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Worrying About the Future, Ruminating on the Past—How Thoughts Affect Mental Health
The Wall Street Journal: Patrick Molloy has a great fear of offending people. At the end of each day, he replays every one of his conversations and interactions in his head, to figure out if he needs to apologize to anyone. The 44-year-old graphic designer says it’s nearly impossible to turn these swirling thoughts off. “It feels like an unwelcome guest in my mind,” says Mr. Molloy, who lives in West Sussex in the U.K. “It’s wearying and it’s discouraging.” ... Rumination has been found to predict both the onset of depression as well as the continuation of it in a number of studies.
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Will Doctors Soon Be Prescribing Video Games For Mental Health?
NPR: Developers of a new video game for your brain say theirs is more than just another get-smarter-quick scheme. Akili, a Northern California startup, insists on taking the game through a full battery of clinical trials so it can get approval from the Food and Drug Administration — a process that will take lots of money and several years. So why would a game designer go to all that trouble when there's already a robust market of consumers ready to buy games that claim to make you smarter and improve your memory? ... "That's absurd," says psychology professor Randall Engle from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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It Pays to Give Thanks at the Office
The Wall Street Journal: Earlier this summer, Google’s Larry Page got the highest approval ratings of any chief executive on the job review site Glassdoor.com. His likable, low-key style accounts for much of his popularity—but so does his willingness to express gratitude to the people who work for him. The company’s own “Reasons to Work at Google” reflect his way of doing things, declaring: “We love our employees and we want them to know it” and “Appreciation is the best motivation.” ... Adam Grant, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, divides people into three categories—givers, takers, and matchers.
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Read—Don’t Just Talk—to Your Kids
Pacific Standard: It's no big surprise that young children first learn language by listening to adults talk to them. Nor is it a surprise that reading aloud to kids is important to their success, both in school and work. What might be a bit more surprising: Picture books have, on average, around 70 percent more unique words than conversations directed at kids, according to a new study, suggesting that reading to kids could help improve their vocabularies.
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Parents’ Math Anxiety Can Undermine Children’s Math Achievement
If the thought of a math test makes you break out in a cold sweat, Mom or Dad may be partly to blame, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A team of researchers led by University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine found that children of math-anxious parents learned less math over the school year and were more likely to be math-anxious themselves—but only when these parents provided frequent help on the child’s math homework. Lead study author Erin A. Maloney is a postdoctoral scholar in psychology at UChicago. Gerardo Ramirez and Elizabeth A.
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Cold Offices Linked to Lower Productivity
Companies may want to turn up the thermostat. Blasting the air conditioning doesn’t just run up energy bills, it may also be running up costs in lost worker productivity. In a small field study from 2004, Cornell University psychological scientist Alan Hedge determined that workers are more efficient when they’re warm. Hedge and colleagues carefully tracked the productivity of nine women working at an insurance office in Orlando, Florida. Their workstations were equipped with air samplers that recorded the temperature every 15 minutes. Productivity was tracked by software that measured their typing speed and errors for 20 consecutive days.
