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America needs a Chief Friendship Officer
America is suffering from a lack of friendship. The average American hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s American Perspectives Survey from May 2021, Americans report having fewer friendships than in the past three decades. Nearly one in five Americans has no close social connections, a double digit increase from 2013. Fifteen percent of men have no close friendships at all, a fivefold increase since 1990. Loneliness and isolation are far more common experiences for people with few close friendships.
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Lila Gleitman, Who Showed How Children Learn Language, Dies at 91
Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and cognitive science expanded our understanding of how language works and how children go about learning it, died on Aug. 8 at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 91. Her daughter Claire Gleitman said the cause was a heart attack. Until the 1970s, most linguists believed that the structure of language existed out in the world, and that the human brain then learned it from infancy. Building on the work of her friend Noam Chomsky, Dr. Gleitman argued the opposite: that the structures, or syntax, of language were hard-wired into the brain from birth, and that children already had a sophisticated grasp of how they work.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on an intervention for trauma recovery for refugees, attention regulation in schizophrenia, social anxiety disorder and childhood maltreatment, smoking and psychopathology, substance use and sexual-minority status, food expectations and fast-food intake, repetitive negative thinking and affect and depressive symptoms, polytraumatization and psychopathology, and suicide ideation.
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Channel All That Rage Into Your Workout
When I was in high school, I was not particularly athletic. I sat the bench on the junior varsity baseball team and quit freshman basketball after two weeks. And yet, I still wanted to find a sport that was right for me, so I got into rock climbing. I wasn’t good at that either, but I loved the feeling it gave me. Climbing seemed to center me. On Friday I’d be a distracted mess of hormones and teen angst. On Sunday, I would dangle 80 feet off the ground, scared out of my gourd, and by Monday schoolwork just seemed easier. How did something so terrifying make the world feel less chaotic and stressful?
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The Opposite of Toxic Positivity
Countless books have been written on the “power of gratitude” and the importance of counting your blessings, but that sentiment may feel like cold comfort during the coronavirus pandemic, when blessings have often seemed scant. Refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health. This “toxic positivity” is ultimately a denial of reality. Telling someone to “stay positive” in the middle of a global crisis is missing out on an opportunity for growth, not to mention likely to backfire and only make them feel worse.
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Returning to the Office Will Be Hard. Here’s How Managers Can Make It Easier.
Many leaders are contemplating a full or partial return to the office post-pandemic. As they consider this, they tend to think of employees in two opposite groups: those who are eager to return and those who are opposed. However, it’s important to recognize that some of the people who want to return to a shared workspace may nonetheless feel discomfort, some significantly so. Even after the acute danger of a crisis has passed, stress-related behaviors — whether the result of specific health concerns or the spillover of challenging family or economic situations — don’t magically disappear.
