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Mindfulness meditation is huge, but science isn’t sure how, or whether, it works
Meditation: It’s celebrated as a therapeutic tool to help ease stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and chronic pain. It’s come into vogue as a way to enhance human performance, finding its way into classrooms, businesses, locker rooms and smartphones through apps such as Headspace and Calm. Various forms of meditation are now routinely offered to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. In particular, mindfulness meditation, which focuses one’s attention on the present moment, is wildly popular and has ballooned into a billion-dollar business, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
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Crash Risks May Spike Immediately After a Near Miss
The short period of time after narrowly averting a vehicular accident is a vulnerable one for drivers, especially in city driving.
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People Use Emotion to Persuade, Even When It Could Backfire
People tend toward appeals that aren’t simply more positive or negative but are infused with emotionality, even when they’re trying to sway an audience that may not be receptive to such language.
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What It’s Like To Watch #MeToo When It Is You, Too
On average, more than 300,000 Americans experience rape or sexual assault each year. When the #MeToo movement makes headlines, those survivors are reading. How is that affecting people who have experienced sexual violence, to see stories similar to their own blasted across media outlets every day? Experts aren’t sure, but they’re confident that it’s having some kind of impact. Case in point: In the last three months of 2017, calls to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network — a national crisis hotline for people who have experienced sexual trauma — increased by 23 percent compared with the same period in the previous year.
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John Cacioppo, Who Studied Effects of Loneliness, Is Dead at 66
She was a brain researcher and an authority on the scientific basis of love. He, too, was a neuroscientist, but with an expertise in loneliness. She was in her mid-30s, he in his late 50s. Both were wedded to careers in separate hemispheres — until they happened to be seated beside each other, serendipitously, at dinner on the last night of a neuroscience research symposium in Shanghai. Before going their separate ways, they left the restaurant together. A romantic full moon was rising over the East China Sea. He snapped a photograph. A few weeks later, she emailed him to request a copy (which she later admitted was just a pretext to resume their brief acquaintance).
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Judges and examiners get laxer with practice
Students are widely judged on their abilities before being allowed to enter top universities. Athletes are assessed on their physical prowess before being awarded medals. And academic papers, like those reported in this section, must run the gauntlet of peer review before being published. In making their determinations, evaluators study that which they are judging in a sequence, one student, athlete or paper after another, and apply standardised criteria. This approach is supposed to afford equal treatment to all.
