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Why Men May Not Try To ‘Have It All’ The Same Way Women Do
The Huffington Post: It was 1971, and Johns Hopkins University psychology professor Julian Stanley wanted to answer one very big question: How can we set up highly intelligent kids to become highly successful adults? To find out, he launched a study so extensive he would not live to see its fruition. Stanley set out to track the accomplishments, educational outcomes and well-being of a select group of gifted 13-year-olds over their lives. He recruited 1,037 boys and 613 girls within five years of one another in the 1970s. All were in the top 1 percent when it came to their mathematical reasoning abilities, based on college-level exams they took to qualify for the study.
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It Pays to Think You’re Good at Math, Even If You Aren’t
New York Magazine: People, as a general rule, aren't good at gauging their own abilities and tend to overrate them — it's a finding that comes up again and again in psychological research, to the point where there's a name for overconfidence among untalented people:the Dunning-Kruger effect. New research extends this subject to an area of perpetual anxiety for a lot of people — math — and adds an interesting silver lining.
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A Road to Mental Health Through the Kitchen
The Wall Street Journal: Many cooks know what a sanctuary the kitchen can be. Now, some health-care clinics and counselors are using cooking or baking as therapy tools for people suffering from depression, anxiety and other mental-health problems. The courses are often partly aimed at teaching healthy cooking and eating skills to people living tough, chaotic lives. Counselors say the classes also soothe stress, build self-esteem and curb negative thinking by focusing the mind on following a recipe. Often the courses are part of a larger treatment plan that can also including talk therapy or medication.
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Are There Natural Remedies For Cognitive Aging?
More than 30 countries now have a life expectancy of 80 or more, a dramatic increase over the last half century. This is good news, but it also brings challenges. The aging brain goes through predictable changes, and as a result, old age is usually accompanied by some cognitive decline, even dementia. Happily, some of the risk factors for mental aging are open to intervention. Diet, exercise and mental activity all play a role in healthy aging, but there are also natural pharmaceuticals that may be of use in staving off decline.
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Do People Like To Think?
NPR: When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed at night listening to Mets games on the transistor radio, or to the top 40. Sunday evenings were hard because there was no baseball and most of the music stations went to talk. As I got older, I came to take comfort in the talk. I learned to love Father Bill Ayers' call-in show late on New York's WPLJ. I thought about my impulse to turn to noise and distraction at an early age when I heard about a paper, published last summer in Science, touting the finding that people would prefer electric shocks to being left alone with their own thoughts.
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Hugs Help Protect Against Colds by Boosting Social Support
We're told to wash our hands, get plenty of rest, and avoid public coughers and sneezers in order to keep the common cold at bay, but new research suggests another line of defense: hugs. A team of researchers, led by Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, tested whether hugs act as a form of social support, protecting stressed people from getting sick. They found that greater social support and more frequent hugs protected people from the increased susceptibility to infection associated with being stressed and resulted in less severe illness symptoms.
