University - Exercise reorganizes the brain to be more resilient to stress. Posted July 3, 2013; 02:30 p.m. by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications Physical activity reorganizes the brain so that its response to stress is reduced and anxiety is less likely to interfere with normal brain function, according to a research team based at Princeton University. The researchers report in the Journal of Neuroscience that when mice allowed to exercise regularly experienced a stressor — exposure to cold water — their brains exhibited a spike in the activity of neurons that shut off excitement in the ventral hippocampus, a brain region shown to regulate anxiety. These findings potentially resolve a discrepancy in research related to the effect of exercise on the brain — namely that exercise reduces anxiety while also promoting the growth of new neurons in the ventral hippocampus. Because these young neurons are typically more excitable than their more mature counterparts, exercise should result in more anxiety, not less.
Back To Top. Writing - for health and happiness? 17 August 2013Last updated at 01:11 GMT By Cathy Edwards Health Check, BBC World Service There are risks and benefits to sharing your emotions online Decades of research have shown that writing down your emotions has concrete health benefits - even helping wounds heal. But as more and more people publish their intimate feelings online, could they be doing themselves more harm than good? High-profile coverage of cyberbullying might make sharing your deepest emotions online sound like a bad idea, but when it comes to the risks and benefits of writing online, advice is mixed.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, suggests questions about social media are included in visits to the doctor, a move prompted by worries about cyberbullying, internet addiction and sleep deprivation. On the other hand, blogging about health problems has been shown to improve feelings of social support, especially when that support is lacking from family and friends. Traumatic experience 'Emotions bottled up' Paying attention is a skill: Schools need to teach it. Photo by Shutterstock There is no doubt that “diminished attention” is a correct diagnosis of the intellectual temperament of our age. I see it to a greater degree each year even in the students I teach, who are among the very best that our high schools have to offer.
But how to treat it? Again and again, we are told in this information-overloaded digital age, complex and subtle arguments just won’t hold the reader’s or viewer’s attention. By catering to diminished attention, we are making a colossal and unconscionable mistake. The key point for teachers and principals and parents to realize is that maintaining attention is a skill. In other words, the “short-attention” phenomenon is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A person who is my age can read a very brief and oversimplified discussion of a complex issue and note that it is brief and oversimplified.
It is easy to find villains in this war on attention. Research on training attention may one day produce a magic bullet. Jane Ellen Stevens: The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study -- the Largest Public Health Study You Never Heard Of. "Adverse childhood experiences" has become a buzzword in social services, public health, education, juvenile justice, mental health, pediatrics, criminal justice, medical research and even business. The ACE Study - the CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences Study -- has recently been featured in the New York Times, This American Life, and Salon.com. Many people say that just as you should what your cholesterol score is, so you should know your ACE score.
But what is this study? And do you know your own ACE score? The ACE Study - probably the most important public health study you never heard of - emerged from an obesity clinic on a quiet street in San Diego. It was 1985, and Dr. Felitti cut an imposing, yet dashing, figure. But the 50-percent dropout rate in the obesity clinic that Felitti started in 1980 was driving him crazy. The situation "was ruining my attempts to build a successful program," he recalls, and in typical Type-A fashion, he was determined to find out why. Got Your ACE Score? « ACEs Too High. There are 10 types of childhood trauma measured in the ACE Study. Five are personal — physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect.
Five are related to other family members: a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. Each type of trauma counts as one. So a person who’s been physically abused, with one alcoholic parent, and a mother who was beaten up has an ACE score of three. There are, of course, many other types of childhood trauma — watching a sibling being abused, losing a caregiver (grandmother, mother, grandfather, etc.), homelessness, surviving and recovering from a severe accident, witnessing a father being abused by a mother, witnessing a grandmother abusing a father, etc.
