xee1mm 's List: reading

• She didn’t just respond to rote commands, she could correctly react to novel  combinations of words. And she created her own little sentences like gimme  sweet, come open, and listen dog.³ Taken out on a lake, Washoe saw a swan for the first  time and signed water bird for this unfamiliar creature.

• We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic  example of such "hedonic adaptation" comes from a 1970s study of lottery  winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners.  Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life  circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do  so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins  and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is  determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass  look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back  to near your baseline.

  • the limit of persisting happiness
• Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked  the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was  impossible, that what goes up must come down."
• When science had scrutinized happiness at all, it was mainly through  correlational studies, which cannot tell what came first--the happiness or what  it is linked to--let alone determine the cause and effect. Finding out that  individuals with strong social ties are more satisfied with their lives than  loners, for example, begs the question of whether friends make us happier or  whether happy people are simply likelier to seek and attract friends.
• For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But  one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less  happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky  therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned  out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good  deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky is  also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you  happier?

  • Good deed makes happines..

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• a new company, SpinVox, and its Spin-my-Vmail service. The promise: All voice mails get converted to text and sent to your phone and PC via SMS and e-mail. It works by replacing your existing voice-mail service and transcribing inbound messages