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The Key To Raising Brilliant Kids? Play A Game
We all want to raise smart, successful kids, so it's tempting to play Mozart for our babies and run math drills for kindergartners. After all, we need to give them a head start while they're still little sponges, right? "It doesn't quite work that way," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children with Roberta Golinkoff. She's been studying childhood development for almost 40 years. So how does it work?
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Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say
Humility is a relative newcomer to social and personality psychology, at least as a trait or behavior to be studied on its own. It arrived as part of the effort, beginning in the 1990s, to build a “positive” psychology: a more complete understanding of sustaining qualities such as pride, forgiveness, grit and contentment. More recently, humility has found a foothold in the most widely used measure of personality traits, the five- factor questionnaire. The wallflower is attracting some attention, and so far appears to be absorbing it well. ... In their day jobs, research psychologists don’t typically need safety goggles, much less pith helmets or Indiana Jones bullwhips.
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What to Expect When You’re Expecting Gender-Reveal Backlash
Reilly acknowledges that the parties might not be for everyone—and, indeed, gender reveals have suffered fierce backlash for conflating gender with sex and enforcing rigid cultural norms. But Reilly is among the defenders who argue that the new tradition is about more than whether a baby will grow up to be a square-jawed macho man or a dainty lady. They’re meant to celebrate the mother, he says. In fact, some researchers agree with that assessment—and say the discussions around gender in America today might have helped bring about the tradition’s rise in the first place. ... It also makes sense that gender would be a part of this new ritual.
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Need to Solve a Problem? Sleep On It
You truly are better off getting a good night’s sleep before making any tough decisions, findings from a study at Northwestern University suggest.
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Stanford psychology expert: This is the No. 1 work skill of the future—but most fail to realize it
You pick up your phone to look at the news notification and answer your text, only to check a Facebook post and then watch a Youtube video. Suddenly, before you know it, an hour has passed, and you haven’t accomplished a single work-related task. ... What’s the cost of all this? In 1971, the psychologist Herbert A. Simon emphasized that a wealth of information means a dearth of something else: attention. ... That said, not being distractable is the single most important skill for the 21st century. Many experts, including Adam Grant, who said that “success and happiness belong to people who can control their attention,” have addressed the importance of focus.
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Excessive brain activity linked to a shorter life
One key to a longer life could be a quieter brain without too much neural activity, according to a new study that examined postmortem brain tissue from extremely long-lived people for clues about what made them different from people who died in their 60s and 70s. “Use it or lose it” has dominated thinking on how to protect the aging brain, and extensive research shows there are many benefits to remaining physically and mentally active as people get older. But the study, published in the journal Nature, suggests more isn’t always better. Excessive activity — at least at the level of brain cells — could be harmful. ...
