The Greater Good Blog

Grand Theft Childhood? A Greater Good panel on the surprising truths about violent video games

April 30th, 2008 by Jason Marsh | Tags: events, family, children | Leave a Comment »

Join Greater Good staff and contributors for an event to celebrate its Spring 2008 issue on play. A panel discussion will explore the newest research on video game play and discuss the guidelines this research suggests for parents, teachers, kids, and the people who create the games.

The event will run from 6 until 7:30pm on Tuesday, May 6th, in the library of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The event is free; no rsvp required. Hope to see you there.

Unnatural Causes

April 29th, 2008 by Jason Marsh | Tags: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

In case you missed it over the last month, I recommend checking with your local PBS station to see when they might be rebroadcasting the 4-part documentary series, Unnatural Causes. The series explores racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. It goes beyond looking at disparities in the quality of health care, instead focusing on the social and psychological reasons why certain people are more likely to get sick in the first place, such as higher levels of stress and less access to healthy food and safe places to exercise. You can also buy DVDs of the series.

For more on the subject, check out Eve Ekman’s excellent article on the negative health effects of feeling powerless, which we published in the Winter 2007-08 issue of Greater Good, a few months before Unnatural Causes aired.

Daughters, Mothers, and God

April 24th, 2008 by Rodolfo Cortes | Tags: family, religion, children | Leave a Comment »

New research published in the February edition of the Journal of Family Psychology suggests that daughters and mothers who discuss their spiritual beliefs have stronger relationships.

A Midwestern research team asked 130 college-aged women, and their mothers, to complete questionnaires measuring the extent to which they discussed their spiritual or religious beliefs and practices. The researchers also measured the communication patterns, relationship satisfaction, and conflict resolutions strategies between the mothers and daughters.

Results showed that daughters who often discussed their spiritual beliefs with their mothers were more satisfied with their relationship and were less aggressive when trying to resolve conflicts with their mothers. Mothers had the same results with respect to their daughters. The researchers found that these results held even if the mothers and daughters differed on their spiritual views, though most of the women in their study belonged to a Judeo-Christian religious tradition.

According to the authors, the study suggests it is better for adolescent daughters and their mothers to discuss their spiritual beliefs openly “rather than allow the topic of religion/spirituality to go underground, or adopt a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

It’s April 15: Do You Know Where Your Income Tax Dollars Are Going?

April 15th, 2008 by Jeremy Adam Smith | Tags: politics, work, marriage, money, family, parenting, children, Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

From the redoubtable Stephanie Coontz and the Council on Contemporary Families:

Americans tend to think we are better off than families in most other industrial countries because we pay lower income taxes. But when we factor in the higher amount Americans pay for health care, child care, and education, the comparison is not always in our favor. Where do American families’ tax dollars go and what family “value” they get in return?

For every $100 in income tax:

• $32 goes to national defense
• $19 goes to interest on the national debt
• $15 goes to supplemental programs such as TANF, child tax credits, and farm subsidies
• $14 goes to health
• $6 goes to education, employment, and social services
• $4 goes to transportation
• $2 goes to administration of justice
• $2 goes to environment and natural resources
• $2 goes to international affairs
• $1 goes to community and regional development
• $1 goes to agriculture
• $1 goes to science, space, and technology
• $1 goes to the commerce and housing funds.

Want to find out more, including how the United States compares to other countries? See the full report.

For orangutans, laughter is contagious

April 3rd, 2008 by Alex Dixon | Tags: evolution, empathy | Leave a Comment »

It may be the highest form of flattery, but imitation is among the lowest forms of empathy. But that doesn’t make it meaningless. A new study has shown that orangutans imitate each other’s facial expressions, the first evidence that empathy may exist in non-humans.

The study, published in Biology Letters and led by researchers from the University of Portsmouth (in the UK) and the University of Hanover (in Germany), examined 25 orangutans in captivity. Researchers honed in on one of the orangutans’ expressions in particular: oval-shaped open-mouths that are equivalent to human laughter. Just like humans, researchers found, the orangutans’ laughter was contagious: When one of them flashed his open-mouthed grin, others around him followed suit roughly two-thirds of the time.

