-
Social Media Is Attention Alcohol
Last year, researchers at Instagram published disturbing findings from an internal study on the app’s effect on young women. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the authors wrote in a presentation obtained by The Wall Street Journal. “They often feel ‘addicted’ and know that what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.” This was not a new revelation. For years, Facebook, which owns Instagram, has investigated the app’s effects on its users, and it kept getting the same result.
-
Need a Quick Stress-Reliever? Try One of These Surprising Science-Based Strategies.
There is a saying in the Balkans, where I was born and raised, that loosely translates to: “There is nothing worse than finally seeing the light, only to be plunged again into darkness.” As a psychologist, I have observed my patients’ extraordinary levels of stress and anxiety start to ease, only to be replaced by anger, disappointment and despair as coronavirus cases have resurged and the promise of the pandemic’s end has become more elusive. The widespread return to in-person school and the uneven return to offices this fall are further contributing to the sense of being pushed to the limit.
-
Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral Sciences 2022-23 Fellowships
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University is now accepting applications for residential fellowships for the 2021–22 academic year. CASBS has hosted generations of scholars and researchers who are in residence for the academic year and welcomes applications from individuals at any career stage. It is particularly eager to receive applications from accomplished scholars and thinkers who engage with significant societal challenges, and the research methods that support them. Application Deadline: November 5, 2021 For more information, visit the CASBS website.
-
Making Eye Contact Signals a New Turn in a Conversation
What is found in a good conversation? It is certainly correct to say words—the more engagingly put, the better. But conversation also includes “eyes, smiles, the silences between the words,” as the Swedish author Annika Thor wrote. It is when those elements hum along together that we feel most deeply engaged with, and most connected to, our conversational partner, as if we are in sync with them. Like good conversationalists, neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have taken that idea and carried it to new places.
-
Ever Gotten Angry at Your Partner in a Dream and Woken Up Mad? You’re Not Alone.
It was not so much that My Lovely Wife got what’s called an undercut haircut — a style favored by “the youth” that features a partly shaved cranium — or that she dyed the resultant stubble on the right half of her head purple. It’s that she didn’t tell me about it beforehand, leaving me to discover her rather alarming new do at a barbecue we were attending. As hamburgers sizzled on the grill, Ruth tilted her head to the side and the long hair she’d brushed over her undercut fell away, revealing that periwinkle fuzz. That this happened in a dream and not in real life did not lessen the shock.
-
Five Ways to Train Your Brain for Another Covid Season
So much for the big post-pandemic reopening we expected this fall. Instead, a season of caution and delay is here: Office-return plans have been postponed. Schools are back in session, but with worries of exposure to the more-contagious Delta variant. Meanwhile, divisions over masks and safety protocols are sharpening, and Covid-19 cases keep climbing. It’s a long way from earlier this summer, when the initial rollout of vaccines promised a return to worry-free social gatherings, travel and other elements of pre-virus life. If you are searching for new ways to steel yourself through this next phase of uncertainty, you’re not alone.
