Article archive / December 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 4. Source pages: 15.
I intended to cover Christmas research in this month’s issue of Psychology Gumbo. But golly, I could barely find any at all that was about Christmas. Obviously I was using some offbeat search term. I did find a strange study about regifting, which Dr. Gilda Reed wisely declined to comment on. It lacked inspiration, she said. So I talked her into looking at one about happiness. But in case your thinking of regifting, here is a nutshell.
• “The Gifts We Keep on Giving: Documenting and Destigmatizing the Regifting Taboo” – in Psychological Science, 2012. Adams, Flynn, and Norton looked at how “receivers” and “givers” view the social taboo of “regifting.” They found that attitudes about regifting depended on whether a person was giving or receiving and that some people find it offensive. The researchers suggested that a simple intervention that givers encourage their receivers to use the gift freely. Problem solved.
• “The Pursuit of Happiness: Time, Money, and Social Connection” C. Mogilner, – in Psychological Science, 2010.
COMMENT: Dr. Gilda Reed, Psychology Department, University of New Orleans, Princeton Review’s Best Professor
"Happiness is an elusive personal construct which cannot be operationally defined. The Pursuit of Happiness: Time, Money, and Social Connection by Cassie Mogilner (Psych- ological Science 2010 21: 1348) professes that hap- piness is not triggered as much with money/work thoughts as it is with time/relationship thoughts. Mogilner attempts to separate the influences of both types of thinking on happiness. I believe her conclusions that more happiness results with a shift in attention toward time as opposed to money. Perhaps, my own implicit happiness beliefs that relationships tower over money are responsible (46 year marriage, 7 children, 15 grandchildren, hundreds of college students per semester.)
The scientist in me, however, cannot put much stock in the generalizations and assumptions embedded within the work. It is more plausible to pair money and work together than it is to pair time and relationship together. Work begets money and is generally considered a prerequisite for it. The value of time does not necessarily match up with relationship, as people may value spending it elsewhere (Cziksentmihalyi’s flow), especially in the absence of satisfying relationships. Assuming that valuing of time translates into happiness when spent with family, assumes that this family time is enjoyable. Also problematic are the broad categorizations of work being tied implicitly to the word price and of time being tied implicitly to the word clock.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.