"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion."  Dalai Lama 

It's the third and last day of this annual BABCP conference (although I'm posting this a day after writing it).  I wrote yesterday about a symposium I went to on the second day.  Today I was more settled - I got out for a pre-breakfast run and then had a chance to meditate.  There's nothing that really grabs my attention in the first set of symposia this morning, so I'm taking the opportunity to review how the conference has been so far and what my plans are for the rest of the day. 

I blogged yesterday about the second full day of this "5th European conference on positive psychology".  So how was the last morning of the conference?  In order to catch my flight I only went in for the final two plenary presentations and then left at the coffee break - a pity, but I already have plenty new to chew over from this conference and I don't think I was missing anything too crucial - for the kind of work - I do by coming away a little early. 

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be."  They report four studies showing how widely this motivation acts - with political power, public funding, gender demographics, and in attacks on those who are trying to work for change.  There's relevance here to the second paper by Wilper et al on "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" estimating that, even after adjusting for income, education, health status, weight, exercise, smoking and alcohol use, lack of insurance was associated with about 45,000 excess deaths annually in the United States among people aged 18 to 64.  Still in the area of inequality and discrimination, Wexler et al publish on