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Your Pandemic Baby’s Coming Out Party
... Even grandparents, aunts or uncles in the same country as babies born during Covid-19 have been kept away by travel restrictions and other precautions. Darby Saxbe, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, said her lab started following 760 expectant parents in the spring of 2020 to study their mental health, social connection and other factors. In open-ended survey responses, many participants reported that they hadn’t been able to see extended family. The first pandemic babies are becoming toddlers this spring, which means entire infancies have passed while children and their parents were isolated from their loved ones.
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Pandemic Got You Down? Psychologists Suggest Time Travel — Sort of.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could peek into the future to reassure ourselves? That’s not actually possible, but there is a psychological technique for regulating emotions that employs this idea. It’s called “temporal distancing,” and you can think of it as mental time travel. If the concept sounds familiar, it’s a bit like reminding yourself of the ancient adage “this, too, shall pass.” I consulted three experts about how to do it and why it works. Trapped in the moment Right now, you may find many things upsetting: You might be Zoomed out, missing your friends or mourning lost loved ones.
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Students Who Gesture During Learning ‘Grasp’ Concepts Better
When we talk, we naturally gesture—we open our palms, we point, we chop the air for emphasis. Such movement may be more than superfluous hand flapping. It helps communicate ideas to listeners and even appears to help speakers think and learn. A growing field of psychological research is exploring the potential of having students or teachers gesture as pupils learn. Studies have shown that people remember material better when they make spontaneous gestures, watch a teacher’s movements or use their hands and arms to imitate the instructor. More recent work suggests that telling learners to move in specific ways can help them learn—even when they are unaware of why they are making the motions.
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The Many Minds of the Octopus
Cephalopods are having a moment. An octopus stars in a documentary nominated for an Academy Award (“My Octopus Teacher”). Octos, as scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey Smith calls them, also play a leading role in his marvelous new book “Metazoa,” alongside a supporting cast of corals, sponges, sharks and crabs. (I like Mr. Godfrey-Smith’s plural, which avoids the tiresome debate over Latin and Greek endings). Part of the allure of the octos is that they are both very smart, probably the smartest of invertebrates, and extremely weird. The intelligence and weirdness may be connected and can perhaps teach us something about those other intelligent, weird animals we call homo sapiens. ...
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There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing
At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends. It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness.
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The Replication Crisis Devastated Psychology. This Group is Looking To Rebuild it.
The 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse left Chris Chartier feeling, well, a little jealous. Chartier, like so many Americans, was awed by the whole country coming together to celebrate a force of nature. Chartier is a psychologist, and he also started to think of how precise the eclipse forecast was. Astronomers knew, down to the second, when the moon would cross the path of the sun; where, precisely, its shadow would land; and for how many seconds the sun would appear to be blocked out for those on the ground. Chartier’s field — social psychology — just doesn’t have that type of accuracy. “Things are really messy,” says Chartier, who’s an associate professor at Ashland University in Ohio.
