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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
The New York Times: Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School — which is odd, because he’s the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx.
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SpongeBob impairs little kids’ thinking, study finds
Los Angeles Times: Watching just a short bit of the wildly popular kids TV show "SpongeBob SquarePants" has been known to give many parents headaches. Psychologists have now found that a brief exposure to SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and the rest of the crew also appears to dampen preschoolers' brain power. Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson, both of the University of Virginia's department of psychology, wanted to see whether watching fast-paced television had an immediate influence on kids' executive function -- skills including attention, working memory, problem solving and delay of gratification that are associated with success in school.
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Hardcore gamer kids tend to have low opinions of parents: Study
The Vancouver Sun: If your kids play a lot of video games, does it say something about you as a parent? It might, according to the results of a study that assessed correlations between how much time pre- and early-teen youths spend playing video games and the opinions they hold of their parents. The study, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University and involving more than 500 middle-school students, found that those who played more video games were more likely to hold negative views of their parents. Some of the perceptions heavy video-game players tended to have of their parents were that they nagged a lot or did not provide adequate supervision.
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How to Improve Your Life with Story Editing
Scientific American: People can change — but how? This is the central concern of “Redirect,” a new book by Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson offers a tour of recent scientific work on psychological change, with a focus on techniques that help a person who is struggling — bad behavior, bad grades, bad attitudes — find a new, better path. Again and again, Wilson asks: What actually works? The answers can be surprising. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. COOK: A central concept in your book is “story editing.” Can you please explain what you mean by this?
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Rebooting Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy has come a long way since the days of Freudian psychoanalysis – today, rigorous scientific studies are providing evidence for the kinds of psychotherapies that effectively treat various psychiatric disorders. But Alan Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University, believes that we must acknowledge a basic truth – all of our progress and development in evidence-based psychotherapy has failed to solve the rather serious problem of mental illness in the United States.
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Ciò che vediamo non sempre rispecchia la realtà
La Stampa: “Se non vedo non ci credo”… Oppure: “credo solo ai miei occhi”… e via discorrendo, i modi di dire sono tanti mentre la realtà dovrebbe essere una sola, per tutti. Invece, pare non sia così e le cose su cui puntiamo non solo il nostro sguardo, ma anche la mente, possono assumere connotati diversi, passando così da una realtà oggettiva a una soggettiva. Ecco quanto affermato da un nuovo studio dell’Università di Yale (Usa) i cui risultati saranno pubblicati su Psychological Science, una rivista dell’Association for Psychological Science.
