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What Loneliness Is Doing To Your Heart
Forbes: You may have heard that loneliness is hazardous to your health — and can even lead to an early death. Now, an analysis of 23 scientific studies gives us numbers that reveal just how sick it can really make you. People with “poor social relationships” had a 29% higher risk of newly diagnosed heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke, according to the study, published July 1 in the British journal Heart. ... Brigham Young researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad told Time magazine that nurturing close relationships as well as a “diverse set of social connections” is key.
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Why kids can learn more from tales of fantasy than realism
aeon: Children have a lot of learning to do. Arguably, this is the purpose of childhood: to provide children with protected time so that they can focus on learning how to communicate, how the world around them works, what values their culture finds important, and so on. Given the massive amount of information that children need to absorb, it would seem prudent for them to spend as much of this protected time as possible engaged in the serious study of real-world issues and problems. ...
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The New Norm
NPR: Our second story involves a grand experiment in shifting a social norm, this time of an entire nation. In the 1990's McDonald's decided to open the first ever McDonald's in Moscow, but were impeded by the social norms around smiling and customer service in Russia. In this story Alix follows the story of Yuri, one of the first McDonald's employees, as he comes to unlearn what his teachers in school taught him: that people who smile at strangers are idiots. Read the whole story: NPR
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Psychology’s First Superhero: Celebrating Wonder Woman At 75
Fast Company: William Moulton Marston—an attorney and psychologist who invented a systolic blood pressure deception test, the precursor to the modern polygraph—created Wonder Woman as a new type of superhero who, beyond her strength, used wisdom and compassion as weapons against evil—not to mention a magic golden lasso to compel people to tell the truth. Read the whole story: Fast Company
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‘Like’ it or not, teen brain is primed to join the crowd
The Washington Post: About the easiest action you can take in social media is to "like" a tweet or a photo. If you're a teenager, your brain is particularly primed to "like" what others have "liked," according to researchers from UCLA. Their new study, published in Psychological Science, is thought to be the first to replicate the social media experience while people are inside an fMRI scanner. The findings underscore the importance of both reward-seeking behavior and peer acceptance in adolescence. Thirty-four adolescents, ages 13-18, roughly equal numbers male and female, participated in the experiment.
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Money can buy happiness — if you know how to use it
The Washington Post: As humans, we are almost always aspiring to land the next promotion or the next big raise, or to strike it rich some other way. But a new report offers hope for those of us who have yet to win the lottery. Researchers at the University of Cambridge concluded in a study released this month that money can indeed buy happiness. But the secret, they found, is not how much cash you have. It’s what you do with the money you have. ...
