Every day, millions of shoppers hit the stores in full force, searching wildly for the perfect gift. Aside from purchasing holiday gifts, most people regularly buy presents for other occasions throughout the year, including weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. This frequent experience of gift-giving can cause uncertain feelings in gift-givers. Many enjoy the opportunity to buy presents because gift-giving offers a powerful means to build stronger bonds, while many worry that their purchases will disappoint rather than delight the intended recipients (接受者).

Anthropologists describe gift-giving as a positive social process, serving various political, religious, and psychological functions. Economists, however, offer a less favorable view. According to Waldfogel, gift-giving represents an objective waste of resources. People buy gifts that recipients would not choose to buy on their own, or at least not spend as much money to purchase (a phenomenon referred to as ‘‘the deadweight loss of Christmas”).

What is surprising is that gift-givers have much experience acting as both gift-givers and gift-recipients, but nevertheless tend to overspend each time they set out to purchase a meaningful gift. In the present research, we propose a unique psychological explanation for this overspending problem — gift-givers link how much they spend with how much recipients will appreciate the gift. Though it seems natural to gift-givers, such an assumption may be unfounded. Indeed, we propose that gift-recipients will be less likely to base their feelings of appreciation on the value of a gift than givers assume.

Why do gift-givers assume that gift price is closely linked to gift-recipients’ feelings of appreciation? Perhaps givers believe that more expensive gifts communicate a stronger sense of thoughtfulness and consideration. According to Camerer and others, gift-giving represents a symbolic ritual (习俗), by which gift-givers attempt to signal their positive attitudes towards the recipient and their willingness to invest resources in a future relationship. In this sense, gift-givers may be motivated to spend more money on a gift in order to send a “stronger signal”. As for gift-recipients, they may not interpret smaller and larger gifts as representing smaller and larger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration.

The idea of gift-givers and gift-recipients being unable to account for the other party’s viewpoint seems confusing because people slip in and out of these roles every day. Yet, despite the experience as both givers and receivers, people often struggle to apply information gained from one role in another. In theoretical terms, people fail to use information about their own preferences and experiences to produce more efficient outcomes in their exchange relations. In practical terms, people spend hundreds of dollars each year on gifts, but somehow never learn to estimate their gift expense according to personal insight.

We need to vent（发泄）about the place we work sometimes. Whether it is the long hours you put in ,an unreasonable boss, or lack of recognition for your efforts-every workplace has enough fuel to lighten the frustration（挫折）.

【小题1】.And it is good to the productivity in the office too. Vanessa Pouthier, a researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, studied a team of nurses and health professionals at a hospital in the United States.【小题2】.Pouthier observed the joking and complaining that went on for 12 months and realized“it helps people to process stress and frustration,”Pouthier told ABC Radio Perth.

【小题3】,there will always be a corner of the office or the lunch room, where a small or large collective of employees are venting to some degree.“Generally, people don’t think there is any value to it,”Pouthier says.【小题4】;she had to look into other fields, such as linguistics, to better understand its functions.

Whether it’s politely debating the effectiveness of how an office runs, or complaining about the bosses, Pouthier found that the complaining session served as bonding function.【小题5】.

“It allows people to recognize how similar they are in the challenges they are facing every day and how they feel about them,”she says.

It is widely believed that smiling means a person is happy, and it usually occurs when they're meeting another person or a group of people. However, a new study led by the body language expert Dr Harry Witchel shows this isn't always the case.

In his research, he asked 44 participants aged 18—35 to play a geography quiz game consisting of nine difficult questions so that they often got the answer wrong. Participants seated interacted with a computer alone in a room while their faces were video recorded.

After the quiz, the participants were asked to rate their experience using a range of 12 emotions including “bored”, “interested” and “frustrated”. Meanwhile, their facial expressions were then computer analysed frame by frame in order to judge how much they were smiling based on a scale of between 0 to 1.

Dr Witchel said: “According to some researchers, a real smile reflects the inner state of cheerfulness or amusement. However, behavioral ecology theory suggests that all smiles are tools used in social interactions, meaning cheerfulness is neither necessary nor rich for smiling. Our study showed that in these human­computer interaction experiments, smiling isn't driven by happiness; it is associated with subjective involvement(主观参与) , which acts like a social fuel for smiling, even when socialising with a computer on your own.”

Surprisingly, participants didn't tend to smile during the period when they were trying to figure out the answers. However, they did smile right after the computer game informed them if their answer was correct or wrong. Participants smiled more often when they got the answer wrong. Dr Witched added: “During these computerised quizzes, smiling was greatly increased just after answering questions incorrectly.This behaviour could be explained by self­ratings of involvement, rather than by ratings of happiness or frustration.”