Happiness is ... not having the children This according to Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, who was speaking at the Happiness & Its Causes conference in Sydney yesterday. He said people's happiness goes into steep decline after they have children, and never recovers its old level until the children leave home. As a source of pleasure, playing with one's offspring rates just above doing housework ... Read full entry

Inside a deal Successful dealing making is more perspective-taking, that is the ability see a situation from someone else's point-of-view, rather than trying to empathize, or make an emotional connection, with the "opposing" negotiator. This was the finding of an experiment involving 150 MBA students attending a ten-week negotiation course at the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois, who were split into 75 buyer and seller ... Read full entry

Researchers from the department of Psychology at the University of Leipzig, in Germany, claim to have found a correlation between a person's email address and their personality. Just as eyes are said to be the windows of the soul, e-mail addresses could be the electronic equivalent in the online environment. E-mail addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young ... Read full entry

Secrets of choosing an online dating name Just so you all know. Cyber-psychology lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Dr Monica Whitty, advises care when choosing a screen name for online dating websites. Names with upbeat and outgoing connotations do best, though it seems women should be especially wary, as apparently like does not always attract like. However she advised female lonely hearts to avoid screen names which attempt to be classy, ... Read full entry

Taking Your Losses When coming up short puts you ahead, the latest article at Jugglezine, by Todd Pitock. I am, I confess, prone to obsessing over slights, snubs, and spite. A psychologist working through an exercise in how to understand your approach to the world once did an exercise in which the audience got to finish the sentence "life is..." The irrepressible six-year-old who still lives inside me folded his ... Read full entry

Face value. Should a boss be more than a pretty face, or is a pretty face sufficient? Dr Ambady and Mr Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to ... Read full entry