Picture this: you’re out to dinner with a friend who you know makes a lot more money than you do. When you open the menu, your heart sinks. There’s not a dish in sight that is less than $35, and even a soup is going to run you $18. You probably vow (发誓) to stick to dollar pizza slices the rest of the month to balance out this dinner. However, this time, what if you just turned to your friend, closed the menu, and said, “Sorry, I have to be honest. I can’t afford this. Let’s go somewhere else?” That’s the idea behind “loud budgeting”, a trend that could not only relieve you of the financial burden, but help you deal with these sorts of stressful situations both mentally and emotionally.
The term was first introduced by TikTok (抖音) comedian Lukas Battle. Battle explained his concept in an interview: simply put, loud budgeting is being honest about what you do and don’t want to spend money on.
It’s not just a TikTok thing though. Even those in the financial services industry are on board with the trend. Nikolina Cuca, a financial advisor, says that she’s seen social media add pressure to her clients, causing them to spend beyond their means on luxury items. “There should be no shame about trying to match your spending to your means. This trend helps young people moderate spending by normalizing the idea of living within budgets.”
Beyond just saving money, loud budgeting is also bringing people closer. Honest money talks lead to greater respect among friends and family. By openly discussing money goals, people are creating stronger bonds based on mutual understanding for each other’s financial situations.
As more people adopt this approach, it is likely to stay a big part of how we handle money in the future.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Before you head out to a run event where there will be many people, you should be aware of the dangers of a crowd crush.
Though the risk of crowd crush is rare, it can be deadly when it happens. Crowd crush occurs when many people are packed together and begin to fall over one another. In the past, such instances have caused horrible injury and even death. To avoid such a fate, it’s best to escape the crush before it happens.
Before attending a crowded event, look up a map of the venue. This will give you an idea of the surroundings - pay special attention to any exits. Once you arrive, choosing the right spot can be crucial. Avoid the middle or front; instead, pick the back or edges of a crowd. It’s also important to trust your feelings. Stay aware to see if you feel packed in at any point. The more crowded the event becomes, the sooner you may need to retreat to a safe place.
If you do end up in a crush, here’s how you can stay safe. The most important thing you can do is stay on your feet. To do this, spread your feet apart and bend your knees a little. Also make sure to move with the flow of the crowd. Trying to move against a crowd of people will only end in disaster.
Helping others is another great way to keep everyone safe. Once one person falls down, more people tend to fall over them. So if your neighbor in the crowd falls to the ground, help them up.
A common cause of death in a crowd crush isn’t being crushed but rather losing air. It’s best to hold out your arms in front of your chest. This allows space between you and the person in front of you. It also protects your chest and lungs from being crushed on the ground should you fall.
There is usually fun where the crowds are, so enjoy yourself. But remember to stay alert!
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Why Willing to Wait?
First it was the fried chicken. Then a variety of fancy milkshakes. No matter what time it is or how bad the streets smell, there are plenty of people waiting in line for hours to get their hands on the food that everyone’s talking about. If you are not the type of person crazy for trendy foods, you probably wonder why someone would like to wait in a long line just to get a taste of a popular cream tea. There is a bit of psychology behind the craze of waiting before getting one’s chopsticks on a trendy food.
People are born curiosity hunters, especially for fresh ideas, according to some experts. At the sight of a long waiting line, they just can’t help having a try. And when the trendy foods are novel in looks and favors, even innovative in their sales environment, the desire for them is upgraded. All those stimulate people to investigate more—to deal with their curiosity.
In addition, having access to something that is sought out but hard to possess equips people with a feeling that improves their self-definitions. When someone is envied due to something he gained with efforts, his self-worth gets enhanced. Although it is yet to be determined whether the number of likes he receives on the photos of foods he’s posted online is connected with the level of envy from on-lookers, that feeling automatically becomes stronger.
Even more, “mob psychology” comes into play: when many people are doing something—waiting in line for the sought-after milkshakes, for instance —others are eager to be part of the group and share such a type of social familiarity, kind of like the natural pursuit of a sense of belonging. Tasting the same wait-worthy food has something in common.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Microplastics: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?
People joke that someone suffering from paranoia (妄想症) sees danger everywhere, thinking someone is out to get him. In the case of microplastics, you don’t need to have paranoia to be worried about them being everywhere, because they basically are!
What exactly are microplastics? They are particles (颗粒) of any type of plastic that are less than 5 millimeters in diameter (直径). They have resulted from the plastic pollution widespread in the world today.
