Liberals Wage War On Emoticons
Activist Catherine Weingarten says that she knows firsthand how dangerous society #39;s unrealistic standards of beauty can be for impressionable young women. That #39;s why, after overcoming an...
By: Secular Talk
The rest is here:
Liberals Wage War On Emoticons - Video
By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter Latest Mental Health News
THURSDAY, March 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Offering a fresh spin on the red-blue political divide, new research suggests that Americans who lean liberal may be a little bit happier than their conservative counterparts.
The finding -- though far from definitive -- comes from a series of related studies that attempted to grade happiness based on the way roughly 5,000 people of varying political stripes spoke and smiled.
"When we looked at both behavior and political ideology, we found that liberals actually express greater happiness than conservatives," said study lead author Sean Wojcik, who conducted the research while a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
"But it's worth noting that the difference was pretty small," Wojcik added. "So I want to be cautious. The results were significant. And strikingly consistent. But it's not that liberals were elated, and conservatives were depressed. We did find a happiness gap. But that gap was small."
Wojcik and his colleagues reported their findings in the March 13 issue of the journal Science.
Wojcik said the finding that liberals seem slightly happier runs counter to several recent studies that found a small happiness gap favoring conservatives. That earlier research was based on "self-reports" -- meaning happiness levels were graded on whether study participants agreed or disagreed with statements such as: "In most ways my life is close to ideal."
But Wojcik said there can be problems with self-reports. An initial life satisfaction survey that Wojcik's team conducted with more than 1,400 men and women found that, while conservatives say they are happier, they're also more likely than liberals to enhance and elevate their own testimonials. This may owe to conservatives' political ideology that can emphasize traits such as individualism, he said.
With that in mind, Wojcik and his team based their happiness evaluations not on survey responses but on documented behavior.
The researchers started with the 113th Congress, which concluded its two-year run on Jan. 3, 2015. Texts drawn from the congressional record of 2013 -- along with 18 years of prior congressional notes -- were analyzed. The result: more conservative members of Congress were a little less likely to use positive language than their liberal colleagues, the study authors said.
See the rest here:
Are Liberals Happier Than Conservatives?
Federal Liberals have fired back at two anti-abortion groups embarking on a national campaign to warn Canadians that Justin Trudeau is an "extremist."
On Thursday, the Campaign Life Coalition and Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform announced a cross-country speaking tour dubbed "#No2Trudeau" in protest of the Liberal leader's edict that all Grit MPs after the next election will be pro-choice.
"Justin Trudeau is ignoring and discriminating against the majority of Canadians who support abortion restrictions, by proclaiming they are not welcome to run for the Liberal Party of Canada," said Campaign Life Coalition spokesperson Alissa Golob in a statement.
But on Friday, Liberals launched the hashtag "#Yes2Trudeau" on Twitter, with many supporters and candidates lauding his stance and promoting a petition on the Liberal website in support of a woman's right to choose.
The petition includes space for supporters to add their names, emails, and postal codes all information that could prove valuable in building a voter database before the next election. The site also contains a donation button.
By Friday afternoon, the hashtag was trending in Canada.
Liberals also tweeted a clip from Trudeau's speech in Toronto earlier this week on the topic of liberty, where he addressed the controversy over his pro-choice pledge.
Last spring, Trudeau announced no new candidates with anti-abortion stances would be allowed to run for the party in the next federal election. Incumbent MPs opposed to abortion would also be required to vote pro-choice if the matter comes before the House of Commons.
"For Liberals, the right of a woman to control her body is more important than the right of a legislator to restrict her freedom with their vote, he said. MPs who disagree with that have other choices. They can sit as independents, or as Conservatives."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said last year that Conservative MPs will be allowed to vote their conscience on matters that challenge their morals or religious faith.
Read this article:
#Yes2Trudeau: Liberals Respond To Anti-Abortion Groups
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has spoken at McGill University and the University of British Columbia in recent weeks. The choice of these locations was not an accident.
If the Liberals are to improve their standing in the scheduled October election, let alone contend to form a government, they have to charge up young Canadians to vote.
