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Awe: the powerful emotion with strange and beautiful effects
The Guardian: The other day, I got fairly decisively lost while hiking in the French Pyrénées. Not seriously lost, since I had a functioning iPhone, and was never much more than an hour’s walk from a road where, in a crisis, I could doubtless have flagged down a grudging French motorist. (Is there any other kind?) But just lost enough to feel the first frisson of something like fear: enough to be reminded that mountain ranges are very large and solid things, whereas I am a tiny and fragile thing, and that it takes a vanishingly small amount of effort on the part of a mountain range to kill a human. ...
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Belief That Mental Illness Can Be Contagious Contributes To Isolation
NPR: Many illnesses are contagious. You'd do well to avoid your neighbor's sneeze, for example, and to wash your hands after tending to your sick child. But what about mental illness? The idea that anxiety, autism or major depression could be transmitted through contact may sound crazy — and it probably is. There's a lot we don't know about the origins of mental illness, but the mechanisms identified so far point in other directions. Nonetheless, we do know that people's emotions can be affected by the emotions of those around them — a phenomenon known as "emotional contagion" — and that specific symptoms of mental disorders, such as binge eating, can sometimes spread among peers.
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That’s a Wrap. What Did I Miss?
The New York Times: Like most parents, I imagine, I keep a running list of things I’ve done well and things I’ve flubbed. Help our children get lots of sleep? Check. Play fun, stimulating games at dinner? Score. Have peaceful, stress-free mornings when everyone goes into the day uplifted and on time? Hardly. Produce handsome scrapbooks with carefully captioned memories? Not a one. (We do have a few boxes labeled “keepsakes.”) In all this second-guessing, there’s one area where I give myself unqualified high marks: photography. Having grown up surrounded by cameras, I take lots of pictures. But there’s another area where I’m a complete failure: video.
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Blame Your Parents for Your Crappy Math Skills
Pacific Standard: There's a seemingly constant stream of news about how bad Americans are at math, with much of the blame aimed at teachers and the sometimes confusing curricula they're supposed to teach. But, a new study suggests, parents' own anxieties about mathematics might have as much to do with kids' math abilities as teachers or the materials they're supposed to teach. "Although the classroom is usually viewed as the primary vehicle for advancing academic achievement, parents also play an important role in students’ academic success," writes a team of psychologists led by the University of Chicago's Erin Maloney.
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How Others See Our Identity Depends on Moral Traits, Not Memory
We may view our memory as being essential to who we are, but new findings suggest that others consider our moral traits to be the core component of our identity. Data collected from family members of patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease showed that it was changes in moral behavior, not memory loss, that caused loved ones to say that the patient wasn't “the same person” anymore. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Contrary to what you might think -- and what generations of philosophers and psychologists have assumed -- memory loss itself doesn't make someone seem like a different person.
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Would You Rather Lose Your Morals or Your Memory?
New Republic: When Nina Strohminger was a teenager, her grandmother had dementia. “Before she got sick, she was not a very nice person,” Strohminger said. “One of the first things that went when this disease was taking hold is she became really, really nice. I just remember her stopping me one day and saying ‘Nina, your skin is so beautiful,’ and I was like ‘what is happening?’” We spoke on the phone, both of us traveling—I paced outside of a Starbucks in Brooklyn while she packed her things to move from Durham, NC, where we both lived at the time, to New Haven, CT, where she’d be starting as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.
