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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.
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How Terror Hijacks the Brain
TIME: Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky. “When people are terrorized, the smartest parts of our brain tend to shut down,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy. (Disclosure: he and I have written books together). ... Every loud sound suddenly becomes a potential threat, for example, and even mundane circumstances such as a person who avoids eye contact can take on suspicious and ominous meaning and elicit an extreme, alert-ready response. Such informational triage can be essential to surviving traumatic experience, of course.
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Feeling Powerful Will Make You Smarter
Business Insider: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us—isn't that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. ... A sense of power "has dramatic effects on thought and behavior," writes Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, in 2011 article in the journal Psychological Science.
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Anxiety is normal, but PTSD may simmer in children who’ve seen Boston Marathon bombing
CBS: The graphic nature of the attack at the Boston Marathon can be difficult for many to process, and that includes young people. Whether or not they were physically there at the bombing, children can be profoundly affected by what they hear and see. It can be normal to notice some anxiety and fear after an event like the marathon bombing, Dr. Alan Hilfer, director of psychology at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, explained to CBSNews.com.The most important thing is that someone will be there for them -- because they'll be turning to the adults in their life and their peer for answers and support. ...
