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Belief That Mental Illness Can Be Contagious Contributes To Isolation
NPR: Many illnesses are contagious. You'd do well to avoid your neighbor's sneeze, for example, and to wash your hands after tending to your sick child. But what about mental illness? The idea that anxiety, autism or major depression could be transmitted through contact may sound crazy — and it probably is. There's a lot we don't know about the origins of mental illness, but the mechanisms identified so far point in other directions. Nonetheless, we do know that people's emotions can be affected by the emotions of those around them — a phenomenon known as "emotional contagion" — and that specific symptoms of mental disorders, such as binge eating, can sometimes spread among peers.
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That’s a Wrap. What Did I Miss?
The New York Times: Like most parents, I imagine, I keep a running list of things I’ve done well and things I’ve flubbed. Help our children get lots of sleep? Check. Play fun, stimulating games at dinner? Score. Have peaceful, stress-free mornings when everyone goes into the day uplifted and on time? Hardly. Produce handsome scrapbooks with carefully captioned memories? Not a one. (We do have a few boxes labeled “keepsakes.”) In all this second-guessing, there’s one area where I give myself unqualified high marks: photography. Having grown up surrounded by cameras, I take lots of pictures. But there’s another area where I’m a complete failure: video.
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Blame Your Parents for Your Crappy Math Skills
Pacific Standard: There's a seemingly constant stream of news about how bad Americans are at math, with much of the blame aimed at teachers and the sometimes confusing curricula they're supposed to teach. But, a new study suggests, parents' own anxieties about mathematics might have as much to do with kids' math abilities as teachers or the materials they're supposed to teach. "Although the classroom is usually viewed as the primary vehicle for advancing academic achievement, parents also play an important role in students’ academic success," writes a team of psychologists led by the University of Chicago's Erin Maloney.
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How Others See Our Identity Depends on Moral Traits, Not Memory
We may view our memory as being essential to who we are, but new findings suggest that others consider our moral traits to be the core component of our identity. Data collected from family members of patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease showed that it was changes in moral behavior, not memory loss, that caused loved ones to say that the patient wasn't “the same person” anymore. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Contrary to what you might think -- and what generations of philosophers and psychologists have assumed -- memory loss itself doesn't make someone seem like a different person.
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Would You Rather Lose Your Morals or Your Memory?
New Republic: When Nina Strohminger was a teenager, her grandmother had dementia. “Before she got sick, she was not a very nice person,” Strohminger said. “One of the first things that went when this disease was taking hold is she became really, really nice. I just remember her stopping me one day and saying ‘Nina, your skin is so beautiful,’ and I was like ‘what is happening?’” We spoke on the phone, both of us traveling—I paced outside of a Starbucks in Brooklyn while she packed her things to move from Durham, NC, where we both lived at the time, to New Haven, CT, where she’d be starting as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.
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Life’s Stories
The Atlantic: In Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis.“‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,'" he says. “‘What did you expect?’” a friend responds. “Howard ponders this. ‘I suppose—this sounds stupid, but I suppose I thought there’d be more of a narrative arc.’” But it's not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn't much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc.
