Professional School of Psychology

A quick scan of what the psychology beat turned up this week, pulled from newsrooms and wire services around the country. The threads run from the behavior of people trying to sell a house in a bad market to the way children reshape a marriage, with a few campus honors mixed in.

PR Newswire ran a piece arguing that anyone working with sellers right now should pay attention to what the downturn does to their heads. When prices fall, the problem stops being purely financial and becomes emotional: people anchor to what their home used to be worth and resist the number the market is actually offering.

Gawker, in its own register, interviewed someone it called a big psychology nerd on the subject of snark. The conversation treated sarcasm and jabbing humor as behavior worth taking seriously rather than just dismissing, which is about as much respect as the topic usually gets.

On the awards side, the Swampscott Reporter noted that Jordan Jaffe picked up recognition in psychology. The Hattiesburg American covered students honored by a College of Education and Psychology, and Media Newswire reported that a Mesa Community College student made the All-USA Academic Team. The Boston Globe wrote that a Fulbright is sending a professor off on another stretch of work abroad, and Kentucky.com followed Western Kentucky graduates taking very different routes into the job market.

Two separate stories circled the same uncomfortable question about parenthood. USA Today reported that kids can wear down marital happiness, and HealthNews framed it more bluntly by asking whether having a baby ends marital bliss altogether. Neither suggests regret so much as a drop in the easy contentment couples knew before the sleepless nights started.

The Boston Globe also had a second item worth flagging: researchers studying how dogs think in hopes of learning something about the human mind. Dogs read our cues, follow pointing, and respond to attention in ways that look a lot like social reasoning, which makes them a useful window into where our own thinking might come from.