From Slate: Girls don’t start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way. When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a […]
Bryan Caplan looks at twin studies and concludes: Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them (WSJ): The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up. I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you
“Serenity Parenting” Read More »
Suffering Souls, from the New Yorker, a ways back (via MindHacks): Psychopaths are as old as Cain, and they are believed to exist in all cultures, although they are more prevalent in individualistic societies in the West. The Yupik Eskimos use the term kunlangeta to describe a man who repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, and takes sexual
Psychopaths, the Article Read More »
Social Rejection Hurts Like Physical Pain (PsychCentral): “On the surface, spilling a hot cup of coffee on yourself and thinking about how rejected you feel when you look at the picture of a person that you recently experienced an unwanted break-up with may seem to elicit very different types of pain. But this research shows
Study: Couples May Not Communicate Better Than Strangers (PsychCentral): “Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical. This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse” […] “A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting
Couples Communication Read More »
Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges (NYT): [R]esearch suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that
For Self-Compassion Read More »
The Claim: A Fake Smile Can be Bad for Your Health (NYT Really?) [S]cientists examined what happened when the drivers engaged in fake smiling, known as “surface acting,” and its opposite, “deep acting,” where they generated authentic smiles through positive thoughts, said an author of the study, Brent Scott, an assistant professor of management
Against Surface Smiles Read More »
Placebo Outperforms Drug in Oxford Study (PsychCentral): Positive expectations of a treatment may be more powerful than the drug itself when it comes to getting well. According to a brain imaging study at Oxford University, volunteers who believed their medication would help actually doubled the natural physiological or biochemical effects of an opioid drug. On
NPR Science Friday: Growing A Bigger Brain Is A Walk In The Park A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that adults who walked for 40 minutes three times a week for a year had brain growth in the hippocampus — an area of the brain associated with spatial memory.
Take a Walk, Grow Your Brain Read More »
Inspiration from Brain Stimulation? (PsychCentral): Are we on the verge of reality transcending science fiction with the use of brain electrodes to enhance individual creativity and expression? Doctoral student Richard Chi and Dr. Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney seem to think so. They found that participants who