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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.
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Yes, Mom and Dad, I Lied Sometimes—But That’s All Your Fault
Pacific Standard: Like most other kids, I was afraid of lying to my parents. As a result, I lied to them often. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that my parents embedded a sense of right and wrong in me. Included in that framework was an understanding of how important it is to always tell the truth. But that wasn’t just because telling the truth is the objectively right thing to do. It’s also because not telling the truth is wrong—and there would be consequences for it. But according to a new study by McGill researchers, punishment is actually an ineffective way to deal with lying kids. It might just make them lie more.