When plastic is exposed to environmental forces, it breaks down into these tiny particles, which, in turn, do not disappear but continue to exist for hundreds or even thousands of years. Every piece of plastic that has ever been made is still on Earth today, except for what has been burned. Often mistaken for food, plastics and microplastics in oceans and on beaches are often consumed by marine animals, which is harmful. Research has linked microplastics to cancer and other problems in animals.
Whatever you think about these particles, taking them in is easier than you think. When you heat food in a plastic dish in the microwave, microplastics get into your food. The water from a plastic water bottle contains the particles as well. After taking surveys of microplastics in air, water and seafood, scientists estimate that people may easily be eating 5 grams of plastic a week. Researchers don’t know yet if or how this will affect humans. Microplastics have been found in human tissue samples, and no one yet knows how long they stay in the human body or what problems may arise.
Not until the amount of plastic waste in the world is reduced will microplastics decrease. So, while the evidence is still missing of the effect microplastics have on people’s health, reusing and recycling plastic is a no-brainer.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Why Ear-worms Get Stuck in Your Head
We all get a sensation when a song, for no apparent reason, refuses to leave your head — in fact we’re no strangers to the dreaded “ear-worm.” But a new study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts reveals a fascinating insight into ear-worms, and why some songs are better than others in sticking in our heads by investigating the actual elements of the song that make it catchy in the first place.
To do this, most frequent ear-worms of the participants were entered into a database and compared to songs that had never been reported as an ear-worm at all. The melodic features of the tunes were then analyzed, revealing that ear-worm tunes were typically those songs that have overall melodic shapes common in Western pop music. A classic example of a common contour (音调的升降曲线) pattern is heard in Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls. This makes the tune easy to remember and has been exploited in many other nursery rhymes, but also in pop music.
In addition to the melodic shape, the other ingredient to the ear-worm formula is the unusual interval structure. The aim of this is to surpass the listener’s expectations of an average pop song, showing unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than usual. “Our findings show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content,” says one of the researchers, “This could help song-writers or advertisers write a jingle (短歌) everyone will remember for days or months afterwards.”
The authors conclude that studies of ear-worms can help explain how the brain works, and improve our understanding in how perception, emotions, memory and spontaneous thoughts behave in different people.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The ingredients of love
In modern times, finding love seems more central to people’s lives. Then, researchers wonder, can love, a highly valued emotional state, be created?
To help determine the ingredients of attraction, one research paired 164 college classmates and had them talk for 3, 6 or 10 minutes to get a sense of each other’s individuality. Then students were asked to predict what kind of relationship they might build with their partners. After nine weeks, they reported what happened. Reports showed their initial judgments often held true. All these students seemed to distinguish at an early stage who would best fit into their lives.
Scientists have also turned to nonhumans to increase understanding of attraction. Many animals give off pheromones — natural chemicals that can be detected by, and then can produce a response in, other animals of the same species. Pheromones can signal that an animal is either ready to fight or is feeling open to partnerships. In contrast, humans do not seem to be as gifted as other animals at detecting such chemicals. Smell, however, does seem to play a part in human attraction. Although we may not be aware of chemicals like pheromones consciously, we give and receive loads of information through smell in every interaction with other people.
Being fond of someone seems to have a number of factors, including seeing something we find attractive. Researchers had people judge faces for attractiveness. The participants had 0.013 seconds to view each face, yet somehow they generally considered the images the same as people who had more time to study the same faces. The way we assess attractiveness seems to be somewhat automatic. When shown an attractive face and then words with good or bad associations, people responded to positive words faster after viewing an attractive face. Seeing something attractive seems to cause happy thinking.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________It Takes at Least 200 Hours to Make a Close Friendship, and More to Maintain It
Many of us worry that we don’t put in enough time to maintain close friendships. But how much is enough? Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula (公式) for how much time you need to spend on your friends to keep them. Each friendship and friend are unique and develops or ends depending on how we interact.
Forming a friendship in the first place takes a certain number of hours of being together. We need between 40 and 60 hours together for a person we know slightly to become a casual friend. In order to move from casual friends to close friends, we need to spend an additional 140 to 160 hours together for a total of about 200 hours.
However, deeper interactions can quicken that timeline. We can form a close bond in less than 200 hours with meaningful conversations. Contrarily, spending 200 hours together doesn’t necessarily mean a person will become a close friend. They have to want to be your friends. Some co-workers can spend 300 hours together and never become close friends.
When it comes to maintaining friendships, it’s not just the number of hours spent together, but what we do that matters. Engaging in passive activity with friends — like watching a TV series — is fun and enjoyable, but it doesn’t do as much to maintain friendship as having deep conversations, sharing feelings, and being a good listener. And routinely checking in with people we choose to connect with, through calls and texts or in person, helps maintain relationships and leads to higher scores of positive feelings, like happiness.
