How to make envy work for you

Is envy taking over your life? Try practicing gratitude, Christine Harris of Psychology tells the New York Times. Listing reasons you appreciate your own life can help negate envious emotions, since “it is hard to simultaneously be in both states at once” according to Harris. Her research also shows that young adults feel envy more frequently than older adults, so these feelings can dissipate with age.

Winkielman Elected to Academia Europea 

Congratulations to Piotr Winkielman of Psychology on being elected to Academia Europea! Academia Europea is a non-governmental association acting as a pan-European academy to promote learning, education and research. Membership is by invitation only and includes “leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law.”

U.S. Universities Must Tackle Their Huge Carbon Footprints

“The carbon emissions from running large U.S. university campuses greatly exceed those produced by individual laboratories’ use of plastic and electricity,” writes Adam Aron of Psychology, with a UC Davis colleague, in Nature. “Those institutions have a responsibility to urgently retire their fossil-fuel infrastructure.”

ChatGPT Tricks Teachers

Can you tell if what you’re reading right now was written by a human or generated by artificial intelligence? Do you care? Those are essentially the questions that researchers asked in an experiment with ChatGPT at a regional high school. The study – by Gail Heyman of Psychology, postdoc Tal Waltzer and local high school student Riley Cox – showed that even confident educators have trouble recognizing AI-generated essays.

2024 Boyd McCandless Award

Kudos to Caren Walker of Psychology! Walker has been recognized by the American Psychological Association “as a young scientist who has made a distinguished contribution to developmental psychology.” The award is for continued efforts rather than a single outstanding work.

It Rocks in the Treetops, But Is That Bird Making Music?

“Birdsong has inspired musicians from Bob Marley to Mozart and perhaps as far back as the first hunter-gatherers who banged out a beat,” reports the New York Times. “And a growing body of research is showing that the affinity human musicians feel toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis. Scientists are understanding more about avian species’ ability to learn, interpret and produce songs much like our own.” The story includes insights from Psychology graduate student Jeffrey Xing, describing some of his work with Timothy Gentner on the Australian pied butcherbird.