1 . Have you ever bought a new car and started noticing the exact color and model of car everywhere? Has that type of car just become popular in your city? Were they there before? Or are you just going crazy?

You’re not going crazy. The reason you are now just noticing them is what psychologists call “priming”. Basically, the cars were always there. You just didn’t recognize them consciously. However, when that certain model of car becomes part of your conscious thinking, you start “automatically” recognizing all of the other cars that are the same, because you are already “primed” to do so.

The priming effect takes many forms. In one study, students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely. Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you are primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. This research shows that the way we think influences the way we act, and the way we act influences the way we think.

A similar conclusion was reached by the American psychologist William James a century ago, but he emphasized the effect on feeling. “Actions seem to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the path to cheerfulness, should our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

So, that’s it. If you want to be happy, just sit up and act happy. Based on these scientific findings, we can adopt certain priming effects to help make ourselves consistently happier.

One thing we have in common is our ability to think, and thus feel. Pleasant thoughts have been proven to produce the chemicals that make us feel happy, particularly thoughts and feelings of gratitude. When we purposefully go through and think about the things we’re grateful for and deliberately feel as much gratitude as we can, we are flooding our mind with the “happy chemicals”. Furthermore, by consciously thinking, feeling and expressing gratitude, we will not only be happier in the moment, we will be “primed” to recognize the things in our life to appreciate. Each time this happens, the “happy chemicals” will be produced. Do this every day and we will become consistently happier. This makes up for the momentary happiness we gain from eating chocolate or buying new clothes. More than that, combining thoughts of gratitude with happy acts like smiling and laughing will have a supplementary positive effect on our state of mind.

1. Which of the following is an example of the priming effect?

A．Walking much faster after attending a lecture about old age.

B．Donating money to the poor after seeing pictures of cute cats.

C．Learning about various types of cars after purchasing the first car.

D．Completing SO_P as SOUP rather than SOAP after seeing the word EAT.

2. What does the underlined word “reciprocal” in Paragraph 3 probably mean?

A．Related.

B．Two-way.

C．Well-rounded.

D．Opposite.

3. What will the author probably agree with?

A．Eating or shopping leads to consistent feelings of happiness.

B．Our will has greater control over emotions than over actions.

C．Happy chemicals make us think about the things we’re grateful for.

D．Practicing gratitude frequently prepares us for long-term happiness.

4. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

A．Prime Yourself to Be Happier

B．Share Happiness to Enhance Wellbeing

C．Why Gratitude Is Important in Psychology

D．How Happy Chemicals Affect People’s Thoughts

2 . The Positive Effects of a Positive Affect

Parents often have high hopes for how their children will turn out in adulthood, such as wanting them to be healthy, to feel satisfied with their career, and to have strong friendships.    1    

Recent research suggests that a teen’s affect—especially positive affect—is one critical factor. What exactly is affect? Affect is the tendency to express positive or negative emotions, which in turn influences how we experience things and determine whether to judge a given situation as positive or negative.    2     Moreover, research suggests that a person’s affect is relatively stable over time, especially by the time one reaches adulthood.

Affect is typically described in terms of being either positive or negative, and it seems that positive affect, in particular, is related to a number of beneficial outcomes in adulthood.

In support of this crucial role that positive affect has in development, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia followed teenagers and young adults from ages 14 to 25, allowing them to understand the predictive power of positive affect across the critical developmental period from adolescence to young adulthood.    3     For example, teens with a higher positive affect reported had a stronger, healthier attachment to their friends.

    4     Positive affect also predicted increased self-worth and job competence, suggesting that, overall, positive affect seems to be a key predictor of young adult success across several important areas of functioning.

But what about the effects of negative affect? The researchers also examined whether negative affect would predict problems in young adulthood.    5     Thus, the important takeaway is that adolescent positive affect may have powerful links to important life outcomes in the domains of personal well-being, career, and social relationships up to a decade later.

A．Affective responses to events typically happen automatically.

B．So how can parents help their children grasp the meaning of positive affect?

C．But what factors help produce these outcomes as teens move from adolescence to adulthood?

D．Interestingly, the results suggested that positive affect may go beyond helping teens build positive relationships.

E．The results uncovered that negative affect might account for many life problems when a teenager became a young adult.

F．Unlike positive affect, having greater negative affect did not have any significant associations with any of the later life outcomes.

G．This study found that positive affect was strongly predictive of life outcomes in young adulthood, such as developing better friendships.

3 . 阅读下面短文，根据短文内容填空。在未给提示词的空白处仅填写 1 个恰当的单词，在给出提示词的空白处用括号内所给词的正确形式填空。

Gratitude is more than just saying “thank you”. Gratitude is a deeper appreciation for someone or something. Expressing gratitude makes us feel a positive emotion. Over the past thirty years, there    1     (be) many studies showing that writing a gratitude letter to another person offers us an opportunity    2     (escape) from negative emotions. Even if we don’t share our writing with anyone, the act of completing the exercise alone makes us happier and    3     (satisfied) with life. The more we express gratitude, the more positive we feel.