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The Science Behind Making Your Child Smarter
What parents wouldn’t want to give their children the ability to get good grades and excel at work? Those benefits are linked in research to a high IQ. Dozens of recent studies shed new light on the extent to which parents can—and cannot—help their children score higher on that popular and widely used measure of intelligence. The history of brain-training programs for small children is littered with failures. Remember marketers’ claims in the 1990s, later discredited, that playing Baby Einstein videos for infants in their cribs would make them smarter?
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The 5 Years That Changed Dating
On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times’ popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor wrote that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and, in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times. “Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they’d met through their friends or family, or in college,” wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in 2012.
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If You Feel Thankful, Write It Down. It’s Good For Your Health
Over this past year, lifestyle blogger Aileen Xu has kept a monthly gratitude list. Sometimes it was the big stuff: "I'm grateful that my family is so understanding. I'm grateful so many people care." And sometimes it was life's little blessings: "July 2018: I'm grateful for good hair after I shower." Xu started making such lists when she was in college, "at a point when I was just not in a very good place in my life." Now, the 28-year-old lifestyle blogger and YouTuber recommends the practice to her nearly 750,000 subscribers. It wasn't a hard sell.
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The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness
In 1909 five men converged on Clark University in Massachusetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the head of this little troupe was psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Ten years earlier Freud had introduced a new treatment for what was called “hysteria” in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This work also introduced a scandalous view of the human psyche: underneath the surface of consciousness roils a largely inaccessible cauldron of deeply rooted drives, especially of sexual energy (the libido). These drives, held in check by socially inculcated morality, vent themselves in slips of the tongue, dreams and neuroses. The slips in turn provide evidence of the unconscious mind.
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The Pacific Standard Guide to Gift Giving
If you clicked on the headline to this story, one thing is obvious: You really saved your Christmas shopping until the last minute. That said, here are a few well-researched tips that might come in handy as you start swiping that credit card: --- Don't Feel Too Bad If You Need to Re-Gift You might be deterred from re-gifting for fear that the original giver will find out about your slothful Christmas strategy. But fortunately, those original gift-givers seem to be OK with their present turning into someone else's freebie. A 2012 article in Psychological Science found that the people most bothered by the re-gifting process were actually the guilt-ridden re-gifters, not the original givers.
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Shake It Off; Dr. Maria Kovacs on Mood and Depression
Shake it Off Have you ever had a bad mood you just couldn’t shake? Everyone feels grouchy or irritable some days. But a bad mood or major mood swings that go on too long may signal a bigger problem. The good news is that certain healthy habits can help you boost your mood. “Some people are more moody than other people. Normal mood actually varies from person to person,” explains Dr. Carlos Zarate, chief of NIH’s mood disorders group. That’s because we all have different “temperaments,” or combinations of personality traits that are biologically based. These are fairly stable over time. “Considerable research shows that people really differ in their basic temperament,” says Dr.
