L3Y2 Tutorial 2022 - critical thinking

Image description: The title of an article on a webpage, How To Be Happy, reads: Kindness makes you happier and here is why.
The picture shows a yellow soft toy with a big, smiley, happy face. To the left of the toy is a quote: "How beautiful a day can be when kindness touches it!"
The text underneath the picture reads: "FOCUSING ON THE BRAIN Within the confines of the brain, you’ll find that chemical releases are found. Chemical releases such as serotonin can promote mood elevation. Well, when someone gives, out of the goodness of their heart, something as simple as a helping hand the brain reacts in a positive manner. Dopamine rushes through the body, and the brain signals a certain type of “high” or elation as a result."

Image description: A headline from The Sydney Morning Herald reads: Nice one: being kind makes you happier, healthier and more attractive.
The image shows two people having a hug.

Above and below the image, the text reads: "In the last week Donna Fairall has left a coffee voucher on a stranger’s car, ordered a Christmas hamper for a needy family and offered to babysit for friends with a newborn baby. Donna says she enjoys being kind to other people, friends and strangers whenever she can. “It makes me feel valued as a person, humbled, maybe a little less selfish” says the creative arts director from Coffs Harbour."

Image description: An article title in Nature Communications Journal reads: A neural link between generosity and happiness.
The text reads:
"ABSTRACT Generous behaviour is known to increase happiness, which could thereby motivate generosity. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a public pledge for future generosity to investigate the brain mechanisms that link generous behaviour with increases in happiness. Participants promised to spend money over the next 4 weeks either on others (experimental group) or on themselves (control group). Here, we report that, compared to controls, participants in the experimental group make more generous choices in an independent decision-making task and show stronger increases in self-reported happiness. Generous decisions engage the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in the experimental more than in the control group and differentially modulate the connectivity between TPJ and ventral striatum. Importantly, striatal activity during generous decisions is directly related to changes in happiness. These results demonstrate that top–down control of striatal activity plays a fundamental role in linking commitment-induced generosity with happiness."

Image description: An article title published by the University of Oxford reads: Being kind to others does make you happy, concludes large-scale review of evidence.

The text reads: "Researchers conclude that being kind to others causes a small but significant improvement in subjective well-being. The review found that the effect is lower than some pop psychology articles have claimed, but also concluded that future research might help identify which kind acts are most effective at boosting happiness. The claim that ‘helping makes you happy’ has become a staple of pop psychology and self-help manuals. Performing ‘random acts of kindness’ has been touted as a sure-fi re way of boosting your mood — doing good makes you feel good, as well as benefiting others. But do these claims stack up, or are they ‘too good to be true’? In order to find out, a team from the universities of Oxford and Bournemouth carried out a systematic review of the scientific literature. They analysed over 400 published papers that had investigated the relationship between kindness and happiness, and identified 21 studies that had explicitly put the claim to the test – that being kind to others makes us happier. They then conducted a ‘meta-analysis’, which statistically combines the results of these previous studies."