Featured Post from University of Rochester

Valentines Day thoughtfulness has intrinsic rewards, says University of Rochester professor

Feb 1, 2019

1 min

Harry Reis

We’ve all heard that it’s better to give than to receive. When it comes to Valentines Day, there’s empirical evidence to show that being thoughtful to a spouse is rewarding in and of itself.


A 2017 study by University of Rochester Psychology Professor Harry Reis shows that when we show compassion toward our partner—when we put aside personal wishes in order to meet the partner’s needs—it makes us feel better, even if—and this was a surprise—those acts of compassion go unrecognized by the recipient. 


Over the course of 14 days, husbands and wives reported giving and receiving an average of .65 and .59 compassionate acts each day—with husbands perceiving more such acts than did their partners. The acts included such things as changing personal plans for the partner’s sake, doing something that showed the partner was valued, and expressing tenderness for the spouse.


For Reis, the results suggest that acting compassionately may be its own reward, or in this case, its own Valentines gift.


Professor Reis’s research interests involve social interaction and close relationships. He studies the factors that influence the quantity and closeness of social interaction, and the consequences of different patterns of socializing for health and psychological well-being. 

Connect with:
Harry Reis

Harry Reis

Professor of Psychology and Dean's Professor in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering

Professor Harry Reis' research interests involve social interaction and close relationships.

Marriage and Close RelationshipsHealth and Psychological Well BeingSocial interactionIntimacyEmotion Regulation

You might also like...

Check out some other posts from University of Rochester

1 min

Protect yourself: Scammed by a QR Code? It didn’t have to happen

QR codes are used everywhere nowadays – to pay for metered parking, to read menus at restaurants, to win a free cup of coffee. Cybercriminals are using them, too – redirecting users to harmful websites that harvest their data. The practice is known as “quishing,” derived from QR code phishing, and it is a fast-growing cybercrime. But it doesn’t have to be. University of Rochester engineers Gaurav Sharma and Irving Barron have devised a new form of QR code – called a self-authenticating dual-modulated QR (SDMQR) – that protects smartphone users from quishing attacks by signaling when users are being directed to a safe link or a potential scam. Gaurav is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and biostatistics and computational biology. Barron is an assistant professor of instruction in electrical computer engineering. Their creation involves allowing companies to register their websites and embed a cryptographic signature in a QR code. When the code is scanned, the user is notified that the code is from an official source and safe. Gaurav and Barron recently wrote about their technology in the journal IEEE Security and Privacy, and spoke about their work on the National Science Foundation's Discovery Files podcast. They can be reached by email at gaurav.sharma@rochester.edu and ibarron@ur.rochester.edu.

1 min

For autonomous machines to flourish, scalability is everything

The past decade has seen remarkable advancements in robotics and AI technologies, ushering in the era of autonomous machines. While the rise of these machines promises to revolutionize our economy, the reality has fallen short of expectations. That’s not for a lack of intensive investments in research in development, says Yuhao Zhu, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Rochester. The reason we’re not seeing more service robots, autonomous drones, and self-driving vehicles, Zhu says, is that autonomation development is currently scaling with the size of engineering teams rather than the amount of relevant data and computational resources. This limitation prevents the autonomy industry from fully leveraging economies of scale, Zhu says, particularly the exponentially decreasing cost of computing power and the explosion of available data. Zhu recently co-authored a report on the quest for economies of scale in autonomation in Communications of the ACM and is part of an international team of computer scientists focused on making autonomous machines more reliable and less costly. He can be reached by email at yzhu@rochester.edu.

1 min

How to help children cope when tragedy and social media collide

When a child feels traumatized by stressful events or a tragedy, exposure to social media can exacerbate the problem. That's in part because social media can be wrought with misinformation and disinformation, and appropriate communication on its platforms is often lacking.  “There are no rules on social media, and kids can gang up on each other,” says Jennie Noll, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and executive director of the university’s Mount Hope Family Center, which provides evidence-based intervention and prevention services to thousands of children and their families in the Rochester area, with a primary focus is supporting children and families affected by stressful or traumatic experiences. What can adults do to help children cope with tragedy and check in on their emotional and social well-being? The best thing that parents, guardians, and other caretakers of children can do is help youngsters understand that there is more to communication, more to friendship, and more to their self-worth than what arises on social media."We need to understand how we treat each other as humans on social media. Social media has exasperated everything that we thought was risky with regard to how teens interact." She recommends parents check in with their children, enforce breaks from social media for them when they're confronting a stressful situation, and help them make alternative plans. Media outlets often turn to Noll for her insights into child psychology, maltreatment prevention, and social media use. She can be reached by clicking on her profile.

View all posts
Powered by