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Ask Me First: What Self-Assessments Can Tell Us about Autism
Just moments earlier, the teenager had been laughing so hard he was in tears. He had spent the day doing improv and other drama-based activities—part of a six-week summer camp in Boston designed to help children with autism build social skills. But when his mother showed up and asked about his day, the boy clammed up. “Do you mean you just sat in a corner and stared at the wall all day?” psychologist Matthew Lerner asked him. It was the summer of 2006 and Lerner had launched the program with a colleague two years earlier. He had witnessed the boy’s giggle fit and hoped to prompt more of a response. “Yes,” the boy replied.
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Change Your Mind-Set, Reduce Your Chronic Pain
Humans, like other animals, are born with an instinctive motivation to escape pain. Think about the last time you touched something painfully hot and how quickly you pulled away from it. Your quick and automatic action is the result of hardwired biology meant to preserve your health and survival. When it comes to ongoing, severe pain that comes from within your own body—migraine or back pain, for example—escape isn’t so easy. About 100 million Americans experience this kind of chronic agony, making it more prevalent than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined—and it has a significant impact on their lives.
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Yale’s beloved happiness class is now on the internet for free
Happiness, they say, is infectious. Perhaps that is why the most popular course ever to be taught at Yale University—this semester enrolling 1,200 students, or a quarter of the undergraduate student body—is one titled “Psychology and the Good Life.” PSYC 157, or “Laurie Santos’ happiness class” as it is affectionately known on Yale’s campus, teaches practical advice such as how to pick a meaningful career and how to separate satisfying pursuits from hollow ones.
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Even minor stress can impact long-term health, study warns
That exposure to stress is a risk factor for many health problems, such as cardiovascular issues, anxiety and depression, and chronic pain, is a familiar idea. Yet we may think that it's only certain kinds of major stressors — such as getting fired, going through a breakup, or undergoing surgery — that significantly impact our lives. But, recent research explains that even small stressors can harm our long-term health if we hold on to how they make us feel. For example, a misunderstanding with a friend today might lead to health issues later in life if we let this stress factor carry over into the next day.
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The Myth of ‘Learning Styles’
In the early ‘90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently? --- In other words, “there’s evidence that people do try to treat tasks in accordance with what they believe to be their learning style, but it doesn’t help them,” says Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.
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The person who’s best at lying to you is you
In 2008, the psychiatrist Stephen Greenspan published The Annals of Gullibility, a summary of his decades of research into how to avoid being gullible. Two days later, he discovered his financial advisor Bernie Madoff was a fraud, who had caused Greenspan to lose a third of his retirement savings. This anecdote, from a presentation by University of Michigan social psychologist David Dunning, due to be presented at the 20th Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology in Visegrád, Hungary in July, highlights an unfortunate but inescapable truth: We are always most gullible to ourselves.
