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Mindfulness: Is it a fad or a powerful life-changing coping skill? A look at the science.
The Washington Post: Imagine this scenario: You come home from work tired and frazzled, and your little kids are running wild. Perhaps this doesn’t require much imagination. People in such situations might find solace in a popular meditative practice called mindfulness. With mindfulness, you train your mind to focus on the present and respond with reason before emotion. It’s about taking a pause and guiding yourself to become “aware enough in the moment so that before you react, you’re aware of how you’re responding to a situation,” says Ronald Epstein, a professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.
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How to learn better at any age
The Boston Globe: PEOPLE COMMONLY BELIEVE that if you expose yourself to something enough times — say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from biology class — you can burn it into memory. Not so. Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its head: When learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer. It’s widely believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the most effective way to master a new skill is to give it dogged, single-minded focus, practicing over and over until you’ve got it down.
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Principles of Learnings
Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering, and mathematics? Should there be single-sex schooling? What is intelligence? How do people learn? Always evident in her writing about thought and knowledge, cognitive psychologist Diane F. Halpern’s answers to apparently straightforward questions like these are far from simple, yet they are clear. Halpern’s research has yielded many principles of learning, such as the importance of formative assessment to learning, and she has designed and implemented programs for — among other areas — undergraduate education in psychology, critical thinking, spatial thinking, and even automated tutoring.
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Theology, Taboos, and Creative Thinking
During the 1976 presidential campaign, then-candidate Jimmy Carter famously told Playboy magazine: “I’ve looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter’s unguarded remarks were published in the November issue, just days before the election, and they caused a broad public uproar. The campaign was already concerned about the appeal of Carter’s Southern Baptist faith, and some believed this candor would tip the balance to the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford. It didn’t. Carter went on to squeak out a victory, and became the country’s 39th president. But the Playboy interview put evangelical Christianity in the national spotlight.
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Piecing Together the Flight 370 Narrative
It’s been 13 days since the Malaysia Airlines flight vanished. In that time, there have been hundreds of news reports positing different theories about its whereabouts and its fate. But by virtue of the fact that the plane is still missing, each of those stories is based on circumstantial evidence -- no one truly knows what happened, and the leads and hypotheses that seemed plausible for Flight 370 a week ago have since changed. This is an especially trying situation for those with family or friends on board -- people who want nothing more than to hear a clear-cut story about the fate of their loved ones.
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How Science and Technology Can Help Each Other Flourish
Psychological science and technology stand side by side as two of the fastest-growing areas of interest in the world, yet they rarely intersect or interact to mutually benefit one another. This Presidential Cross-Cutting Theme program at the 2014 APS Annual Convention, May 22–25 in San Francisco, will feature three subpanels on behavioral genetics, mobile sensing, and social networks.