Prior to your 18th birthday: Now add up your “Yes” answers: _ This is your ACE Score 1. 2. 3. Learned Optimism Test. Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (9781400078394): Martin E. P. Seligman. Applying Learned Optimism (Schulman) Brain Article.pdf. SuperBetter. Headspace meditation podcasts. Introduction to Meditation. How to Explore and Study Intention: 10 steps. Edit Article Edited by George AP, Teresa, Flickety, Daniel and 10 others Intention is a surprisingly important, but rarely explored part of the mind, as its significance is only important after the fact. Only once you've spent time observing it can you find just how it fits in to day-to-day living. Intention is a main stepping stone or foundation of the mind that is important to understand - start exploring it today.
Ad Steps 1Find out the ways you can best view intention as it happens. 10Continue to evaluate intention. Tips Consider studying how intention is treated within different disciplines in order to broaden your understanding of it. Warnings Take things a step at a time, this is understanding a major part of how the mind works and reacts. Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges. Stuart Bradford Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family? That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion — how kindly people view themselves. People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.
The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. This idea does seem at odds with the advice dispensed by many doctors and self-help books, which suggest that willpower and self-discipline are the keys to better health. Imagine your reaction to a child struggling in school or eating too much junk food. Dr. For those low on the scale, Dr. Self-compassion - A Healthier Way of Relating to Yourself. Jane McGonigal -- Computer Gaming Revolutionary, Author of Reality is Broken. Jane McGonigal: Truths & Myths in Gaming. Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life. Back to School. Ira talks with Paul Tough, author of the new book How Children Succeed, about the traditional ways we measure ability and intelligence in American schools.
They talk about the focus on cognitive abilities, conventional "book smarts. " They discuss the current emphasis on these kinds of skills in American education, and the emphasis standardized testing, and then turn our attention to a growing body of research that suggests we may be on the verge of a new approach to some of the biggest challenges facing American schools today. Paul Tough discusses how “non-cognitive skills” — qualities like tenacity, resilience, impulse control — are being viewed as increasingly vital in education, and Ira speaks with economist James Heckman, who’s been at the center of this research and this shift.
Doctor Nadine Burke Harris weighs in to discuss studies that show how poverty-related stress can affect brain development, and inhibit the development of non-cognitive skills. NYT | Paul Tough. Saturday, August 25th, 2012 Bill Moyers on Times Magazine Article Bill Moyers comments on my Times Magazine article on Roseland, poverty, and Barack Obama. More here. Sunday, August 19th, 2012 Obama/Poverty Reaction Some reactions to my article in the Times Magazine on President Obama, Roseland, and poverty: 1. 2. 3. 4. Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 Times Magazine article My new article on poverty, Barack Obama, and the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland is now online on the New York Times’s website. Sunday, March 18th, 2012 Three Things Three fairly random items from various sources, each, in its own way, heart-warming (for me, at least): 1. 2. 3. “This is a life-changing book,” Wentworth says of Tough’s look at the work of social activist and educator Geoffrey Canada, who created the Harlem Children’s Zone, a cradle-to-college, community-based organization.
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 Talking about Character Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 Character response Wednesday, September 21st, 2011. What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? Over the course of the next year and a half, Duckworth worked with Levin and Randolph to turn the list of seven strengths into a two-page evaluation, a questionnaire that could be completed by teachers or parents, or by students themselves. For each strength, teachers suggested a variety of “indicators,” much like the questions Duckworth asked people to respond to on her grit questionnaire, and she road-tested several dozen of them at Riverdale and KIPP. She eventually settled on the 24 most statistically reliable ones, from “This student is eager to explore new things” (an indicator of curiosity) to “This student believes that effort will improve his or her future” (optimism).
For Levin, the next step was clear. Wouldn’t it be cool, he mused, if each student graduated from school with not only a G.P.A. but also a C.P.A., for character-point average? Photo Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. Video Continue reading the main story. ‘How Children Succeed,’ by Paul Tough. “Psychologists and neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where these skills come from and how they are developed,” Tough writes, and what they’ve discovered can be summed up in a sentence: Character is created by encountering and overcoming failure.
