The following articles are related to ‘News and Research’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life.
A study which has been all over the press reports research findings from the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, that children with one particular version of a particular gene scored higher in IQ tests, between the ages of five and thirteen, if they had been breastfed.
Rather die than go to the dentist? Contemplating our own death is a lot more pleasant than contemplating dental pain, according to research which shows that reminders of death seem to provoke a kind of tuning into positive emotional information, a way of coping which is immediate, unconscious and clearly counterintuitive.
According to an article in the Observer Food Monthly, happy cows make for better meat. As a life long vegetarian, I am not writing this as an advert for anyone’s meat or a justification for its being ‘produced’ in the first place. But I do think the experiences of farms which do everything to provide a stress-free life and death for their cattle are, as well as a lesser evil, interesting for us humans too…
There is a strong possibility that when a patient goes to the doctor with depression, to be treated within the medical model, they may underplay or not even mention physical symptoms, thinking that “they’re all in the mind” — meaning not real, not worthy of attention. In fact, pain is felt in all kinds of ways, and when doctors and patients alike recognise that, research shows that treatment works better.
In “Mother- and Father-Reported Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions: Relations to Young Children’s Emotional Understanding and Friendship Quality”, researchers led by Dr. Nancy L McElwain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied over 50 pre-school children, firstly assessing their emotional maturity, and then observing play sessions with a friend. In a situation designed to produce stress and conflict it turned out that the optimum situation for the child was one very involved parent and one much less so.
I think that it is of utmost importance that campaigns ‘against obesity’ should not make an underclass of overweight children who it is OK to treat however we like, because the health police and media are on our side. Both teasing, and pushing overweight teenagers to diet are likely to increase the likelihood of them discovering, and getting stuck in, destructive eating patterns.
Psychology today reports on ‘permaparenting’, the phenomenon of young adults coming back to the nest for indefinite amounts of time, or never leaving it at all. It paints a fairly bleak picture of young adults who are not mature enough to leave, and parents who are not mature enough to let them.
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