A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Long before Amy Chua’s provocative 2011 memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, raised the bar for tough-love parenting, psychologists at UC Berkeley were studying the effects of three kinds of child-rearing: authoritarian (too hard), permissive (too soft) and authoritative (combo). Now, with the recent release of UC Berkeley alumna Kim Wong Keltner’s memoir, Tiger Babies Strike Back, along [...]
Last year, I took twenty Year 11 students on a mountain biking camp. We rode through the Stromlo Forest in Canberra by day, and camped in sub zero temperatures by night. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve really appreciated some of the analogies I could draw between by experiences mountain biking [...]
Stanford researchers have come up with a new way to get picky preschoolers to eat more vegetables. Psychologists Sarah Gripshover and Ellen Markman found that teaching children the importance of healthy foods and why their bodies need a variety of foods drives kids to voluntarily eat more vegetables. The findings, published in the journal Psychological [...]
Although inherited DNA genes cannot be changed, the way that genes express themselves can be altered by individual actions, it is said. A work out can positively affect the way cells interact with fat stored in the body, a new study published in the journal PLOS Genetics found. The genes have attached 'methyl groups' which [...]
Over the past 10 years, the research company Gallup have surveyed over a million US students with regard to their strengths, levels of hope and engagement and their wellbeing. Gallup recently published their Student Success Model in which they described some of the wellbeing factors that impact on success. 1. Strengths identification remains as simple as [...]
For many people, race does matter, even if they don’t know it. They feel more empathy when they see white skin pierced than black. This is known as the racial empathy gap. To study it, researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca showed participants all of whom were white video clips of a needle or an [...]
SPARX — a fantasy role-playing game designed by the University of Auckland to teach young people with depression how to manage and overcome their condition — has found a publisher and distributor, it was announced today. The game first came to the attention of the public when a clinical trial involving it was published in [...]
Why is it so hard for some of us to keep things confidential? Psychologists suggest it has to do with our personality and what we've learned from our parents. The world is full of secrets. They range from the fascinating (who is the Mona Lisa?), to the dangerous (what is North Korea planning?) to the quirky [...]
I believe that being genuinely engaged does wonders for your wellbeing. One of the determinants of engagement is a level of independence, or autonomy. Schools go to great lengths to give students (and teachers) the impression that they encourage independence. However, in the scheme of things, most of what occurs at school is prescribed for [...]
Having been hospitalized for an infection increased one's risk of later developing a mood disorder by 62 percent. As patients acquired more infections, their odds of developing a mood disorder increased proportionally: five hospitalizations for infections increased their risk by almost five times. The association remained significant over 15 years after the infection was treated. [...]
