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The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. ... The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience.
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Feeling Lonely Isn’t Just About Being Alone
The more time you spend alone, the more likely you are to be lonely, right? Seems obvious. But it isn’t always true, according to a new study. For instance, it found that although, in general, those who spend the most time alone are the loneliest, that isn’t the case for young people; their time alone has little impact on how lonely they feel. What’s more, people who spend the least time alone tend to be slightly lonelier than those between the extremes. ... But age made a significant difference. Study participants over the age of 40 generally were more likely to feel lonely when they spent more time alone.
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Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. He was 75. The cause was stomach cancer, his wife, Catherine Marin, said. A psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta and a research scientist at the school’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Professor de Waal objected to the common usage of the word “instinct.” He saw the behavior of all sentient creatures, from crows to persons, existing on the same broad continuum of evolutionary adaptation.
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THE FADING MEMORIES OF YOUTH
You might think you remember taking a trip to Disneyland when you were 18 months old, or that time you had chickenpox when you were 2—but you almost certainly don’t. However real they may seem, your earliest treasured memories were probably implanted by seeing photos or hearing your parents’ stories about waiting in line for the spinning teacups. Recalling those manufactured memories again and again consolidated them in your brain, making them as vivid as your last summer vacation. ...
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The Costs of the Secrets We Keep
Psychological experiments historically included lab-invented secrets and simulated social interactions. But a fresher body of research explores the secrets people keep in their everyday lives, experimental psychologist Michael Slepian wrote in a new article for Current Directions in Psychological Science.
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Twisted Tales: Unraveling the Surprising Benefits of Irony
Podcast: APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum and Penny Pexman (Western University) discuss cognitive flexibility and emotion recognition, two crucial aspects underlying the processing of sarcastic speech.
