While residents of wealthy nations tend to have greater life satisfaction, new research shows that those living in poorer nations report having greater meaning in life.

    These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological science, suggest that meaning in life may be higher in poorer nations as a result of greater religiosity (笃信宗教). As countries become richer, religion becomes less central to people's lives and they lose a sense of meaning in life.

    “Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness or life satisfaction,” explains psychological scientist Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia. “Given that meaning in life is an important aspect of overall well-being, we wanted to look more carefully at differential patterns, correlates (相关物), and predictors for meaning in life.”

    Oishi and colleague Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigated life satisfaction, meaning, and well-being by examining data from the 2007 Gallup World Poll, a large-scale survey of over 140,000 participants from 132 countries. In addition to answering a basic life satisfaction question, participants were asked: “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?” and “Is religion an important part of your daily life?”

    The data revealed some unexpected trends: “Among Americans, those who are high in life satisfaction are also high in meaning in life,” says Oishi. “But when we looked at the societal level of analysis, we found a completely different pattern of the association between meaning in life and life satisfaction.”

    When looking across many countries, Oishi and Diener found that people in wealthier nations were more educated, had fewer children, and expressed more individualistic attitudes compared to those in poorer countries — all factors that were associated with higher life satisfaction but a significantly lower sense of meaning in life.”

    The data suggest that religiosity may play an important role: Residents of wealthier nations, where religiosity is lower, reported less meaning in life and had higher suicide rates than poorer countries.

    According to the researchers, religion may provide meaning to life to the extent that it helps people to overcome personal difficulty and cope with the struggles of working to survive in poor economic conditions:

    “Religion gives a system that connects daily experiences with the coherent whole (连贯的整体) and a general structure to one's life … and plays a critical role in constructing meaning out of extreme hardship,” the researchers write.

    Oishi and Diener hope to reproduce these findings using more comprehensive measures of meaning and religiosity, and are interested in following countries over time to track whether economic prosperity gives rise to less religiosity and less meaning in life.

    Recently I had a conversation in Beijing with an adult Chinese friend who was complaining how difficult it was to study English. No surprises there. It is a difficult language to master, just like Chinese. I made a few suggestions based on my experience. One involved a very valuable fact which I learned from my high school Latin and Greek teacher, Dr. Smith．He is a gifted linguist （语言学家），and has an amazing ability to remember things, like poetry, essays, speeches, etc．His advice to us students is that for memorization purposes, there is forty minutes each day in which our memory is more acceptable than it is during the other 23 hours and 20 minutes.

    This 40-minute "super memory" period is divided into two parts: the 20 minutes before we sleep, and the 20 minutes after we first awake. The theory supporting this is pretty simple. First, the last information we input into our brain before bed has a better chance of taking root than information gained during the noisy daytime; and second, our mind is free of disturbance(干扰) when we first awake in the morning一so more receptive to inputs, like a blank slate（石板）．

    I took the advice to heart and it served me well in my school years. In my university days, our Chinese teacher would assign us 200 new vocabulary words each day, on which we would be quizzed（测试）the following day. Without the "magic" 40-minute technique, there's no way I would have passed those daily quizzes.

    As far as language study goes, it's not only useful for memorizing vocabulary. It's also a very useful window of time to listen to the language we're studying even with background noise, and even if it's at a level we find difficult to understand. It might be audio（声音的）language study, aids, or just radio, TV or whatever.

    Beyond our years of formal(正式的) education, memory skills are hugely important in any career. How many times have we heard a speaker read their speech from a prepared text, or read the word-by-word content of a PowerPoint presentation as they present each slide（投影片）? These are annoying, boring, and less effective ways of communicating. They are almost guaranteed(保证) to lose the audience's close attention and interest, let alone persuade or inspire anyone to do anything. And yet lots of people still make this mistake.

    If we use the 40-minute technique, we may not succeed in memorizing our presentation content on a 100% word-by-word basis, but we'll be familiar enough so that we can spend much more time making eye contact with our audience. We will get them in the process, while looking at our text instead of staring at it. This will also free up our hands and arms to convey some extra messages through gesture．

    As you see, the technique really works, but like many things, it takes practice to perfect it. Therefore, we'd better find ways to use the language outside of the classroom, as regularly and frequently as possible. One basic rule of language learning is, "Use it, or lose it·”

Seize the forty-minute learning window and we'll bring in a rich harvest of language learning.

    These days, North Kickapoo Street in Shawnee, Oklahoma, is a four-lane road leading out to the highway, and lined with all kinds of places to eat and shop. But in the mid-1950s, it was just a gravel(砂砾) country road, the perfect place for our daddies to teach us how to drive.

We didn't have driver's education at Shawnee High School. We were on our own. Mom took me to pick up an instruction handbook. I was the oldest of my friends, so we were excited at the prospect of a whole new world opening up. We'd have freedom to get around. Best of all, we could go to the Starlite Drive—In theater on 50-cents-a-carload night. We'd have it made.

    Mom let me back our 1949 Ford out of the garage a few times to get used to the clutch (离合器) and gearshift (变速排挡杆). I got familiar with the motion but was hardly ready for my road test.

