Humans

Feeling good, nationally A sense of personal well-being, typically assumed to depend on factors such as job status, income and close relationships, instead hinges on satisfaction with one’s country for the world’s most impoverished people living mainly in non-Western countries, says a team of University of Illinois psychologists and Gallup pollsters. A survey of life satisfaction among residents of 128 nations, to appear in Psychological Science , indicates that poverty-stricken individuals see their home countries as especially central to their personal identities. Patriotism, a concept related to satisfaction with one’s country, deserves closer study as an influence on well-being, the researchers say. — Bruce Bower Pain has its benefits When reminded of a past immoral deed, people want to experience physical pain — and feel pain more intensely — in order to ease their guilt, asserts a team led by Australian psychologist Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland in an upcoming Psychological Science . College students who wrote about a past unethical act held their hands in ice water much longer and rated the experience as more painful than did students who wrote about an everyday event. Volunteers reported feeling much less guilt about a past misdeed after an ice-water dunk than after a warm-water dip. — Bruce Bower Catching stress Second-hand stress is real, researchers from the Stony Brook University in New York report. People who inhaled dried forms of men’s stress sweat (collected just before the men went skydiving for the first time) had an amped-up response to images of faces showing neutral and ambiguous expressions. People who inhaled run-of-the-mill exercise sweat responded normally to these faces. The study, to appear in an upcoming issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience , suggests stress sweat prompts heightened responses to the environment. — Laura Sanders