research Archives - Mental Wealth

Here’s How to Get People to Care About Climate Apocalypse

Even by the standards of dire climate news, a milestone hit last week is a shocker: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels just hit their highest level in 800,000 years.

But, according to experts, most people won’t care.

In fact, according to a series of studies by Yale University and George Mason University, if you want to persuade someone that climate change is an urgent problem–the newest study in the series, released on Thursday, says voters rank it just 17th among issues of concern–atmospheric science is the last place to start.

“It’s meaningless for most people,” said one of the series’ authors, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Here’s How to Get People to Care About Climate Apocalypse

The six main causes of car crashes.

Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.

I want to know what happened because there’s an obvious payoff. I want to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to me. Was it some bonehead move that I would never make? Or did someone commit a minor transgression and then pay a major price? Give me an instant replay like I get when I’m watching football. A slow-motion video with expert commentators who draw diagrams and who reveal in explicit detail how it all went down.

Without the details of how crashes happen, we tend to dismiss them as the work of “idiots”—drivers who occupy the lower echelons of driving skill and common sense. But while humankind’s measured intelligence is increasing, so is the number of deadly car crashes. After a lifetime of improvement, we saw an 8 percent jump in crash fatalities during 2015, the largest in 50 years. That number rose again in 2016, when more than 40,000 people died in collisions.

The six main causes of car crashes.

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind — Quartzy

Breathing is traditionally thought of as an automatic process driven by the brainstem—the part of the brain controlling such life-sustaining functions as heartbeat and sleeping patterns. But new and unique research, involving recordings made directly from within the brains of humans undergoing neurosurgery, shows that breathing can also change your brain.

Simply put, changes in breathing—for example, breathing at different paces or paying careful attention to the breaths—were shown to engage different parts of the brain.

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind — Quartzy

Judith Wallerstein and divorce: how one woman changed the way we think about breakups.

Judy went to the Berkeley library to see what had been written about how children react to divorce. And found nothing.

The remedy was the “California Children of Divorce Study” which Judy and her colleague Joan Berlin Kelly launched in 1971. They recruited 60 families with 131 children between the ages of 3 and 18 at the point the marriage dissolved, when life as everyone knew it began to unravel. The parents were middle class and well educated. The children had been well cared for.

Judy personally interviewed every man, woman, and child at the time of separation (followed by divorce) and, for the vast majority, every five years afterward for the next quarter of a century. The study turned into an unprecedented longitudinal examination of the effects of divorce on the American family.

Judy’s methodology was based on intimate case studies. She talked with each person over many hours, probing for feelings and insights. For years, she held each child “in her head,” remembering every dream they reported, every fantasy, every frustration. Huge files containing these case studies are still stored downstairs at her home on Belvedere Island in Marin.

Judith Wallerstein and divorce: how one woman changed the way we think about breakups.

People Who Are Always Late Are More Successful And Live Longer, Says Science – Nikola Tesla Fans

The first name that popped in your head – your best friend, or a coworker or someone who is just not there on time. Perhaps it’s you yourself. Nevertheless, we’ve got some good news meant for just you, your friend or whoever you thought of. It’s ok to be late once in a while – but know that there are positive traits that can just be that array of sunshine that you need as an excuse.

For instance – people who are late have that special ability or inability if you will to feel stress which carries it’s own weight regarding your health, but also, if you think about it and just see the bigger picture you will see that in the end, less stress means a longer lifespan and better, sain mind.

People Who Are Always Late Are More Successful And Live Longer, Says Science – Nikola Tesla Fans

Which Political Party Is the Most Adulterous? New Study Points to Patterns | Inverse

Are Republicans more likely to cheat than Democrats? It’s difficult to say for sure when most polls that look at people’s sexual behavior are self-reported. However, using data from the 2015 leak from Ashley Madison, a website that connects married people looking to have an affair, scientists have found which party affiliates were more likely to use the adultery dating service.

