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The Evolutionary Brilliance of the Baby Giggle
My son was 14 weeks old when he made his first unmistakable whole-body belly laugh. In the months that followed, his laughter was accompanied by playful provocations — grabbing my hair and shrieking with delight, blowing mouthfuls of mashed bananas skyward and squealing when they landed on the floor. These incidents signaled something more than laughter: An early sense of humor was emerging, initiated by him, months before the other milestones that parents await in the first year. For me as a mother, this was delightful, but as a developmental psychologist, I was perplexed. Despite my Ph.D., I’d never come across research on infant laughter or humor.
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Dr. Oz Says Drinking Is a ‘Social Lubricant.’ Some Experts Worry About That.
The psychologist first became intrigued by the phenomenon decades ago, while he was setting up an experiment about the effects of drinking on anxiety and heart rate. Women had been excluded from many such studies, so Michael Sayette, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, asked five female volunteers to come into the lab and drink, allowing him to set blood alcohol benchmarks for his experiment. ... “Dr. Oz is right — it is really about talking and smiling and connecting,” said Kasey G. Creswell, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Dissociation Is Not the Coping Mechanism It’s Assumed to Be
A new study highlights that most adults experience little to no dissociation, but it is frequently present in clinical populations, particularly people with dissociative disorders, PTSD, and BPD.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of recent research covering language, friendships, misinformation, and more.
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What It Means to Be ‘Touch-Starved’
... Touch communicates connection and caring “with crystal clarity to your brain in ways that words don’t,” said James A. Coan, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of the forthcoming book “Why We Hold Hands.” ... “Touch is part of flirting — you bump into each other, and you assess each other’s interest with touch,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies touch and emotion. “When you flirt with someone you’re figuring out: Is this a good partner?” ...
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Let Your Kids Fail
... Ann S. Masten, a developmental psychologist, describes resilience as “ordinary magic,” the result of normal developmental processes rather than extraordinary personal qualities. But those processes require what she calls “adaptive systems,” one of the most important of which involves the capacity to learn to cope with stress. Children who are consistently shielded from everyday challenges don’t get to practice this coping. When they inevitably encounter larger disappointments—a college rejection, a romantic breakup—they might lack the psychological fortitude to handle it.