Getting Canadians in the 18-to-30 group to the ballot box has proven quite difficult. Young people are turned off by partisan politics. Lower overall voter turnouts in recent elections are largely explained by the precipitous decline in voting among the young. Thats bad news for the Liberals and great news for the Conservatives.
Pollster after pollster has confirmed that the Liberals do better than the other main parties among the young, whereas Conservatives do best among the over-65 set. Since a much higher share of older Canadians than younger ones vote, this gives the Conservatives a big advantage. The future belongs to the young, but the present belongs to the old.
Pollster Angus Reids latest survey on the matter gives the Liberals 34 per cent of voters in the 18-34 age category, compared to 29 per cent for the New Democrats and just 22 per cent for the Conservatives. Among over-55 voters, the Conservatives lead the Liberals 38 to 32 per cent, with the NDP at 22.
Ipsos Reid has the Liberals seven points ahead of the Conservatives among 18-34-year-olds, but the Conservatives lead by four points among voters over 55. Nanos Researchs Party Power Index, which blends voting intentions and prime ministerial preferences, shows the Liberals ahead among 18-to-29-year-olds but trailing among those over 60.
An instructive, albeit small, poll of two Conservative-held ridings (Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette and Brandon-Souris) by Probe Research in Winnipeg found the Liberals ahead by 17 points among 18-34-year-olds, whereas the Conservatives led by 12 points among those over 55.
Getting young people to vote has long flummoxed political parties (especially the Liberals and New Democrats), civic-society activists and political scientists. Mr. Trudeau needs to solve the puzzle.
Younger voters dont see voting as a civic duty, the way many of their elders do. Perhaps they dont yet have a stake in society, and so feel government to be not terribly important. They get their information from nontraditional sources, which are hard to penetrate with political messages.
If some young people are interested in politics, in the widest sense of the word, they may express it by supporting particular causes. Or they may be too wrapped up in their studies or early careers to worry much about the faraway and abstract stuff of politics.
Read the original:
Trudeau seeks the fountain of youth
When asked if they're happy, political conservatives are more likely to say yes than liberals. But a new study suggests that liberals might be the happier bunch -- and conservatives might just want to look good.
Researchers believe that conservatives may have a reputation for being happy because it's in their nature to talk themselves up.
Previous work on the "happiness gap" between liberals and conservatives took a relatively simple route: Just asking. Study subjects were asked to self-report their own happiness levels. In several academic studies (and one by Pew) conservatives repeatedly came out as generally cheerier than their left-wing countrymen.
[Your brain's response to a gross photo can reveal your political leanings]
The new results, published Thursday in the journal Science, took a different approach. Led bySean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology andsocial behavior at the University of California at Irvine, the experiment analyzed photos and language analysis from the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of those identified as either liberal or conservative.
"Common sense would dictate that if you want to know how happy someone is, you can ask them," saidPeter Ditto, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior and co-author of the paper. "But what do you do if someone says they're happy, but doesn't act that way?"
Indeed, Ditto and Wojcik found more genuine smiles (as measured by standard facial analysis) and more positive language in the Web trail of liberals, even though other members of that group self-reported as less happy in the very same study.
The reason, they say, is that political conservatives have a tendency to self-aggrandize. When they compared happiness self-reports with tests that measured a tendency to enhance one's better qualities, they found that the happiness gap could be explained by a self-enhancement gap. In other words, liberals were being more honest about their personal pitfalls.
"There are two interpretations of this you could make: Either people are happier because this self-enhancement has a positive effect on their lives, or they're just appearing to be happier because of that tendency to self-enhance," Wojcik explained. He believes that a search for positive language and genuine smiles helps suggest that conservatives are in the latter camp.
Of course, this study isn't really any more definitive than the self-reported ones, and Wojcik understands that. If his new method showed the same results as self-reported surveys, it would be another story. "But this does raise more questions than answers," he said.
See the article here:
Liberals might be happier than conservatives, even if conservatives say otherwise