Your Password or Your Privacy A) Matthew Breuer has shared the passwords to his computer, e-mail and social media accounts with every girlfriend he's ever had. It's a matter of convenience—she can check his e-mail when he can't access it or get into his phone to change the song playing on the speakers. But it's also symbolic. B) "I feel like it's so much easier to live in a relationship where you know you have nothing to hide and are entirely honest about who you are and what you're doing," he says. "Times in my life when I've realized that something wasn't working in my relationship coincided with (与……同时发生) times when I would be worried, 'Oh, do I really want to say this on Facebook to somebody else?' It's such a red flag if there's something you're concerned about your partner seeing. That means there's some fundamental issue with your relationship beyond privacy." Breuer has most American couples on his side. According to a recent Pew study, 67% of Internet users in marriages or relationships have shared passwords to one or more of their accounts with their partner. C) Though we don't feel comfortable exchanging passwords with perhaps more trustworthy family members and long-term friends, we do feel comfortable exchanging access to our personal information with boyfriends and girlfriends. It's an exercise in trust, the logic goes. If you have nothing to hide, why would you want to hide your password? And, as Breuer points out, knowing someone may look over your shoulder can keep you honest. D) For Jasmine Tobie, seeing someone else's transgressions (越轨) via e-mail has saved her from a toxic relationship. After finding some receipts that proved her boyfriend was lying to her about being on a business trip one weekend, she decided to look at his e-mail to be sure before she pulled the plug on the relationship. "Once I found that I just had to have more evidence." She didn't know his password, but was able to guess correctly using clues on his desktop. "He was still 'communicating' with his exes. He had taken a trip to visit an ex and told me it was a work trip. He was still signed up with dating sites and other 'hookup' sites and actively communicating with those people... I found some pictures of him and people he swore were 'friends' in the act." The two had dated for a year and lived together for about nine months. "I was trying to find some way to give him the benefit of the doubt. In the end, it did clarify for me that he was not it for me at all and that there were issues I couldn't fix." Tobie adds that those were extraordinary circumstances, and she wouldn't read someone else's e-mails again. She doesn't share passwords with her current boyfriend. E) In most circumstances, psychologists suggest keeping passwords private. "In relationships, we depend on each other for a lot of things, but it's good and healthy to have some independence too," says Kelly Campbell, PhD of Psychology. "The more you self-disclose, the happier you are. But the happiest couples have some degree of secrecy and privacy." Unsurprisingly, sharing passwords can cause some serious problems during a relationship or after it ends. F) Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, advises the teens she talks to for her research not to share passwords because "the relationships can change so quickly, and the emotions behind the breakups can be so strong." She says that one high schooler she worked with was blind-sided when his ex-girlfriend found his phone. "She knew where he charged his phone during class and knew his password, so she went in and sent all sorts of texts to friends, to another girl he was talking to—it really created a lot of problems for him." G) Though one might assume that teens and 20-somethings are the ones foolishly sharing passwords—and suffering from the resulting drama—the survey found that the practice of password-sharing is pretty equal across age groups, and that 18-29-year-olds were actually the least likely to share passwords. 64% of 18-29-year-olds share passwords, compared with 70% of 30-49-year-olds, 66% of 50-64-year-olds, and 69% of those over 65. H) And you don't have to be a teenager to have password problems with your significant other. Suzy, a 46-year-old mother, got into a dangerous situation years ago when her then-boyfriend started reading her e-mails. She hadn't given him her password, but one day she forgot to log out and he checked her e-mail. The couple had been on-again-off-again, and she hadn't told him that she had created an online dating profile while they were apart. She had since deleted the profile and deleted most of the e-mail exchanges with the men she met through the site. "But he went through all my e-mails, including ones that I had thrown away. He went into every folder. He got really mad and basically attacked me," she says. "I ended up having to call an ambulance." I) Since, she says she's never even considered sharing passwords with a significant other. "I now have this paranoia (偏执) where I wouldn't even share it even if I trusted someone. You never know what's going to upset someone," she says. "I don't know if that makes me less trusting or just wiser." J) Still, optimists like Breuer are undeterred (未受阻的) by such horror stories. Breuer says he has always developed friendships with the girls he has dated before dating, and therefore felt they could be honest with one another. "I think sharing passwords honestly ends up affording you the privacy you want," Breuer says, pointing to a password etiquette that has developed between him and his partners in recent years. "Just because you tell somebody your password to things doesn't mean they actually end up looking through your stuff." Breuer says he's never changed his password after a breakup since he's always trusted and respected those he has dated. K) Campbell says the best way to determine if you're ready to share passwords with your significant other is to check and see if you're on the same page. "If you have any question in your mind, the answer is no," says Campbell. "I would say that it should be reciprocal. You shouldn't be sharing something if your partner also didn't share it... People are happiest when they have a match. You and your partner should be a match in that respect too."

