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Kelly McGonigal: Can We Reframe The Way We Think About Stress?
Stress is an unpleasant emotion — but does it have an upside? Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal says adjusting the way you think about stress can actually change the way your body responds to it.
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You’re probably more freaked out about the world than you should be
I don’t know you. But I’m guessing I can still tell you something important about yourself: You are more freaked out about the world — especially the other people in it — than you should be. For starters, you are reading this, which means you consume at least some news media. And the news is, lately, a scary place. Perhaps you saw some stunning graphs recently that depicted the most common actual causes of death in the United States, the causes of death most commonly searched for online and those that get the most news coverage. In reality, most people die of diseases of old age, such as heart disease and cancer.
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What Experts Know About People Who Commit Mass Shootings
On Monday morning, President Trump made his first televised statement about the mass murders committed over the weekend in El Paso, Tex., and Dayton, Ohio. He called for action to “stop mass killings before they start,” citing what he said were a number contributing factors: the contagious nature of mass murder; the glorification of violence in video games; and the need to act on “red flags” to identify and potentially confine the “mentally ill monsters” that he said commit the crimes. ... The results of studies attempting to clarify the relationship between violent video games and aggression have been mixed, with experts deeply divided on the findings.
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You 2.0: The Empathy Gym
What books are on your summer reading list? If you're reading mostly nonfiction, consider the benefits of adding a novel to the mix. "There's a fair amount of evidence now that the more fiction that people read, the more empathetic that they become," says Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. "Because fiction is one of the most powerful ways to connect with people who are different from us who we might not have a chance to meet otherwise." Zaki argues that empathy is like a muscle — it can be strengthened with exercise and it can atrophy when idle. On this episode of Hidden Brain, we talk about calibrating our empathy so we can interact with others more mindfully.
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No, Video Games Are Not a Factor in Mass Shootings
Rather than acknowledge the political motivations of the El Paso shooter or the line of radicalization that led him toward reactionary white supremacy, a number of politicians are returning to a popular scapegoat: video games. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and President Donald Trump all cited violent video games as a factor in these shootings and other acts of violence in the US. These complaints are a decades-old distraction and continue to be unsubstantiated. There is no significant evidence that video games are a contributing factor to mass shootings. ...
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New Research: How Much Screen Time Is Bad for Kids?
Sitting in front of a screen is bad for you. Then it's good for you. Then it's bad for you again. But, like, only a bit. Allow me to explain. ... This is exactly the hypothesis that two researchers from the University of Oxford tested in a paper called "A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well Being of Adolescents." (Przybylski and Weinstein, 2017). The authors collected information from a frankly ridiculous number of adolescents in the UK, resulting in screen time and mental well being data on over 120,000 young people.
