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Teaching Your Child Emotional Agility
The New York Times: It’s hard to see a child unhappy. Whether a child is crying over the death of a pet or the popping of a balloon, our instinct is to make it better, fast. That’s where too many parents get it wrong, says the psychologist Susan David, author of the book “Emotional Agility.” Helping a child feel happy again may offer immediate relief for parent and child, but it doesn’t help a child in the long term. “How children navigate their emotional world is critical to lifelong success,” she said. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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How Virtual Reality Can Boost Retirement Savings
The Wall Street Journal: What if you could travel into your own future to see what your life will look like in 20, 30 or even 40 years? Well, it turns out that virtual time travel may just be the best tool to motivate us to save more effectively for retirement—starting at a younger age. ... So how do you motivate people, especially millennials, to think about saving for their future retirement?
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Why Pride is Good
99u: It’s true that “hubristic pride” – when you feel pleased in your own abilities – can be harmful and indicative of an inflated ego. But “authentic pride,” which is the satisfaction and pleasure we take from the positive outcomes of our hard work and dedication, is an important, rewarding emotion that encourages persistence. And for creatives going through a tough patch, feeling a lack of pride can be a useful indicator that you’re taking the wrong approach. In extreme cases, it might mean it’s time for you to change strategies, or even to take a new direction entirely. ...
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Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear
Rolling Stone: Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a "nonpolitical Democrat." But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and, during commercials, Fox News. "It reminded me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Senko says.
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How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics
The Wall Street Journal: The most-watched made-for-TV movie in American history is “The Day After,” a 1983 portrayal of life in Kansas and Missouri in the days just before and after an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. If you’ve had even fleeting thoughts that Tuesday’s election could bring about the end of the world or the destruction of the country, you might want to find “The Day After” on YouTube, scroll to minute 53 and watch the next six minutes. Now that’s an apocalypse. ... We think that it is. After all, civility doesn’t require consensus or the suspension of criticism.
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How Liars Create the Illusion of Truth
BBC: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum"). ... Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge?
