1 . Psychological science is full of interesting topics, many of which tell a coherent picture of human nature, but some of which create seemingly contradictory stories. A case in point is the misunderstood overlap(交叠) between strength­based science and the research on narcissism (自恋).

There is now convincing evidence to show that narcissism is on the rise, especially in our youth. Some researchers say that about 25% of young people showing symptoms of narcissism.

We are correct to be concerned about this phenomenon, but our fear that all kids are potential narcissists has caused an unhelpful reaction against approaches that seek to make our children and teens feel good about themselves.

In my own research on strength­based parenting, it is common for people to wrongly think this approach to be the cause of narcissism. Their argument seems to be that a child who knows their strengths will automatically view themselves as better than everyone else. It is argued that the self­assurance that comes with identifying and using their positive qualities will make a child selfish and uncaring.

Why does this occur? It’s partly because more is known about narcissism than strengths. While strengths psychology has largely stayed within the limit of academic journals, research on narcissism has made its way into the mass media and our daily life.The New York Times noted that narcissism is a favored topic and that people everywhere are diagnosing others with it.

The fear that a strength­based approach will cause narcissism also occurs because of our binary (非此即彼的) thinking. We mistakenly believe that one cannot be both confident and humble. Without confidence in their strengths, Gandhi and Mother Teresa couldn’t have achieved so much, and yet modesty and selflessness are their qualities.

When we assume that strength­focus is the same as self­focus, we fail to make the idea clear that people who know their strengths are, actually, more likely to be pro­social and ready to help others.

It’s easy to conclude that every young person is at risk of becoming a narcissist but I’d like to stand up for the thousands of young kids I have worked with who are caring, thoughtful and humble—even when they use their strengths.

2 . Some penguins(企鹅)adapt their calls to become more similar to their partners over time，an ability that was previously known in only a few species, including humans.

Luigi Baciadonna at the University of Turin, Italy, and his coworkers recorded African penguins from three different colonies(群体)over three years, and also observed the behavioral patterns of one of the colonies to see which penguins were partners or friendly.

They then analyzed specific vocal(嗓音的)calls, which the penguins made when they were alone or trying to keep track of their friends.They compared four distinct vocal signatures such as the frequency of the calls. The signatures became more similar over time for penguins that were partners or in the same colony, and for penguins that heard more of each other’s calls.

This adaptation could make it easier for penguins to find their partners and friends in a colony. “Imagine that you are in a pub, you are with your friends and your environment is quite noisy,” says Baciadonna. “What you do is try to talk in a certain way so that your communication is more effective.”

The ability to adapt calls in response to the environment, known as vocal accommodation, is a key part of vocal learning, a more complex set of skills such as producing new sounds through learning. Identifying which species display vocal accommodation could provide clues to how vocal learning developed. Baciadonna and his team also propose that this accommodation could help with group harmony and social bonds between individual penguins.

The distance of penguins from humans on the evolutionary tree suggests that vocal accommodation could be common to many species, but a lot more data needs gathering first. “There could be a huge variety of different species that are able to adapt their calls slightly, but we don’t know that yet,” says Sara Torres Ortiz at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

7 . Streaming humorous videos on the Internet at work isn’t always a waste of time. They may be putting themselves in a good mood (心情) so that they can think more creatively.

According to Ruby Nadler, a PhD student at the university of Western Ontario, “Generally, a positive mood has been found to improve creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking.” She and her colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda focused their research on a specific type of learning that benefits from creative thinking.

People in the study were put into various moods before being given a category (类别) learning task to complete: They learned to classify (分类) sets of pictures with visually (视觉) complex patterns. The researchers used music and video clips to change people’s mood; at the beginning, they tested out a few to see which ones made individuals the happiest and saddest. The happiest music was a cheerful Mozart composition, while the happiest video was a newborn baby laughing.

The researchers then used them in the experiment, along with sad music and videos that had no effect on moods. People were required to learn to spot a pattern after listening to the music and seeing the movie. Volunteers who were happy were better at learning a rule to categorize the patterns than those who were sad or indifferent.

“If you have a project where you want to think creatively, or you have a problem to carefully consider, being in a positive mood can help you do that,” Nadler says. And music is a simple method of putting yourself in a good mood. Everyone responds to various types of music, so don’t feel obligated (必须的) to switch to Mozart, she adds.

This, according to Nadler, might be one of the reasons why individuals enjoy watching humorous films at work. “I think people are unconsciously (无意识地) trying to put themselves in a positive mood, so the seeming waste of time may actually be beneficial to employers,” she says.

9 . Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information. But they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism theatrical metaphor (隐喻), these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and protect a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.

So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.

Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what’s acceptable without facing the consequences of “real life.”

10 . I used to tell my children that they were smart, because I was impressed by their rapid growth. I remember clearly watching my daughter figure out how to build a Lego house that would stand up on its own, and thinking: Look at this tiny architectural genius.

But decades of research now suggest that we should not tell our children they’re “smart” when they do impressive things. When I first heard it, I felt instinctively irritated. But after I dug into the research, I was persuaded. It all goes back to something called “growth” mindset, a term developed and popularized by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford. Professor Dweck believes that we can change our abilities through effort and strategy. The alternative to a growth mindset is a “fixed” mindset — the idea that our abilities are inborn and can’t be changed. When we praise our children for being “smart”, based on victories like doing well on a test, we’re unwittingly (不知不觉地) encouraging them to believe that if they do poorly or make mistakes, they’re not smart.

It’s not just what we say that matters, but how we tolerate our children’s failures. A 2016 study by Dweck showed that parents’ “failure mindsets” affect their children more than their views on intelligence. In other words, if parents think that failure is shameful, their children are more likely to be afraid of making mistakes. The study concludes that everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, continually evolving with experience. Whatever we say or don’t say to our kids, the key is to get them more comfortable with failures big or small.

It’s helpful for kids to understand that you make mistakes and learn how they happen. When you chat with them, you can describe what you learned, or how you strategized a solution. “You don’t have to deny you have negative emotional reactions,” Dweck said. “We, as a society, don’t do that enough because we feel embarrassed when we make mistakes.” But if we discuss our missteps more and explain how we overcame them, our children can learn to do the same.