In 2015, a hacker collective known as the Impact Team hacked and published the data from Ashley Madison, an online dating service that connects married people seeking extramarital affairs. Data scientists Kodi Arfer, Ph.D., of University of California Los Angeles, and Jason Jones, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, analyzed the leaked data alongside voter registration records to see how well a voter’s political views on sexual norms agree with their online behavior. Their findings were published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior on Friday.

At the time of the Ashley Madison leak, the website’s slogan was “Life is short. Have an affair,” establishing the sole intent of its mission. Using the leaked data, Arfer and Jones linked credit card payments made via the cheating site with voter registration records from California, Florida, Kansas, New York, and Oklahoma. The analysis took into account registered Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Green party members, as well as those registered without a party affiliation.

Which Political Party Is the Most Adulterous? New Study Points to Patterns | Inverse

How much alcohol is too much? The science is shifting. – Vox

A couple of drinks a day aren’t bad for you and may even be good for you.

Right?

That’s been the message — from researchers, governments, and beverage companies — for decades. And as a result, many of us don’t think twice about tossing back a couple of glasses or wine or a few beers after work.

But maybe we should. Because it turns out the story about the health effects of moderate drinking is shifting pretty dramatically. New research on alcohol and mortality, and a growing awareness about the rise in alcohol-related deaths in the US, is causing a reckoning among researchers about even moderate levels of alcohol consumption.

In particular, an impressive new meta-study involving 600,000 participants, published recently in The Lancet, suggests that levels of alcohol previously thought to be relatively harmless are linked with an earlier death. What’s more, drinking small amounts of alcohol may not carry all the long-touted protective effects on the cardiovascular system.

“For years, there was a sense that there was an optimal level which was not drinking no alcohol but drinking moderately that led to the best health outcomes,” said Duke University’s Dan Blazer, an author of the paper. “I think we’re going to have to rethink that a bit.”

Alongside this study have come disturbing reports of the alcohol industry’s involvement in funding science that may have helped drinking look more favorable, as well as a growing worry that many people are naive about alcohol’s health effects. How many people know, for example, that as far back as 1988, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer designated alcohol a level-one carcinogen? Some say too few.

Maybe it’s time that changes — with some caveats, as usual.

How much alcohol is too much? The science is shifting. – Vox

New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience | WIRED

SITTING AT THE desk in his lower-campus office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the neuroscientist Tony Zador turned his computer monitor toward me to show off a complicated matrix-style graph. Imagine something that looks like a spreadsheet but instead of numbers it’s filled with colors of varying hues and gradations. Casually, he said: “When I tell people I figured out the connectivity of tens of thousands of neurons and show them this, they just go ‘huh?’ But when I show this to people …” He clicked a button onscreen and a transparent 3-D model of the brain popped up, spinning on its axis, filled with nodes and lines too numerous to count. “They go ‘What the _____!’”

What Zador showed me was a map of 50,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex of a mouse. It indicated where the cell bodies of every neuron sat and where they sent their long axon branches. A neural map of this size and detail has never been made before. Forgoing the traditional method of brain mapping that involves marking neurons with fluorescence, Zador had taken an unusual approach that drew on the long tradition of molecular biology research at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island. He used bits of genomic information to imbue a unique RNA sequence or “bar code” into each individual neuron. He then dissected the brain into cubes like a sheet cake and fed the pieces into a DNA sequencer. The result: a 3-D rendering of 50,000 neurons in the mouse cortex (with as many more to be added soon) mapped with single cell resolution.

New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience | WIRED

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?

Another week, another school shooting. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is the eighth school shooting resulting in death or injury this year, yet we have only completed seven weeks. It is, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the 1,607th mass shooting since the rampage of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, widely thought to have been the country’s best hope at changing gun control laws.

It didn’t. And gun violence in schools continues.

But in the midst of the gun control debate, it can be easy to forget that there are humans—often children—who have borne witness to terrifying nightmarish scenes that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. What will happen to them?

While much research has been done into the minds and motives of mass shooters, the psychology of school shooting survivors is in its infancy—though the rate and increasing population of subjects means that it is a burgeoning field. According to The Washington Post, there are more than 150,000 school shooting survivors since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, considered to be the first of modern school mass shootings.

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?