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How Therapy Can Help in the Golden Years
The New York Times: Marvin Tolkin was 83 when he decided that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Until then, it had never occurred to him that there might be emotional “issues” he wanted to explore with a counselor. “I don’t think I ever needed therapy,” said Mr. Tolkin, a retired manufacturer of women’s undergarments who lives in Manhattan and Hewlett Harbor, N.Y. ... But those attitudes have shifted over time, along with the medical community’s understanding of mental illness among seniors. In the past, the assumption was that if older people were acting strangely or having problems, it was probably dementia.
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Narrowing the Achievement Gap with a Psychological Intervention
Scientific American: There is an academic achievement gap in the United States. Compared to their White peers, African American and Latino American students earn lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school. Compared to “the haves”— that is, students with greater economic means, “the have nots” also have lower grades and higher drop-out rates [1]. These achievement gaps are there when students come to school in the fall and widen as the year goes on. ... This new research, led by David Sherman, replicates Cohen’s findings with a population of Latino American students, a group that had received relatively little attention in stereotype threat research, despite its growing numbers.
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A handy tip
The Economist: A POKER face. It is the expressionless gaze that gives nothing away. To win at poker, the face must be mastered, and master it is what the best players try their best to do. But a study just published in Psychological Science by Michael Slepian of Stanford University and his colleagues suggests that even people with the best poker faces give the game away. They do so, however, not with their heads but with their hands. Mr Slepian made his discovery when he showed 78 undergraduate volunteers video clips of players placing bets at the 2009 World Series of Poker.
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How Powerful People Think
TIME: Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us — isn’t that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: Power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. People who feel powerful also show improved “executive functioning”: They are better able to concentrate, plan, inhibit unhelpful impulses and flexibly adapt to change.
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Age Brings Happiness
Scientific American Mind Do people get happier or crankier as they age? Stereotypes of crotchety neighbors aside, scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and the results have been conflicting. Now a study of several thousand Americans born between 1885 and 1980 reveals that well-being indeed increases with age—but overall happiness depends on when a person was born. Previous studies that have compared older adults with the middle-aged and young have sometimes found that older adults are not as happy. But these studies could not discern whether their discontent was because of their age or because of their different life experience.
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Tylenol Fights Headaches…and Existential Angst?
Smithsonian Magazine: Everyone knows you can pop a Tylenol to ease a headache or reduce a fever. But that’s not all. A new study suggests that you can also take Tylenol to ease the psychological angst of watching weird, twisted David Lynch films, or to generally ward off existential dread of death and nothingness. In what is perhaps one of the oddest studies in recent memory, researchers in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia hypothesized that overwhelming feelings of pointlessness and physical pain may be located in the same part of the brain, LiveScience explains.
