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Baby-Mother Bonds Affect Future Adult Relationships, Study Finds
LiveScience: A mother lode of bonding – or a lack thereof – between moms and young children can predict kids' behavior in romantic relationships decades later, a new study suggests. Adding to evidence that even preverbal memories are firmly imprinted on young psyches, researchers found that children who had been more securely attached to their mothers, now grown, did better at resolving relationship conflicts, recovering from those conflicts and enjoying stable, satisfying ties with their romantic partners in early adulthood. "It's often very difficult to find the lingering effects of early life being related to adult behavior, because life circumstances change," said study author Jeffry A.
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Sexual Cues: All It Takes Is A Smile?
Huffington Post: This just in: According to a study by WIlliams College psychologist Carin Perrilloux -- the results of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science -- men really aren't on to how the other sex thinks. Perilloux and her co-authors studied 200 heterosexual college students who were evenly split between the sexes and with an average age of 19 to gauge how each gender read the other's sexual cues. Here are their surprising findings: 1. The more attractive the woman was to the guy the more likely he was to rate her as interested in him! 2.
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Traumatic Experiences Make You Stronger, Study Reveals
The Huffington Post: As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' and now there is new evidence to support his theory as researchers discover that traumatic experiences can help people develop resilience. Scientists from the University of Buffalo discovered that although a traumatic event such as a bereavement or a physical attack can be psychologically damaging - small amounts of trauma make us more resilient and mentally stronger. Researchers looked at those who had suffered difficult times and found these people were more distressed in general.
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Going through some hard times may make people tougher
Los Angeles Times: During the holidays people can experience an enormous amount of stress, even more so these days with a bad economy thrown in. But a study finds that having some adverse experiences in the past may make you mentally tougher. A meta-analysis of studies that looked at how traumatic events affect mental health and well-being found a pattern: The number of adverse experiences may determine whether someone becomes more resilient and better able to handle what life throws at him or her.
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Math for baby boys
The Boston Globe: The Nuremberg Trials established that individuals cannot fall back on a claim that they were merely conforming and “following orders” to justify immoral actions. Nevertheless, a new study suggests that people consider those involved in group behavior to have less responsibility for their actions. An individual in a group with more of a “group mind”--as in a more cohesive group--is judged to have less of “a mind of his or her own.” As such, responsibility is attributed to the group and not the individual. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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How Pregnancy Changes a Woman’s Brain
We know a lot about the links between a pregnant mother’s health, behavior, and moods and her baby’s cognitive and psychological development once it is born. But how does pregnancy change a mother’s brain? “Pregnancy is a critical period for central nervous system development in mothers,” says psychologist Laura M. Glynn of Chapman University. “Yet we know virtually nothing about it.” Glynn and her colleague Curt A. Sandman, of University of the California Irvine, are doing something about that.