The key point is that sharing things about ourselves can lead to close friendships. Once that closeness is established, some ways to maintain closeness are supporting friends when things go wrong for them and celebrating their achievements.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________How to Stay on Task
“In many activities, it is difficult to maintain a high level of focus over time. Our research asks why this is the case,” said Matthew K. Robison, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Although humans generally perform fine in situations that require sustained attention, they are often distracted, which can lead to inattention. Common distractions can be anything from thinking about a new romantic interest to reacting to a car honking. Most inattention has minor consequences like forgetting to forward an email or pick up an item at the grocery store. However, other inattention can lead to serious consequences, such as a train operator not reacting to an incident, a surgeon forgetting a step in an operation or an individual forgetting to turn off an oven.
“Sustaining attention can be easier said than done, as attention fluctuates(波动) across short and long intervals,” Robison said. One of the most common approaches to studying inattention has been to examine response time to a variety of tasks. For this study, Robison and colleagues employed more than 100 participants to complete reaction time tasks for about 25 minutes. In a standard control condition, participants were simply told to respond as quickly as possible on each trial. “In this condition, reaction times systematically increased across time, consistent with the idea that task focus was decreasing,” Robison said. “However, when we gave them specific goals to pursue and made those goals harder over time, they did not show that effect.”
The drop in concentration goes some way to explaining why we remember or forget the moment and why some people remember better than others. Robison and colleagues at the University of Oregon have also published a new study on maintaining attention. The results provide evidence that a simple and easily implementable change in behavior — setting specific goals for oneself — can significantly improve our ability to maintain task focus over time. “Setting a specific goal will increase sustained attention and reduce inattention,” said Robison based on his studies.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________England Prohibits Phones in Schools, But Will It Help?
Recently, England’s Department of Education has confirmed plans to ban the use of mobile phones in English schools during the school day, including break times. The guidance offers schools a variety of ways to implement (实施) the ban, ranging from an order to leave all phones at home, to handing them in on arrival or keeping them in inaccessible lockers.
England’s response to the growing frustration with students’ cellphone use during school time is not unfounded. The United Nations this past summer published a report issuing a strong warning regarding technology use in schools around the globe. Some countries had already implemented strict “no-cellphone” policies. For example, France prohibited students in elementary and middle schools from using cellphones while on campus. Meanwhile, it is reported that most teens use their phones for an average of 43 minutes during school hours, with some students reaching six hours on the high end. These addictive devices often lead to distraction and social anxiety. Worse still, almost one-third of secondary school teachers said that their lessons were interrupted by students’ mobile phones.
However, some people don’t believe that banning mobile phones in England’s schools will fundamentally address the harm that mobile phones do to children. “We work with children daily. We understand that a phone is a device to pay for a bus, contact your mum, and find information,” Kidron, a secondary school teacher, said. “So the device is not the issue; it is the persistent irresponsible content provided by online tech platforms that is to blame. Companies that engage with children, therefore, should offer content that is suitable for their age and development capacity.” Ghey, a concerned mother, also raised her voice on this matter, but with a different perspective. She argued for the phone manufacturers to make specific products for under-18s that prevent them from accessing harmful content.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Complaining: The Happiness Killer
In 15th-century Germany, there was an expression: Greiner, Zanner, which can be translated as “a chronic (长期的) complainer.” Are you a bit of a Greiner, Zanner? If so, you’re not alone. Survey data show that customers today are more than twice as likely to complain about a product or service as they were in 1976. A U. K.-based survey also observed a rise in job dissatisfaction over a two-year period before autumn 2022.
Complaints can be grouped into different categories. As is reported, 45 percent of complaints concern the behavior of others. For instance, parents repeatedly criticize their children for small issues like messy bedrooms or dirty clothes. Another 29 percent focus on personal discomfort. A common complaint in this category might be about feeling too hot in a room without air conditioner. The remaining 26 percent involve unpleasant obligations like unnecessary work meetings people are forced to attend.
The problem with all of these complaints is that it can feel helpful — but it typically isn’t . Although complaining might offer temporary relief, it’s bad for your happiness in the long run. Researchers who measured people’s mood before and after they complained found that those complainers’ mood was significantly worsening. Besides, complaining can also lower the happiness of the people around you. In some relationships, the negative effect can pass like a virus to those exposed. In other words, when people see others’ complaints expressing anger, disgust and sadness, they can, in turn, feel similar emotions.
As the 20th-century Bulgarian philosopher Archimandrite Seraphim Aleksiev observed, “Complaining is like the winter frost which, when it falls, destroys all the labors of the gardeners.”
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