In this absorbing and important book, Tough explains why American children from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are missing out on these essential experiences. The offspring of affluent parents are insulated from adversity, beginning with their baby-proofed nurseries and continuing well into their parentally financed young adulthoods. And while poor children face no end of challenges — from inadequate nutrition and medical care to dysfunctional schools and neighborhoods — there is often little support to help them turn these omnipresent obstacles into character-enhancing triumphs. How Children Succeed book excerpt: What the most boring test in the world tells us about motivation and IQ. Photograph by Anders Lagerås/Wikimedia Commons. The following article is adapted from Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has made it her life’s work to analyze which children succeed and why. She says she finds it useful to divide the mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition. Each one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither is sufficient alone.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to shift a person’s motivation. A few years later, two researchers from the University of South Florida elaborated on Edlund’s experiment. The M&M studies were a major blow to the conventional wisdom about intelligence, which held that IQ tests measured something real and permanent—something that couldn’t be changed drastically with a few candy-covered chocolates. And why? Hard Evidence on Soft Skills (NBER Heckman & Kautz) What's the 'Rate of Return' on Social Skills? - James Heckman. Economics.mit.edu/files/569. Teaching the New Basic Skills. Teaching the New Basic Skills Book suggest ways that schools can help students to meet demands of new economic environment By Bunmi Fatoye-Matory Special to the Gazette In 1979, a 30-year-old man with a high school diploma earned a yearly average of $27,000 (in 1993 dollars) but by 1993 that same man with the same diploma earned $20,000.
This decline in wages becomes even more significant when you learn that in 1993 half of all 30-year-old men had not gone beyond high school. These are dire statistics. The problem is not that the quality of American schools is declining, according to Richard Murnane, education professor at the Graduate School of Education, and Frank Levy, professor of urban economics at M.I.T., authors of the new book, Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy.
The New Basic Skills * the ability to use personal computers to carry out simple tasks like word processing. How To Teach These Skills. Levy, F. and Murnane, R.J.: The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. In The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people at work--a high-end financial advisor, a customer service representative, a pair of successful chefs, a cardiologist, an automotive mechanic, the author Victor Hugo, floor traders in a London financial exchange.
The authors merge these stories with insights from cognitive science, computer science, and economics to show how computers are enhancing productivity in many jobs even as they eliminate other jobs--both directly and by sending work offshore. At greatest risk are jobs that can be expressed in programmable rules--blue collar, clerical, and similar work that requires moderate skills and used to pay middle-class wages. Review: More reviews. Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart? So this year, Muthler is opting Noah out of the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, using a broad religious and ethical exemption. Just knowing he won’t be taking the tests in March has put Noah in a better frame of mind about school.
“The pressure is off his shoulders now,” his mother said. When he doesn’t grasp a concept immediately, he can talk it through without any panic. “He looks forward to science class and math class again,” Muthler said. Muthler understands Noah’s distress; more mysterious is why her son Jacob, who is in eighth grade, isn’t the least bit unnerved by the same tests. Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future. But some children actually do better under competitive, stressful circumstances. Understanding their propensity to become stressed and how to deal with it can help children compete. The researchers were interested in a single gene, the COMT gene. It was the latter. Beyond Critical Thinking: Can We Teach Commitment? The Principle of the Hiding Hand. The Fine Art of Resilience: Lessons from Stanley Meltzoff. Acts of Witness » Learning to Look for Resilience. Challenge Success. Carol Dweck, "Mindsets", Impostor Syndrome, Praise, and Early-Career Blues.
Video shows how Walla Walla, WA, high school integrates resilience into school discipline « ACEs Too High. How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code - James Somers. Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom - Lisa D. Delpit. An Interview With Lisa Delpit on Educating 'Other People's Children' Alfie Kohn on Grit and Its Misuses. What Resilience Is Not: Uses and Abuses. How Not to Teach Values. Teaching Non-Cognitive Skills Blames the Victim - Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable. The Benefits of Character Education - Jessica Lahey. Character education. Core Virtues. See Schools of Character. Further Reading and Links on Issues in Character Education.
Kent Place School ~ Conversation Norms. You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help. - Technology. Conquering the To-Do List. Character Report Card. When and Why Incentives (Don't) Work to Modify Behavior. How Do I Prepare My Students for the Real World? Can we interrupt social conditioning? Mindset | Test Your Mindset.
Measuring mindset in my classes | Quantum Progress. Baronreading / Status of the Class - Period 1. Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught?