Nearly every school system in North America is beginning to debate the use of the internet in schools. Wifi has become ubiquitous, LTE connections are in nearly every student’s backpack and the hand wringing and panic over what children are surfing has reached epic levels.
Read moreAs many as 75% of all pregnancies result in a miscarriage before the woman knows she is pregnant. Once the woman has tested positive on a pregnancy test, there is still a one in five chance of an early miscarriage. Later in the pregnancy, while quite uncommon, miscarriage still occurs about 1% of the time though, for some women, it may repeatedly occur.
Read moreIn my mind, the award for the most incorrectly labelled disorder ever goes to the generalized mayhem that is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Think about it: We have a disorder that we know is the result of the brain continually searching for external sources of stimulation. We further know that children suffering from such can be treated with stimulant medications and that stimulant, paradoxically, calm the child — likely by providing enough internal stimulation.
Read moreRead more“If you believe that you can shake your children or slap them across the face and then smooth things over gradually by smothering them with love, you are mistaken,” wrote lead researcher Jennifer E. Lansford on the Child and Family Blog. Lansford is a research professor at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University. “Being very warm with a child whom you hit in this manner rarely makes things better. It can make a child more, not less, anxious.”
The blog is a joint project of the Future of Children at Princeton University and the Applied Developmental Psychology Research Group at the University of Cambridge.
Read moreThere are other psychological factors at play in the decisions taken by individual parents not to vaccinate their children. One is the rational selfishness of avoiding risk, or even the discomfort of a momentary jab, by gambling that the herd immunity of everyone else will be enough to protect your child.
Another is our tendency to underplay rare events in our calculation about risks – ironically the very success of vaccination programmes makes the diseases they protect us against rare, meaning that most of us don’t have direct experience of the negative consequences of not vaccinating.
Read moreShe is passionate, for example, about the madness of an 8.30/9 am school start time. ‘It’s the middle of the night for a teenager!’ she says. Teenagers release melatonin (the sleepy hormone) a couple of hours later in the day than adults and so are able to stay up later, but then they need more sleep in the morning. ‘It’s like getting us up at 5.30 am,’ Blakemore elaborates.
Read moreIf you’ve considered birth control over the past few years, chances are you’ve had at least one friend wax enthusiastic about an intrauterine device, or IUD. The method, which is the most effective reversible form of contraception on the market, has grown exponentially in popularity over the last decade, despite low national rates.
There’s now even a small sub-genre of personal essay related to choosing IUDs, ranging from testimonials to tales of medical misadventure.
Read moreMore than half of the 47 preschoolers diagnosed with depression displayed pathological guilt, compared with 20 percent of the non-depressed preschoolers. The researchers found that the children with high levels of guilt, even if they weren’t depressed, had smaller anterior insula volume — which has been found to predict later occurrences of depression. Children with smaller insula volume in the right hemisphere, related to either depression or guilt, were more likely to have recurring episodes of clinical depression when they got older.
Read moreMuch of what Siegel wants us to consider can be condensed into a simple phrase: “what fires together, wires together.” The idea is that when a set of neurons are stimulated, they link up with all those other neurons that are simultaneously firing. Whether the groups of neurons that are linking make sense to us as observers on the outside is beside the point. Odd pairings can occur, strange juxtapositions of feelings and sensations that, outside of the experience of a particular individual, seem almost impossible to the rest of us. I’m reminded of a narrative in the old DSM-IV casebook that describes an individual who had come to associate sexual arousal with being covered in insects.
Read moreKissing activates a very large part of the brain associated with sensory information because we’re at work making sense of the experience in order to decide what to do next. Kisses work their magic by setting off a whirlwind of neurotransmitters and hormones through our bodies that influence how we think and feel.
If there’s real “chemistry” between two people, a kiss can set the stage for a new romance. A passionate kiss puts two people in very close proximity – nose to nose.
