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Work less, do more, live better
Times of Higher Education: You may worry that with the myriad demands of your work, if you try to constrain your workweek, including research, to 40 hours or less, you’ll never get anything done. There’s a book for you. In How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (2007), psychologist Paul J. Silvia offers evidence-based advice about how to be productive as an academic writer without giving up on leisure time.
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Children May Be Losing Their Ability To Read Emotions, But There’s A Fix
The Huffington Post: Sure, your child can read emoticons. But a provocative new study suggests that all that screen time is making it hard for children to interpret real-life emotions. It shows that the more kids use digital media, the more their social skills decline. “Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues — losing the ability to understand the emotions of other people — is one of the costs" of heavy use of cell phones and computers, study co-author Dr. Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a written statement.
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Holding a Mirror to Their Natures
The New York Times: When twins have similar personalities, is it mainly because they share so much genetic material or because their physical resemblance makes other people treat them alike? Most researchers believe the former, but the proposition has been hard to prove. So Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist who directs the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, decided to test it — and enlisted an unlikely ally. He is François Brunelle, a photographer in Montreal who takes pictures of pairs of people who look alike but are not twins. Dr. Segal was sent to Mr. Brunelle’s website by a graduate student who knew of her research with twins.
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Labors Lost? Memories of Childbirth
I’m told, by women I trust, that childbirth is an experience unlike any other. These women have vivid and enduring memories of labor and birth, becoming a mother, giving life. They recall the event as profound and magical and life-changing—and also very painful. Nobody questions the physical intensity of labor and childbirth, but how do we know how painful the experience really is? Does recall—especially months and years later—accurately reflect the experienced pain? This is not just an academic question. Mothers’ lasting feelings about the experience of childbirth—good or bad—are closely tied to remembered pain.
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New Research From <em>Clinical Psychological Science</em>
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Najwa C. Culver, Bram Vervliet, and Michelle G. Craske Although exposure therapy has been shown to be effective for treating anxiety disorders, fear symptoms can sometimes return. In this study, the researchers tested whether compound-presentation extinction trials -- in which two fear-inducing stimuli are presented simultaneously -- are better than single-presentation extinction trials for reducing the likelihood of relapse. Participants completed a fear-conditioning procedure before undergoing an extinction procedure that used single- and compound-stimulus presentation or only single-stimulus presentation.
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Stigma as a Barrier to Mental Health Care
Despite the availability of effective evidence-based treatment, about 40% of individuals with serious mental illness do not receive care and many who begin an intervention fail to complete it.
