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When Patients Do Nothing: Illness and Inertia
One of the most daunting public health challenges is getting people to take care of themselves in the most basic ways. It’s not that people with cardiac risk don’t know about exercise and its heart benefits. Or that people with diabetes are unaware of insulin treatment. Or that the elderly don’t know about the flu and flu shots. It’s that they don’t take the first steps in helping themselves get and stay healthy, like seeing a physician and having a checkup and filling a prescription. In this sense, the biggest health risk for many is doing nothing, and the cost of this medical non-compliance could be as high as $100 billion a year in the US alone.
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Pig Out In The Winter Or When Money’s Tight? Blame Evolution
NPR: Has the recession made you fat? To the long and growing list of risk factors known to increase the risk of obesity, scientists recently added a new one: scarcity. People given subtle cues that they may have to confront harsh conditions in the near future choose to eat higher-calorie food than they might do otherwise, a response that researchers believe is shaped by the long hand of evolution.
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The psychology of the to-do list
BBC: If your daily schedule and email inbox are anything like mine, you’re often left a state of paralysis by the sheer bulk of outstanding tasks weighing on your mind. In this respect, David Allen's book Getting Things Done is a phenomenon. An international best-seller and a personal productivity system known merely as GTD, it’s been hailed as being a “new cult for the info age”. ... So what’s the psychology that backs this up? Roy Baumeister and EJ Masicampo at Florida State University were interested in an old phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, which is what psychologists call our mind's tendency to get fixated on unfinished tasks and forget those we’ve completed.
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Marriage Research: Happy Teenage Years Lead To Happier Marriages
The Huffington Post: A new study suggests that teens who get along well with their families are more likely to have successful future marriages. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science found that 7th graders who experienced more positive engagement with their families also showed more positive engagement in their marriages 17 years later. Their spouses also demonstrated more positive behavior, and both partners experienced more relationship satisfaction than those who experienced a more negative family environment as teens. The study did not specify whether or not the teenagers were raised with married or divorced parents. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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Happiness Increases with Age, Across Generations
Longitudinal research reveals that self-reported feelings of well-being tend to increase with age, but that a person’s overall level of well-being depends on when he or she was born.
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Budgets and Biases: Summing Up American Values
Our lawmakers may have averted the fiscal cliff on the first of the year, but the threat of sequestration still looms over the nation. If the Congress and the White House cannot agree on the particulars of deficit reduction by March, draconian across-the-board cuts will slash both national security spending and core domestic programs, ranging from education to public health to environmental protection. Every federal budget is, underneath those numbers, a set of values—many related to protecting Americans from harm. But the mandate to cut spending means choosing among those values and safeguards.
