News category: News

May 4th 2007.

Realizing that some people may feel guilty about reporting pleasure-seeking behaviors, Steger and his colleagues then modified the survey questions slightly to make them seem less exceptionable, and asked a new group of students to perform the study again, this time over a four-week period. The psychologists got the same results.

“A lot of times we think that happiness comes about because you get things for yourself,” said Richard Ryan, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the study. But “it turns out that in a paradoxical way, giving gets you more, and I think that’s an important message in a culture that’s pretty often getting messages to the opposite effect.”

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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/18488538#.VNUMW8aFbdl

By NBC Health

January 15th 2007.

 

 Researchers say they’ve found another reason why video games are so hard to give up: They may help fulfill basic psychological needs.

In a study published in the January issue ofMotivation and Emotion, investigators from the University of Rochester and Immersyve Inc. looked at what motivated 1,000 gamers to keep playing video games.

“We think there’s a deeper theory than the fun of playing,” lead investigator Richard Ryan, a motivational psychologist at Rochester, said in a prepared statement.

The gamers were divided into four groups, each asked to play different games. They answered questionnaires both before and after playing the games. The researchers used the questionnaires to look at the underlying motives and satisfactions that can spark players’ interests and sustain them during play.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/15/AR2007011500409.html