    Finally, the day came for Daddy to give me a real lesson. He drove out to the end of the paved section of Kickapoo Street and across to where the gravel started. My daddy had come from a family of 10, and they had been farmers in a poor area in Oklahoma. There was only one way to do things, and that was the right way.

Praises were rare, so when he expressed his approval it was special. I didn't want to experience his glare if I ground the clutch or the car shook as I tried to get it going.

    I took a deep breath, slowly let out the clutch, pushed the stick into second gear, eased down the road, and then carefully moved into third gear. He had me stop and repeat the procedure two or three more times until I came to the end of the section. I was feeling pretty good as I came to a stop and looked to Daddy for approval.

He glared at me and then barked, “You've been driving, haven't you?” He must have thought I'd been practicing in somebody else's car. I quickly explained that my training was all done on the Ford.

    That was 60 years ago. I can still see the nod he gave me when he said, "Well, you did a good job."

    Moments before I could lift my case to put it in the plane's overhead locker ahead of our recent holiday to Europe, my father gently urged me to stop. He held the thick handles of the case and lifted it with his thin arms, pushing it into place with a sigh. “You should relax and be the lady, and let me do the heavy tasks,” he said seriously. “In the future, someone special will come into your life and take over such tasks from me, but that will never happen if you do everything yourself.”

    I was stunned into silence. This was not the father I remembered from childhood, who trained me to study hard at school, asked me to earn my own pocket money as a teenager at a local coffee shop, and even taught me household chores so that my life alone in London wouldn't turn into a mess. But then, eight years after I left home and started a new life in the UK, I realized for the first time that my dad still has expectations for me to be like a princess and to stay dependent and delicate, which were considered necessary qualities of women in traditional China.

    Well, that came a little late. Little did Dad know that over the three years of my university life, I moved flats five times all by myself, dragging suitcases of books and clothes, and waiting for the taxi in the rain while holding tight onto cardboard boxes. Meanwhile, living in the UK – a country currently led by a female prime minister – I have never thought there is anything girls cannot do. Most of my female friends are professionals working in the City of London, and after work, we frequently go down to the pub for a drink, just like the guys do – something my mother never did.

    I wondered how I might make Dad understand the new world his little girl has entered. Perhaps one day, he will realize the “someone special” in my life will appreciate my confidence and independence above dependence, and admit that times have changed.

    Whatever happened to the familiar scene from the past of children playing "tag(捉人游戏)" in the streets while their parents chatted with the neighbors over the garden fence? This picture is fading fast today, as children are now leaving the streets in favor of a screen.

    Several organizations are attempting to change this situation. One of these organizations is Play England, which aims to improve opportunities for children to play outside. A leading figure in the campaign is 50-year-old Adrian Voce, who has childhood memories of days spent in the "Big Woods" near his house with his older brothers. "We were given a packed lunch and told not to talk to strangers. I can still remember wandering in and out of each others' houses." he says.

    However, it is not only the children that Mr. Voce and his organization have to convince. In many cases the parents themselves block his efforts. A survey in 2014 found that 85 percent of adults agreed that it was important for children to be able to play safely in the road or street where they live. However, many of them were not prepared to park their cars an extra 50 meters away from their homes.

    Mr. Voce's attempts to encourage children to play outside include the organization of campaigns like National Playday. Hundreds of communities all over the country take part in this effort, yet it can take a lot of people to give children a taste of what it is like to play in the streets. On one street in Aldershot last year there were five policemen, three community support officers, a traffic management crew, a closed-circuit television van, and a team of "play workers."

    Society today has changed to such an extent that children do not feel safe on the streets and their parents no longer feel comfortable about letting them play there. It is not only the appeal of computers and video games that has driven children inside, but also the presence of traffic, crime, and violent young people. However, thanks to the efforts of people like Adrian Voce, it may not be too late to turn back the clock.

    In 1973, I was teaching elementary school. Each day, 27 kids entered "The Thinking Laboratory." That was the name students voted for after deciding that "Room 104" was too dull.

    Freddy was an average student, but not an average person. He had the rare balance of fun and compassion(同情). He would laugh the loudest over fun and be the saddest over anyone's misfortune.

    Before the school year ended, I gave the kids a special gift, T-shirts with the words "Verbs Are Your friends" on them. I had advised the kids that while verbs may seem dull, most of the fun things they do throughout their lives will be verbs.

     Through the years, Pd run into former students who would provide updates on old classmates. I learned that Freddy did several jobs after his graduation from high school and remained the same caring person I met forty years before. Once, while working overnight at a store, he let a homeless man sleep in his truck. Another time, he lent a friend money to buy a house.

    Just last year, I was conducting a workshop when someone knocked at the classroom door. A woman excused the interruption and handed me an envelope. I stopped teaching and opened it up. Inside were the "Verbs" shirt and a note from Freddy's mother. "Freddy passed away on Thanksgiving. He wanted you to have this."

    I told the story to the class. As sad as it was, I couldn't help smiling. Although Freddy was taken from us, we all took something from Freddy.