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Want to Live a Long Life? Start Prioritizing Your Friends
Your social network may influence your health as much as your exercise routine. ... To get a measure of the social health boost's overall importance, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, compiled the findings of 148 studies. Together they covered 300,000 participants and had looked at the benefits of social integration and the hazard of social disconnection. She then compared the effects of loneliness with the risks of various other lifestyle factors, including smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise and physical activity, body mass index (a measure of obesity), air pollution and taking medication to control blood pressure.
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Why Do People Mix Up Names?
President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Russia’s President Putin. Donald Trump named Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi. And getting some comedic mileage out of such flubs, the writers of “Friends” had Ross call his bride-to-be Rachel. Her name was Emily. ... The brain remembers information by linking new bits of data with existing information of similar meaning or context. That makes proper nouns, which are arbitrary “nonsense words,” harder to learn, said Neil Mulligan, a cognitive psychologist who studies memory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Though it occurs nearly instantaneously, recalling a name is a multistep endeavor.
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Practicing Gratitude Could Help You Live Longer
Appreciating the little things in life can leave a lasting impact on your health. ... “It’s not completely surprising to me, just given what we know on the health benefits of positive emotions more generally, that a person’s disposition for gratitude might actually even lengthen their life,” said Dr. Philip Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University and author of the book “Gratitude and the Good Life: Toward a Psychology of Appreciation.” Research has found that gratitude benefits individuals’ happiness and flourishing, added Watkins, who was not involved with the new study.
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Newcombe Awarded Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science
APS William James Fellow Nora S. Newcombe, a distinguished researcher at Temple University and Editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, is the recipient of the 25th David E. Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science from the Cognitive Science Society.
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Confidence Is Key to Well-being. Here Are 5 Ways to Boost Yours
Everyone has encountered them: people who always appear to know what they are doing. They gladly take control of a situation, express their opinions as if they were established facts or plunge into a project believing they are going to succeed — with or without the required experience. “Confidence — it is probably the most important resource in human well-being and human performance, I believe,” neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast Chasing Life. Robertson is a professor emeritus of psychology and the codirector of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and the T.
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Can Money Buy Happiness? 5 Tips to Turn Bucks Into Bliss
Can money buy happiness? It’s an age-old question with which many — including philosophers, economists and psychologists — have wrestled. ... “This notion that money cannot buy happiness is just, like, patently false,” social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn recently told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his podcast Chasing Life. Dunn, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, conducts research that focuses, in part, on getting the most enjoyment out of money.
