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Tricks From the Elderly to Stop Worrying
The Wall Street Journal: Recent research into how emotions change with age may be able to help people lead healthier and longer lives and bring about new treatments for depression in the elderly. Like people's bodies, emotions change over time. Older people for the most part have far fewer negative feelings, such as worry and stress, than do younger people, studies show. The elderly learn to disentangle themselves from feelings of negativity and seem to focus more on present situations that bring pleasure, rather than on the future, researchers say. They also tend to process negative information less deeply than positive information.
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‘Helicopter Parenting’ Discourages Kids
"Helicopter parent" is a 21st century term for parents that “hover” over their children, monitoring and micromanaging their every move. Although parents may find this hard to do, research shows that giving kids space may better motivate them. According to APS Fellow Carol Dweck, a psychological scientist at Stanford University who researches motivation and development, helicopter parenting is more likely to hold kids back. “We’ve studied parents over-praising and we are studying parents overdoing. It makes the child feel they can’t do anything without the parent.” The bottom line, she says, is that less parenting may help kids more in the long run.
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Flu Psychology: Who Risks What for Whom?
The Huffington Post: My local pharmacy is offering flu shots. A window sign grabbed my attention the other day, because it was a sweltering, muggy day, and it seemed way too early to think about winter flu bugs. But a little digging proved me wrong on this. Apparently the vaccine takes a couple of weeks to kick in, and seasonal flu bugs can arrive as early as October. So I did the arithmetic, and I'm lining up to get poked. I've gotten flu shots for years, though I'm not in any high-risk group. It just seems prudent to me. And the fact is, public health officials count on people who are at low or moderate risk to get inoculated anyway.
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Study of Judges Finds Evidence From Brain Scans Led to Lighter Sentences
The New York Times: Judges who learned that a convicted assailant was genetically predisposed to violence imposed lighter sentences in a hypothetical case than they otherwise would have, researchers reported on Thursday, in the most rigorous study to date of how behavioral biology can sway judicial decisions. The findings, published in the journal Science, are likely to accelerate the use of brain science in legal proceedings, experts said, and to intensify a long-running debate about its relevance. Courts have increasingly admitted such evidence — brain scans, mostly, as well as genetic analyses — though many experts say the science is still too primitive to inform legal decisions.
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Spacing out for a bit can boost your memory
msnbc: Next time you zone out when your girlfriend is talking to you, just tell her you wanted to remember what she was saying longer. Wakeful resting--or zoning out--after learning something new can boost your memory, according to a study published in Psychological Science. In the study, researchers told two short stories to 33 people. After one story, the participants sat in a room with their eyes closed. After the second story, they played a computer game. Seven days later, the people who zoned out were able to recall more of the story details. After learning something new, your brain automatically replays the information to form a new memory.
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Does Wisdom Really Come with Age? It Depends on the Culture
“Wisdom comes with winters,” Oscar Wilde once said. And it’s certainly comforting to think that aging benefits the mind, if not the body. But do we really get wiser as time passes? There are many way to define what exactly wisdom is, but previous literature suggests that having wisdom means that you are also good at resolving conflict. But conflict is not handled the same way across cultures. Americans have been shown to emphasize individuality and solve conflict in a direct manner, such as by using direct persuasion.
