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Loneliness Destroys Physical Health From The Inside Out
Forbes: Loneliness can increase the risk of premature death in older adults by 14%, claims a major new study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results expand a growing understanding of the potential for loneliness to damage physical health along with psychological health. What the research team found is that perceived social isolation—the “feeling of loneliness”—was strongly linked to two critical physiological responses in a group of 141 older adults: compromised immune systems and increased cellular inflammation.
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Plight of the Funny Female
The Atlantic: A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the year, she was startled by one comment in particular: “She’s not funny,” the student wrote. ... “Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it's worth it.
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Your Adult Siblings May Hold The Secret To A Long, Happy Life
NPR: Somehow we're squeezing 16 people into our apartment for Thanksgiving this year, with relatives ranging in age from my 30-year-old nephew to my 90-year-old mother. I love them all, but in a way the one I know best is the middle-aged man across the table whose blue eyes look just like mine: my younger brother Paul. Paul and I kind of irritated each other when we were kids; I would take bites out of his precisely made sandwiches in just the spot I knew he didn't want me to, and he would hang around the living room telling jokes when he knew I wanted to be alone with the boy on the couch. ... The very presence of siblings in the household can be an education.
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Self-Proclaimed Experts Often Claim To Know More Than They Really Do
Gizmodo: ifteen years ago, psychologists showed that the most incompetent people are the worst at recognizing their own incompetence, confirming what most of us already suspected. Now it turns out that even highly competent people may lay claim to more knowledge than they actually possess. In a set of studies published recently in Psychological Science, Stav Atir, Emily Rosenzweig and David Dunning showed that people who view themselves as experts in any given domain may actually be more susceptible to overclaiming how much they know about it — more so than non-experts, who are more willing to acknowledge that they know less. Read the whole story: Gizmodo
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What Your Baby’s Smile Can Tell You About Her Development
The Wall Street Journal: Once upon a time, babies’ first smiles would often be dismissed as “probably just gas.” Now, scientists know better. Starting nearly from birth, infants’ ethereal grins provide a window into their social and emotional development, researchers say. And the responses those enchanting and goofy expressions elicit can help program babies’ brains for a lifetime of social interactions. ... Developmental psychologists at Johnson State College, in Vermont, observed that 5-month-olds find an unusual sight, such as a book on a person’s head, extremely funny and will laugh even if no one else around them does.
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What Athletes See
The Atlantic: Consider two very different basketball players. The Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan, one of the strongest, quickest players in the NBA, nevertheless made only 39 percent of his free throws last year. Then there’s his teammate, Jamal Crawford—not as fast or as strong as Jordan, but he makes 90 percent of the shots he takes from the foul line, a rate that’s among the best in the league. ... Some evidence indicates that the quiet-eye technique stimulates the dorsal area of the brain, which regulates focused, goal-directed attention.
