What is the relationship between money and happiness? A study of individual well-being in China suggests it’s limited.

  Last week, our favourite sweater vest hoarding Prime Minister made the world’s laziest Nazi/Hitler invocation during Question Period. This is the latest in a string of Hitler references made by sundry politicos in Ottawa during 2012, and we’re not even half way through the year. His gaffe brought jeers and tears of laughter to [...]

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

Letting customers decide how much to pay for a product seems like a surefire way to go out of business, although bands like Radiohead have used the strategy with limited success. So does it really work?

Having spent some time recently examining the NHL’s and NHLPA’s collective negligence about headshots, I was inspired to address the homophobia that surrounds hockey fandom last night. Sure the Canucks lost, but before that, someone called them a bunch of faggles in Twitterland. How did that all go down, and what hope is there that [...]

The debate over whether to put more lectures online

Here, on the distinction between healthy optimism and dangerous boosterism – and how both the Harper and Wall governments are dragging Saskatchewan toward the latter.

Here, on the distinction between healthy optimism and dangerous boosterism – and how both the Harper and Wall governments are dragging Saskatchewan toward the latter. – Syndicated from http://accidentaldeliberations.blogspot.com/

It looks like there’s a gender gap in depression

Not so long ago, my friend Becca was shopping at her local Loblaws store (Real Canadian Superstore, for those of us who live in the West.) Like many people I know, Becca approves of their Joe Fresh clothing line, which offers Canadians the opportunity to buy stylish and seasonal clothing at reasonable prices. Always colourful, [...]

As anyone acquainted with me and this blog knows, I see a psychiatrist regularly for my mood disorder. We started seeing each other in 1991. He’s an unusual psychiatrist… Dr. Bob is not a psychoanalyst like my first psychotherapist back in 1960. She was Jungian and probably one of the only therapists to treat children [...]

Hidden among the obvious reasons why people vote for a politician may be a curious biological knee-jerk: preference for the pitch of a candidate’s voice.

Playing games is tons of fun and enterprising people are finding ways to better humanity through gameplay. I just found out that Tetris can be used to help people deal with traumatic experiences – cool! Research tells us that there is a period of…

A keyboard’s arrangement could have a small but significant impact to how we perceive the meaning of words we type.

An anthropologist of science looks at YouTube, where parodies of Zoloft advertisements have reclaimed the scientific and cultural narrative of depression from a handful of corporate behemoths.

Men rate women wearing red clothing as being more interested in sex, hinting that humans may be conditioned to associate the color with fertility.

Public acceptance of climate change was at its prime in the mid-2000s, yet political bipartisanship also hit a high point. As the economy began to plummet, people began listening to politicians on climate change instead of scientists, new opinion-poll-based research suggests.

As an individual’s wealth and status rise, so does their tendency to be unethical, concludes a new study of the relationship between socioeconomics and ethics.

Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by her name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway. The more pronounceable a person’s name is, the more likely people are to favor her.

Psychologist proves that even adults can learn to play guitar