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Health and Marriage: The Cortisol Connection
The Huffington Post: Bad marriages can be sickening. Most people don't have to be convinced of this, but for those who do, several decades of studies offer plenty of proof. Even so, very little is known about exactly how marriage quality affects health. Do strife and rudeness and neglect--and all the other signs of marital unhappiness--somehow get under the skin and trigger physical ailments? Or do warmth and trust and understanding and appreciation follow some biological pathway to wellness? Or both? Relationship experts have been focusing recently on marital partners' beliefs about their marriage--specifically a partner's belief that the other partner understands and cares for him or her.
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Aggressive Boys Tend to Develop Into Physically Stronger Teens
Boys who show aggressive tendencies develop greater physical strength as teenagers than boys who are not aggressive, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “This work was motivated by a long-standing controversy over the relationship between physical development and personality,” says psychological scientist Joshua Isen of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Greater Maternal Insensitivity in Childhood Predicts Greater Electrodermal Reactivity During Conflict Discussions With Romantic Partners in Adulthood Lee Raby, Glenn I. Roisman, Jeffry A. Simpson, W. A. Collins, and Ryan D. Steele How do our early interpersonal experiences shape the way we react to relationships in adulthood? Participants' childhood interactions with their mothers were assessed for maternal sensitivity.
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How Children Learn To Read
The New Yorker: Why is it easy for some people to learn to read, and difficult for others? It’s a tough question with a long history. We know that it’s not just about raw intelligence, nor is it wholly about repetition and dogged persistence. We also know that there are some conditions that, effort aside, can hold a child back. Socioeconomic status, for instance, has been reliably linked to reading achievement. And, regardless of background, children with lower general verbal ability and those who have difficulty with phonetic processing seem to struggle. But what underlies those differences?
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Positive thinking isn’t all-powerful. Penalty for failure may help more in reaching goals.
The Washington Post: It’s that time of year when New Year’s resolutions begin to fade, and even the best-laid plans can become sidetracked as life gets busy. But as psychologists and behavioral economists have found reasons why it’s so easy to let good intentions slide, they’ve also come up with tools to help. As counterintuitive as it may sound, many resolutions fail due to positive thinking, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University. Her research has shown that optimistic thinking can actually hamper your drive to succeed. ... “We found that positive dreams and fantasies are not only not helpful, but they might actually hurt,” Oettingen says.
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Brains Make Decisions the Way Alan Turing Cracked Codes
Smithsonian Magazine: Despite the events depicted in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing did not invent the machine that cracked Germany’s codes during World War II—Poland did. But the brilliant mathematician did invent something never mentioned in the film: a mathematical tool for judging the reliability of information. His tool sped up the work of deciphering encoded messages using improved versions of the Polish machines. Now researchers studying rhesus monkeys have found that the brain also uses this mathematical tool, not for decoding messages, but for piecing together unreliable evidence to make simple decisions.