Though Ida Bauer was only 18 years old, she had come to Sigmund Freud suffering from coughing and speechlessness. She'd become depressed, even hinting at suicide. During one session, as he tried to help her uncover the source of her sickness, Freud observed Bauer toying with a small handbag. Interpreting the act as an expression of repressed desire, Freud concluded, "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." Sometimes a handbag is just a handbag, but modern research does support the idea that secrecy can be a source of mental and physical distress. Keeping a secret requires constant effort. In one recent study, subjects asked to conceal their sexual orientation performed worse on a spatial ability task, reacted more rudely to criticism, and gave up sooner in a test of handgrip endurance. And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep. Another study found that subjects asked to recall a meaningful secret perceived hills to be steeper and distances to be longer than those asked to recall a trivial secret. When researchers requested help moving books from their lab, the subjects harboring meaningful secrets lifted fewer stacks. All of that mental exertion might actually wear a body down: research shows an association between keeping an emotionally charged secret and ailments ranging from the common cold to chronic diseases. Other evidence in favor of disclosure includes multiple studies showing that writing about a traumatic (令人痛苦的) experience can boost the immune system, and the finding that teens who confide in a parent or close friend report fewer physical complaints and less delinquent behavior, loneliness, and depression than those who sit on their secrets. One reason secret keeping is such hard work is that secrets, like unwanted thoughts, tend to take up more brain space the more one tries not to think about them. But not everyone is equally prone to this self-defeating cycle. Researchers have identified a small class of "repressors," who experience fewer intrusive (妨碍的) thoughts about sensitive information they are suppressing: they may keep their secrets so tightly wrapped that they manage to hide them even from themselves.

People tend to have one of three beliefs about the meaning of work and which category you fall into largely depends on your parents, according to new research from the University of Michigan. Workers who are job-oriented are those just trying to make a living who much prefer the activities they pursue outside of the office. Career-oriented adults—your typical "workaholic"—value the social status and prestige (声望) that comes with professional achievement, and derive much of their identity from their jobs. Calling-oriented people do work that they are passionate about because they want to have a positive impact on the world. In the first empirical (以实验为依据的) study into how these orientations originate, researchers found that how adolescents (青少年) perceive their parents' work ethic is central to the development of their own work attitudes. It's not a straightforward transfer of values. People who perceive their father to have a strong career-orientation are more likely to be career-oriented themselves—but career-determined mothers have no effect on their kids' work orientation. The researchers attributed this to generational gender norms. When the study's participants were teenagers, mostly in the 1980s, men were more commonly employed outside of the home and were more likely than women to hold "career" jobs with opportunity for advancement. Mothers do have a notable effect on whether children have a job-orientation mentality. Adolescents who are close to their mothers are less likely to view work as just a job when they grow up, probably because they've been raised to value social, rather than instrumental, life experiences. Having both parents display the same work ethic has an amplified (增强的) influence, but only in the case of calling-oriented offspring (子女). As our capitalist society favors money and professional achievement, a child with two calling-oriented parents is more likely to have the confidence to ignore these societal pressures and pursue her dreams. Children can affect their parents' work ethic, too. Allowing people to bring their children into the office has been shown to boost efficiency and productivity—and could help raise that next generation of career-oriented workers.