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What Would a Dog Do on Mars?
Recently, NASA released colorful, dreamy illustrations depicting an imagined future in which human beings have made it to other worlds. A curly-haired astronaut floats inside a lunar space station, with the crater-pocked moon behind her. A lunar explorer steadies a camera on a tripod to photograph Earth in the distance. And an astronaut stands on the dunes of Mars with her hands in the pockets of her spacesuit, a dog at her side. Wait, a dog? To be clear, NASA’s ambitious plans for missions to the moon and Mars do not include dogs. (At least, none that the public knows about.
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Trying To Do Good
It's always better to help someone than not, right? We begin this episode in a virtual classroom. Several years ago Kellie Gillespie took an online course in social psychology, taught by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University. Hundreds of thousands of other people enrolled in the same online course. Kellie and her classmates were exposed to psychological concepts such as the norm of reciprocity: if you're nice to someone, or you open up to them, they're likely to do the same with you. They also learned about the power of empathy: when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, the relationship you have with them profoundly changes.
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Can We Touch?
Tiffany Field has spent decades trying to get people to touch one another more. Her efforts started with premature babies, when she found that basic human touch led them to quickly gain weight. An initial small study, published in the journal Pediatrics in 1986, showed that just 10 days of “body stroking and passive movements of the limbs” for less than an hour led babies to grow 47 percent faster. They averaged fewer days in the hospital and accrued $3,000 less in medical bills. The effect has been replicated multiple times. Field, a developmental psychologist by training, went on to found the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.
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Americans Are Obsessed With Tidying Up. But There’s a Downside to Being Organized
In her bestselling book and Netflix series, Marie Kondo makes the case that decluttering can “dramatically transform” your life. “Detoxing” your spaces of unused and unwanted stuff can make you happier, more confident and maybe even slimmer, Kondo writes in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Judging by the popularity of her message and method, Kondo’s philosophy is scratching an itch for a lot of people. And there’s more evidence, much of it predating the “KonMari” phenomenon, that America has caught organization fever. There’s the “Inbox Zero” movement, a popular approach to email management that emphasizes clearing your inbox at the end of every work day.
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Is It Healthy to Use Food as a Reward?
Hi, Dan. I have final exams coming up, and I’m trying to get motivated by giving myself rewards for studying. But all the rewards I can think of involve sweets or fried foods, which will set me back on my weight-loss goals. Nothing seems to motivate me as much as a piece of chocolate cake! Any advice? —Jordan Your chocolate-cake strategy may not be so bad, if your commitment to your diet is already strong and you can manage to delay your reward. Recently, a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Qian Xu and colleagues looked at the issue of using food as a motivator.
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For Kids With Anxiety, Parents Learn To Let Them Face Their Fears
The first time Jessica Calise can remember her 9-year-old son Joseph's anxiety spiking was about a year ago, when he had to perform at a school concert. He said his stomach hurt and he might throw up. "We spent the whole performance in the bathroom," she recalls. After that, Joseph struggled whenever he had to do something alone, like showering or sleeping in his bedroom. He would beg his parents to sit outside the bathroom door or let him sleep in their bed. "It's heartbreaking to see your child so upset and feel like he's going to throw up because he's nervous about something that, in my mind, is no big deal," Jessica says.
