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How Exercise And Other Activities Beat Back Dementia
NPR: The numbers are pretty grim: More than half of all 85-year-olds suffer some form of . But here's the good news: Brain researchers say there are ways to boost brain power and stave off problems in memory and thinking. In other words, brain decline is not necessarily an inevitable part of aging. "It's simply not pre-destined for all human beings," Bryan James tells Shots. He's an epidemiologist at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago. "Lots of people live into their 90s and even 100s with no symptoms of dementia." So what can you do to increase the odds?
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Lip Movements Affect Infants' Audiovisual Speech Perception H. Henny Yeung and Janet F. Werker Although research has suggested that audio-visual speech perception is linked to articulatory movements in adults, no studies have examined this link in infants. Infants performed an audiovisual matching procedure while making lip movements similar or different from those seen in the task. Infants' looking patterns were biased away from audiovisually matching faces when they made lip movements similar to those needed to produce the heard vowel.
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Professor works to change future of business ethics
Today: Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is taking on the “greed is good” mentality of some CEOs and business executives, hoping to shape the leaders of tomorrow by teaching them it’s possible to give and still get ahead. Gran'ts big idea is this, the cultural wisdom that says only the strong and self-interested survive in the dog eat dog world of business is demonstrably wrong. Read the whole story: Today
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For Obesity, the Future Is Now
The Huffington Post: Obesity is largely a failure of self-control. I know it's possible to quibble about calories and carbs and dietary fat, but fundamentally, obesity comes down to valuing fattening foods today, in this moment, more than we value a healthy future. We know, rationally, that we should forego the French fries and brownies for some greater payoff down the line, but the moment's temptations make it hard to keep our eyes on that future reward. We do have the cognitive ability to project days or weeks or even years into the future, but we don't do it when we're making food choices in the here and now. What if we could trick ourselves into keeping our heads in the future?
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Unconscious Choices Can Sabotage Health Goals
Scientific American Mind: Plans for working out and eating well often go awry, and the reasons for those lapses are not always obvious. Three new papers highlight unconscious influences that affect our choices. In several related studies published last fall in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany investigated the link between health behaviors and the belief in mind-body dualism—the concept that mind and body are two separate entities. Participants who were primed to embrace dualism made less healthy choices than participants encouraged to think of the mind and body as interrelated.
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Risk Factor for Depression Can Be ‘Contagious’
A new study with college roommates shows that a particular style of thinking that makes people vulnerable to depression can actually "rub off" on others, increasing their symptoms of depression six months later. The research, from psychological scientists Gerald Haeffel and Jennifer Hames of the University of Notre Dame, is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Studies show that people who respond negatively to stressful life events, interpreting the events as the result of factors they can’t change and as a reflection of their own deficiency, are more vulnerable to depression.
