We were at another Think Again! event, which is a "live psychology panel show". I recommend you try sometime. It's part lecture, part stand-up, part Q&A.  We learned, amongst other things: Dogs laugh (play pant); All the popular tells to spot a liar are junk; and Laughter may have evolved because it's more efficient...

Reading: Advance Medical Decision-Making Differs Across First- and Third-Person Perspectives, Toomey et al. (2024), AJOB Empirical Bioethics (via the British Psychological Society research digest). This study asked almost 1500 people if they would honour the current healthcare wishes of someone with cognitive decline...

Skimming: Happiness of the younger, the older, and those in between, chapter 2 of the World Happiness Report 2024. World happiness rankings? It’s complicated: Still, the answer is basically Scandiwegian: …for reasons we roughly know.

Skimming: The Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains Why the Nordic Countries Are Constantly Among the Happiest in the World, chapter 7 of the World Happiness Report 2020. Thus, there seems to be no secret sauce specific to Nordic happiness that is unavailable to others. There is rather a more general recipe for creating...

Reading: How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models, Nature news feature, 14 May 2024. Available as an audio long read at YouTube. I was drawn to this news feature as it seems the opposite of ideas I’ve been reading about lately. I’ve been interested in how concepts from...

Reading: Question-based computational language approach outperforms rating scales in quantifying emotional states, Sikström et al. (2024), Communications Psychology. The gold standard of psychological assessment is a mental state interview with a psychologist. But second to that are rating scales: questionnaires where...