack of serotonin.

“Bad is good,” The Economist

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

People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than the thought of gaining something of equal value. Homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how much money they could save (“Increasing the Effectiveness of Energy Auditors,” 1988). Pamphlets urging women to check for breast cancer are significantly more successful if they state their case in terms of what stands to be lost rather than gained (“The Effect of Message Framing on Breast Self-Examination Attitudes, Intentions, and Behavior,” 1987).

One reason for the potency of the scarcity principle is that, by following it, we are usually and efficiently right (“Scarcity Effects on Desirability,” Wm Michael Lynn, 1989).

When increasing scarcity – or anything else – interferes with our prior access to some item we will want and try to possess the item more than before (”Psychological Reactance and the Attractiveness of Unattainable Objects,” Sharon Brehm, 1981).

In one study, boys (averaging 24 months in age) accompanied their mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys. The toys were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent Plexiglas barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of the boys, the Plexiglas sheet formed no real barrier to the toy behind it, since the boys could easily reach over the top. For the other boys, the Plexiglas was higher, effectively blocking their access to one toy unless they went around the barrier. When the barrier was too short to restrict access to the toy behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one behind it. When the barrier was high enough to be a true obstacle, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it 3 times faster than with the unobstructed toy. (“Physical barriers and psychological reactance,” 1977)

(Girls in the study did not show the same resistant response to the large barrier as did the boys. It appears that girls are primarily reactant to restrictions that come from other people rather than from physical barriers.)

Almost invariably, our response to the banning of information is a greater desire to receive that information and a more favorable attitude toward it than before the ban. (“Censorship as an Attitude Change Induction,” by Richard D. Ashmore; “The Effects of Censorship and Attractiveness of the Censor on Attitude Change,” by Stephen Worchel, etc.; “The Effect of Censorship on Attitude Change”; and “Beyond a Commodity Theory Analysis of Censorship”)

A judge’s declaration of inadmissibility may lead jurors to use the evidence to a greater extent (“The University of Chicago Jury Project”).

We find a piece of information more persuasive if we think we can’t get it elsewhere (”A Commodity Theory Analysis of Persuasion” and “Liberalization of Commodity Theory”).

In an customer-preference study by Stephen Worchel, a cookie apparently in short supply was rated as more desirable to eat in the future, more attractive as a consumer item, and more costly than the identical cookie in abundant supply. By manipulating the number of cookies in the cookie jar, Worchel also showed that a drop from abundance to scarcity produced a decidedly more positive reaction to the cookies than did constant scarcity. (“Effects of supply and demand on ratings of objective value”)

According to James C. Davies, we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal. From 1940 to the mid-‘50s, the family income of American black families compared to comparably educated white families rose from 56% to 80%. By 1962, however, it had fallen to 62%, and rioting followed. (“The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfaction as a Course of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Revolution” and “Toward a Theory of Revolution”)

Influence, Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.

In an exercise, Sigal Barsade analyzed 4 groups of people who were asked to distribute a limited amount of bonus money. Unknown to the other participants, an actor was assigned to display a different mood in each group.

When the actor showed high negativity — by frowning, raising his voice or tapping his pencil impatiently, for example — the group was much less likely to be cooperative and more likely to engage in conflict.

In groups where the actor displayed a positive response — say, by smiling and leaning forward — participants were more cooperative in allocating the money. The actor’s moods spread to others and influenced their actions but they were mostly unaware that this had happened.

According to Daniel Goleman, the bad moods that really hurt are the ones where you obsess and ruminate about what it is that’s upset you. At that point, the amygdala becomes overly active, to the point that you cannot focus on a task. “If you realize that you are caught up in one of these ruminating tape loops, don’t buy it. Realize that you don’t have to believe your thoughts. When we’re overly anxious or overly angry, our thinking is distorted.”

Moods have a biological component. Simple calming strategies like meditating, taking a walk or exercising have a physical effect on brain activity and may correct the mood.

Studies have shown that the mood of a team’s leader has much more impact on performance than that of other workers.

“Sunny or Cloudy, Moods Cast an Influence,” by Phyllis Korki