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Is Postpartum Depression a Disease of Modern Civilization?
The Huffington Post: In the current issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert describes her family's brief and not-entirely-successful experiment with the Paleolithic diet. Her account is humorous, but it also explores some of the science underlying this popular style of eating, which basically avoids everything but meat, tubers and fresh fruits and vegetables. The idea behind "Paleo" meals and menus is to get back to the healthier diet that our ancient ancestors consumed before the advent of agriculture, which has led to all sorts of dietary and lifestyle changes -- and to a host of modern diseases.
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Getting Over Procrastination
The New Yorker: Want to hear my favorite procrastination joke? I’ll tell you later. Piers Steel, a psychologist at the University of Calgary, has saved up countless such lines while researching the nature of procrastination. Formerly a terrible procrastinator himself, he figures a dose of humor can’t hurt. It’s certainly better than continually building up anxiety about work you should do now but put off until later and later, as your chances of completing it grow ever slimmer, and the consequences loom ever larger. Read the whole story: The New Yorker
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How Family Game Night Makes Kids Into Better Students
The Atlantic: There has been a lot of recent attention focused on the importance of executive function for successful learning. Many researchers and educators believe that this group of skills, which enable a child to formulate and pursue goals, are more important to learning and educational success than IQ or inherent academic talent. Kids with weak executive function face numerous challenges in school. They find it difficult to focus their attention or control their behavior—to plan, prioritize, strategize, switch tasks, or hold information in their working memory. As a teacher and a parent, I’m always looking for fun ways to shore up these skills in my students and my children.
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Why Nice Entrepreneurs Finish First
Inc.: Wharton Professor and author of bestseller Give and Take Adam Grant talks with Inc.’s Eric Schurenberg about the lastest research on giving, taking, success, networking and more. Watch the whole story: Inc.
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Aiming for an A? Study habits you should adopt and avoid
USA TODAY: What are your favorite ways of preparing for an upcoming exam? Do you highlight and reread portions of text or create word associations to remember difficult concepts? According to research published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, many learning methods favored by students actually do very little to improve educational outcomes, while some of the less popular methods deserve another look. Read the whole story: USA TODAY
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The 9-to-5 workday is practically an invitation to ethical lapses. Here’s why.
The Washington Post: Do you consider yourself an ethical person? Chances are you answered "yes," but new research suggests that our ability to act honestly in a given situation is dependent, in part, on the time of day. A study forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science finds that early-risers, or "larks," are more likely to act dishonestly in the late evening hours. Night-owls, on the other hand, exhibit a tendency toward ethical lapses early in the morning. Most of us are hard-wired to go to sleep and wake up at certain times of day. Some of us are early-to-bed-and-early-to-risers, while others prefer to stay up late and wake up late. Many of us fall somewhere in between.
