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Is a Wandering Mind a Sign of Aging?
AARP: There’s a new study that suggests that if your mind frequently wanders or gets distracted — hey, are you paying attention? — it means your cells are aging too quickly. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, wanted to test whether being able to focus on the here and now predicts better health and longevity. To measure longevity, they looked at telomeres, the little caps at the ends of a cell’s chromosomes that are considered a biomarker for how fast our bodies are aging. Telomeres shorten with age and also in response to stress and depression.
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Research Explores How Children Reason, Think About Others
Two new studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the development of reasoning and perspective-taking in children. How to Pass the False-Belief Task Before Your Fourth Birthday As social creatures, humans must constantly monitor each other's intentions, beliefs, desires, and other mental states.
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Think yourself well
The Economist: The link between mind and body is terrain into which many medical researchers, fearing ridicule, dare not tread. But perhaps more should do so. For centuries, doctors have recognized the placebo effect, in which the illusion of treatment, such as pills without an active ingredient, produces real medical benefits. More recently, respectable research has demonstrated that those who frequently experience positive emotions live longer and healthier lives. They have fewer heart attacks, for example, and fewer colds too. Why this happens, though, is only slowly becoming understood.
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When They’re Grown, the Real Pain Begins
The New York Times: When I was 24 years old, I brought my firstborn son, 3-week-old Jacob, to my childhood home on the Eastern End of Long Island to meet his grandparents. When I arrived, an old family friend and neighbor, Cora Stevens, happened to be sitting in my parents’ kitchen. Cora, a mother to five grown children and grandmother to seven, grabbed tiny Jake, put her face right up to his and started speaking loud baby talk to him. Then, as she bounced him on her knee, she turned to me and said, “When they’re little they sit on your lap; when they’re big they sit on your heart.” Oh, how right she was.
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Read My Hips
Science: On the reality television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the lucky recipient gets a first look at his newly renovated home. For a split second, his face contorts with—shock? Joy? During intense emotional experiences, there's a fleeting moment when expressions of pleasure and pain are hard to distinguish. In fact, others read intense emotion more effectively by looking at a person's body language than by watching his facial expressions, a new study suggests. Most studies of facial cues rely on a set of stylized, recognizable expressions—perhaps made by actors in photographs.
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Asperger’s gone, dyslexia stays in first change to psychiatric manual in almost 20 years
The Washington Post: The now familiar term “Asperger’s disorder” is being dropped. And abnormally bad and frequent temper tantrums will be given a scientific-sounding diagnosis called DMDD. But “dyslexia” and other learning disorders remain. The revisions come in the first major rewrite in nearly 20 years of the diagnostic guide used by the nation’s psychiatrists. Changes were approved Saturday. Full details of all the revisions will come next May when the American Psychiatric Association’s new diagnostic manual is published, but the impact will be huge, affecting millions of children and adults worldwide.