Formally, this is called “emotional contagion”—evidence that emotions can be involuntarily passed from one person to another, like a cold. In humans, this involuntary facial mimicry can happen in less than fourth-tenths of a second. In this study, the researchers found that orangutans react just as quickly.

Overall the presence of emotional contagion in orangutans suggests empathy is deeply rooted in human nature, stretching back as far as 12 to 16 million years ago, when humans and orangutans shared a common evolutionary ancestor.

Foundations of Cooperation in Young Children

March 25th, 2008 by Rodolfo Cortes | Tags: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Considerable research in the field of moral development has established that children as young as one year of age engage in kind, helpful-or “pro-social”-behavior. But only recently have psychologists started to look at the conditions that help foster this kind of behavior in children.

In a soon-to-be-published article in Cognition, noted Harvard University developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke and her graduate student Kristina Olson show that three-and-a-quarter-year-old kids deliberately act pro-socially, but they discriminate about to whom they lend a hand.

Olson and Spelke ran three related studies in which the children were introduced to a “protagonist” doll which, at certain times, benefited from pro-social behavior from other dolls. The children were then given the opportunity to direct the protagonist doll either to share or not share a resource (for example, stickers, pennies) with other dolls.

Results of the first study showed that participating children were much more likely to encourage sharing between dolls described as siblings or friends than between dolls described as strangers. A second study found that children were significantly more likely to direct the protagonist doll to share with a doll that helped it first. The third and final study showed that children were much more inclined to direct the protagonist doll to engage in pro-social behavior with dolls that had engaged in some form of pro-social behavior–even if that pro-social behavior was not directed towards the protagonist.
Olson and Spelke conclude by noting that the participants did not receive formal moral instruction from the researchers but made pro-social choices entirely on their own. Such results highlight that the capacity for goodness “runs deep into human.development,” said Olson.

Another award nomination

March 12th, 2008 by Jason Marsh | Tags: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

We said we were “thrilled” after our recent Utne Independent Press Award nomination. Well, now we’re doubly thrilled: The Western Publication Association has nominated Greater Good for one of its prestigious Maggie awards, in the category of Best Quarterly. Thanks to all our staff, contributors, and readers for helping to make this happen.
The Maggie award winners will be announced in May.

Being social may help your heart

March 2nd, 2008 by Alex Dixon | Tags: social capital, cooperation, health | 2 Comments »

A new study lends some scientific support to the idea that humans are social creatures.

The study, led by researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and published in the February issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, suggests that social health and heart health are linked. The researchers found that low-income participants with a history of heart problems were less likely to have recurring heart attacks or chest pain if they lived in a county with high “social capital, ” which means that trust, cooperation, and social networks are pervasive there.

“Although the association was not large,” the researchers wrote in their study, “this finding has potentially large public health implications since acute coronary syndrome is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality among both men and women in the United States.”

The Gender of Video Games

February 21st, 2008 by Jeremy Adam Smith | Tags: gender roles, violence, family, heroism, parenting, children, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

In the next issue of Greater Good (Spring 2008), I have an essay on new research into video games. My focus is on the mental and physical health impacts of playing the games, but one of the other things I discovered is that video games continue to be something boys play: today around 80 percent of boys play a game on a typical day compared to 20 percent of girls. (It’s worth noting that the number of girls playing the games has skyrocketed in recent years, but a big disparity persists.) And many of those boys are playing games rated M (”Mature”) for violence or sexual content.

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Altruistic voting

February 20th, 2008 by Jason Marsh | Tags: politics, altruism | Leave a Comment »

It’s always interesting to come across real-world examples that corroborate scientific research findings, and that’s what happened when I was reading the newspaper this morning.

Last fall, I wrote in Greater Good about new research showing that the greatest factor that predicts whether someone will vote is their level of altruism: The more altruistic you are, the more likely you are to vote. This challenges years of conventional wisdom about voting–namely, that voters are driven by self-interest, that they put their pocketbooks ahead of less selfish concerns.

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