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Working Out at the (Implicit) Fitness Center
The Huffington Post: It's fair to say that the filmmaker Alexander Payne takes a grim view of aging in America. In last year's darkly comedic road film Nebraska, the highly praised Bruce Dern plays the alcoholic and incompetent Woody Grant, who suffers under the delusion he has won a million-dollar sweepstakes prize. And Payne's earlier About Schmidt is unrivaled as the most depressing cinematic depiction of retirement ever. Jack Nicholson plays the title character with sympathy, but there's no getting around his pathetic and lonely existence. Both Grant and Schmidt are models of decrepitude as well. They embody our worst fears about the elderly body's inevitable deterioration.
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Lean On: Workers, Work and the Spouses Who Help Us Succeed
Sheryl Sandberg had a good year last year. She was named chief operating officer of Facebook, and also published the bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which has sold more than a million copies and has sparked a movement among professional women. She is a perennial on Forbes’ list of most powerful women in business. Lean In is aimed primarily at women who aspire to leadership roles in the competitive world of business, but Sandberg makes it clear she is also talking to men who want to live in a more equitable world.
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Littering and Following the Crowd
The Atlantic: Loretta Brown walked along Bishop’s Beach near Homer, Alaska, looking for plastic bottles, Styrofoam cups, beer cans, cigarette butts, and old fishing nets. “You tend to find things among the driftwood, since the same tide that washes up the driftwood washes up the trash,” she said, stooping to pick up a plastic water bottle. “It’s kind of like an Easter egg hunt.” Brown is a marine debris education and outreach specialist with the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, a nonprofit organization based in Homer that educates the public about coastal issues and offers eco-tours of the region. She also has a keen, experienced eye for litter.
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New Research From <em>Clinical Psychological Science</em>
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Madeline Lee Pe, Katharina Kircanski, Renee J. Thompson, Laura F. Bringmann, Francis Tuerlinckx, Merijn Mestdagh, Jutta Mata, Susanne M. Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides, Peter Kuppens, and Ian H. Gotlib In this study, the authors used a network approach to examine whether people with major depressive disorder (MDD) have a denser, and thus less flexible, emotion network -- something that is thought to be associated with psychopathology.
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The Dilemma of the Depressed Mother-to-Be
The Atlantic: Another potentially deadly outcome is persistent newborn pulmonary hypertension (PPHN), a condition that occurs when a newborn’s cardiac system fails to transition normally after birth. Numerous studies have shown that SSRI use late in pregnancy increases the risk of PPHN, some by as much as fivefold. In 2006, the FDA issued a public health advisory based on a study that found six times the risk of PPHN, but then five years later issued a retraction of sorts after subsequent studies did not find an elevated risk. Even in the face of such muddy conclusions, to me the choice initially seemed obvious: Stop taking the meds and tough it out for the sake of the child.
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Bicyclists Beware: The Psychology of Car-Bike Crash Risks
With bike-sharing programs in more than 500 cities worldwide accounting for a combined fleet of over 500,000 bicycles, cars are increasingly sharing urban streets with bicycles. When crashes between bikes and cars occur they are often particularly dangerous for the cyclist. In 2012 alone, 722 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles-- a 6 percent increase from 2011, according to US government statistics. To better understand the cause of crashes between cars and bikes, psychological scientists Nadine Chaurand and Patricia Delhomme of The French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport looked at differences in how cyclists and drivers perceive traffic risks.
