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Therapist-free therapy
The Economist: THE treatment, in the early 1880s, of an Austrian hysteric called Anna O is generally regarded as the beginning of talking-it-through as a form of therapy. But psychoanalysis, as this version of talk therapy became known, is an expensive procedure. Anna’s doctor, Josef Breuer, is estimated to have spent over 1,000 hours with her. Since then, things have improved. A typical course of a modern talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, consists of 12-16 hour-long sessions and is a reasonably efficient way of treating conditions like depression and anxiety (hysteria is no longer a recognised diagnosis). Medication, too, can bring rapid change.
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Secret to a happy marriage? Delusion.
The Boston Globe: We’ve all seen those mismatched couples — where the husband is 10 times better looking than the wife. Or where she’s an absolute sweetheart, and he’s a total jerk. What does she see in him?, we think. What does he see in her? If the couple is happily married, it could be that the better half of the couple has an idealistic vision of the lesser half. New research published in Psychological Science oddly enough finds that people who were, well, a bit delusional about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than those see-it-like-it-is realists. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Born-Again Feminism
Newsweek: Among life’s surreal experiences, few can compare with finding myself seated on a baroque bench, one of dozens lining the perimeter of an ornate drawing room in the palace of Sheikha Fatima Bint Mubarak in Abu Dhabi, chatting it up with three Ph.D.-endowed women sheathed in black abayas, sipping sweet hot tea and eating candies. “I think you Americans do not enjoy being women as much as we do,” said one, peering into my face with an earnestness one usually associates with grim news delivered to next of kin. Say what? Read the whole story: Newsweek
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Science Learning Easier When Students Put Down Textbooks
The Epoch Times: Put down those science textbooks and work at recalling information from memory. That’s the shorthand take-away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. Read the whole story: The Epoch Times
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New Research From Psychological Science
Controlling the Unconscious: Attentional Task Sets Modulate Subliminal Semantic and Visuomotor Processes Differentially Ulla Martens, Ulrich Ansorge, and Markus Kiefer Unconscious processing can be affected by how a person's attention is focused. Researchers gave volunteers a semantic induction task (i.e., classifying an object as living or nonliving) or a perceptual induction task (i.e., classifying an object as round or elongated) to engage their attention in different ways.
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Why Having Kids Is Foolish
TIME: All parents know that having kids is a blessing — except when it's a nightmare of screaming fits, diapers, runny noses, wars over bedtimes and homework and clothes. To say nothing of bills too numerous to list. Economists have argued in the past that having kids is an economically silly investment; after all, it's cheaper to hire end-of-life care than to raise a child. Now comes new research showing that having kids is not only financially foolish but that kids literally make parents delusional. Researchers have known for some time that parents with minors who live at home report feeling calm significantly less often than than people who don't live with young children.
