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Cognitive Earthquake: Who’s Really in Need?
The Huffington Post: In January 2000, an earthquake shook China's mountainous Yunnan province. It was a moderate earthquake and killed only seven, but it leveled more than 40,000 homes and injured thousands of residents. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 1.8 million were affected by the disaster, and in need of shelter, medical attention or other aid. The scientists have a theory, which is that we respond to deaths more decisively than we respond to other, undefined suffering -- even though it is obviously not the dead who need help. They set out to test this idea, and also to see if there might be a way to increase sensitivity to those left behind.
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Social Connections Drive the ‘Upward Spiral’ of Positive Emotions and Health
People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Bethany Kok of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences also found it is possible for a person to self-generate positive emotions in ways that make him or her physically healthier. “People tend to liken their emotions to the weather, viewing them as uncontrollable,” says Fredrickson.
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Bouncing Back May Be Tough, but So Are We
The Chronicle of Higher Education: In 2005 the National Science Foundation brought together some unlikely collaborators—ecologists and psychologists among them—to talk about resilience. It turns out they had a lot in common. For decades researchers in each field had been studying the ways in which external events and stresses could transform complex systems. Their conclusions were strikingly similar: Resilience is often the result of a period of stress and change. Just as ecosystems can absorb serious shock and transform into different, but stable versions of themselves, so can people. Resilience, it seems, is hard-wired into us. Read the whole story: The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Study: Babies Like Watching Puppets Who Are Different From Them Get Hurt
The Atlantic: People are not always good to each other. We do know that babies prefer faces similar to their own and are better at processing emotional cues and distinguishing between people of their own ethnicity. I'm not saying you're racist, babies, but it does seem like you could be cooler. Researchers at University of British Columbia, Temple University, University of Chicago, and Yale University led by Kiley Hamlin worked with 64 nine-month-olds and 64 fourteen-month-olds. They first established whether each baby preferred graham crackers or green beans.
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Memory, Aging, and Distraction
The Huffington Post: The population in the United States is aging. That has created a lot of anxiety about the cognitive effects of getting older. Lots of research suggests that older adults are worse than younger adults on a variety of different thinking tasks. They remember fewer words from lists they see. They are slower to respond in many situations. They have more trouble ignoring distracting information.
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Weight Gain May Change Personality
LiveScience: After gaining a significant amount of weight, people may grow more self-conscious about their choices, while at the same time being weaker in the face of temptation, a new study finds. Researchers already have an idea about how personality traits contribute to weight gain. For instance, people pleasers tend to eat more at parties, conscientious folk are more likely to have a regular exercise routine, and those with a Type A personality may be at increased risk for health problems like weight gain and heart disease. These are all averages, of course, and every person with a certain personality won't fall into the associated health group.
