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Thinking Clearly About Personality Disorders
The New York Times: For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly. Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors. This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders.
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Exam success makes children happy, argues Michael Gove
BBC: In the speech, the minister is expected to refer to the work of the American cognitive scientist Daniel T Willingham whom he cites as one of his biggest influences. Quoting from Mr Willingham's book Why Students Don't Like School Mr Gove says he agrees that students are motivated to learn if they enjoy "the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought". Mr Gove is set to say this is what exam success provides: "There is no feeling of satisfaction as deep or sustained as knowing we have succeeded through hard work at a task which is the upper end, or just beyond, our normal or expected level of competence.
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Soldiers’ stress may start early
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Childhood abuse and previous exposure to violence may raise a soldier's risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study says. Researchers followed 746 Danish soldiers before, during, and after deployment to Afghanistan; 84 percent of them showed no PTSD symptoms or recovered quickly from mild symptoms. The soldiers who developed PTSD were much more likely to have suffered emotional problems and traumatic events at some point in their lives before they went to war.
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The Data Vigilante
The Atlantic: Uri Simonsohn, a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, did not set out to be a vigilante. His first step down that path came two years ago, at a dinner with some fellow social psychologists in St. Louis. The pisco sours were flowing, Simonsohn recently told me, as the scholars began to indiscreetly name and shame various “crazy findings we didn’t believe.” Social psychology—the subfield of psychology devoted to how social interaction affects human thought and action—routinely produces all sorts of findings that are, if not crazy, strongly counterintuitive.
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A glimpse into why minds wander
San Francisco Chronicle: If you're the sort who gets distracted by every new, shiny thing, it may be worth your time to read this description of a new UCSF study. In a paper published online last week in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, researchers report that they have discovered a possible biological link between the wandering mind and aging. Their preliminary study concerns telomeres, the DNA caps that protect chromosomes from deteriorating or fusing with neighboring chromosomes. They typically shorten with age, often because of psychological and physiological stress, and can predict early disease and death. Read the whole story: San Francisco Chronicle
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A Recipe to Enhance Innovation
The New York Times: For America, 2012 will go down in history as the year of the Latinos, the blacks, the women and the gays. That rainbow coalition won President Barack Obama his second term. This triumph of the outsiders is partly due to America’s changing demographics. And it is not just the United States that is becoming more diverse. Canada is, too, as is much of Europe. That is why it is worth thinking hard about how to make diverse teams effective, and how people who straddle two cultural worlds can succeed.
