Will Baum, LCSW

From Slate:  Girls don’t start out more anxious than boys, but they usually end up that way.

When it comes to our preconceived notions about women and anxiety, women are unfairly being dragged through the mud. While women are indeed more fretful than men on average right now, this difference is mostly the result of a cultural setup—one in which major social and parenting biases lead to girls becoming needlessly nervous adults. In reality, the idea that women are “naturally” twice as anxious as men is nothing more than a pernicious illusion.

Bryan Caplan looks at twin studies and concludes:  Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them (WSJ):

The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up.  I call it “Serenity Parenting”: Parents need the serenity to accept the things they cannot change, the courage to change the things they can, and (thank you twin research) the wisdom to know the difference.  Focus on enjoying your journey with your child, instead of trying to control his destination. Accept that your child’s future depends mostly on him, not your sacrifices. Realize that the point of discipline is to make your kid treat the people around him decently—not to mold him into a better adult.

Suffering Souls, from the New Yorker, a ways back (via MindHacks):

Psychopaths are as old as Cain, and they are believed to exist in all cultures, although they are more prevalent in individualistic societies in the West. The Yupik Eskimos use the term kunlangeta to describe a man who repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, and takes sexual advantage of women, according to a 1976 study by Jane M. Murphy, an anthropologist then at Harvard University. She asked an Eskimo what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, and he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”

Slate asks, Is Facebook Making Us Sad?

Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one’s assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn’t make the cut, either. The site’s very design—the presence of a “Like” button, without a corresponding “Hate” button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring.

Helpful tips from Beth S. Patterson (GoodTherapy.org):

I often suggest journal writing to my clients who are grieving the death of a loved one or dealing with a difficult life change as a useful way to deal with and befriend the intense emotions that often accompany these experiences. Some say, “oh, I’m not a good writer.”  To that I reply that what is important is the act of expression, not how pretty or correct it is. In fact, the word “express” literally means “push out”, that is, pushing out all of those churning, claustrophobic and chaotic feelings in a way that gives them “breathing room” and makes them workable.

The question by the Edge Foundation:  ”What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”  163 answers are here.  Here’s a sampling, from the Wired team:

- “Cognitive load”, from Nicholas Carr: a limitation in how much information entering our consciousness we can process at any instant;

- “The Pareto principle”, from Clay Shirky: a reminder that the richest or busiest or most connected participants in a system will account for much more wealth, or activity, or connectedness than average”;

- “Connective intelligence”, from Matt Ridley: the idea that human achievement “is entirely a networking phenomenon” and is “based on collective intelligence”.

David Brooks pays tribute to brain science in a big New Yorker piece.

Help comes from the strangest places. We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

On Road to Recovery, Past Adversity Provides a Map (NYT)

New research suggests that resilience may have at least as much to do with how often people have faced adversity in past as it does with who they are — their personality, their genes, for example — or what they’re facing now. That is, the number of life blows a person has taken may affect his or her mental toughness more than any other factor.

Theories about why people–and animals–yawn.  One tidbit:

Children under 5 are not subject to contagious yawning, but adult humans, chimpanzees, monkeys and dogs — animals with advanced social skills — are. Apparently an understanding of the mental states of others is required before yawning becomes catching

NYT:  A Fate That Narcissists Will Hate: Being Ignored.

Narcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species.  Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored.  The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.

Reaction underway:  ”Odd and haphazard,” says PsychCentral.