During the recession, a number of people have begun to value work less (unless finances force them to value work much, much more) -  time away from family, less leisure time and fewer self-improvement activities have begun to get noticed.

In other words, the human condition that causes us to devalue something until we no longer have it is in full force.   A new study also indicated that recession-related stress tends to manifest differently in men and women.

Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration in the Florida State University College of Business, and research associates Tyler Everett and Stuart Tapley, decided to find out how attitudes toward work had changed during recent times.

If you like to read science studies you are most likely to get them through one of two avenues; the long-standing business model has been that a print journal gets the study and does the work formatting it and lends their 'goodwill' to it with marketing - in return, they hold copyright and subscribers pay to read it.   A more recent approach has been companies that instead charge the scientists to publish the study but reading it is free - open access versus toll access, proponents claim, though in a practical sense someone is either paying to read or someone is paying to publish.

People will pay more for an iPhone, or any product, if it is owned by someone the consumer has 'positive' envy of, such as a friend or celebrity they like, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

But it works the other way also; those with 'malicious' envy or contempt of someone who has a product would instead buy, for example, a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone.  The researchers say their discoveries about the motivations that result from different kinds of envy could be key to understanding marketing in the future.