The Most Obvious Sign Of Intelligence

Brain scans measured the total surface area of the cortex and its thickness.

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Everything Happens for a Reason—And Other Things Not to Say When Tragedy Strikes

“Well, it’s the good kind of cancer. You will be better soon.”

Those are the words Elizabeth Gillette heard from some people when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at 21 years old. She would need several rounds of chemotherapy followed by radiation treatment. She was terrified — and shocked to hear anyone refer to her cancer as good.

These “responses effectively closed me off to having any further conversation with them because I knew they didn’t understand how scared I was feeling,” said Gillette, LCSW, now an attachment-focused therapist, who specializes in working with individuals and couples as their families grow.

“You can always try again.”

Those are the words Gillette’s clients have heard from family and friends after sharing they’d suffered a miscarriage.

“God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.”

This is another unhelpful response. It “implies that the person must handle the situation well and if they are having a tough time, it must mean something about them and their abilities,” Gillette said.

“At least you have your health,” “At least they’re no longer in pain,” “I know how you feel, I’ve lost ______. Or “I’m dealing with this hard thing too.”

These are other examples of phrases that can be hurtful, according to Laura Torres, LPC, a holistic mental health counselor who loves supporting people in navigating anxiety, stress, self-worth issues, relationship challenges and life transitions.

When something terrible happens to someone, we yearn to be supportive. We yearn to say the right things. But often we just blurt out inappropriate things (like the above) and clichés like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “Of course, it’ll be OK; don’t worry.”

In trying to be helpful, we say things we think will be positive, encouraging and optimistic, but end up coming across as callous. Sometimes, we try to distract the person or shift the focus to ourselves, Torres said. And that doesn’t help either.

Sometimes we don’t say anything at all, she said.

We think that if we acknowledge the pain someone is experiencing, we’ll only make it worse. We also turn to clichés because we’re uncomfortable with pain. “I think our ability to be with someone else’s pain and vulnerability is a direct reflection of our ability to be with our own pain,” Torres said. “If we feel shame around our own tenderness, we are going to try to fix or avoid it in others.”

Whatever our reasons, any time we try to reassure someone, fix the situation or ignore it altogether, “it can feel dismissive and invalidating,” Torres said. We send the message that their pain is not OK. It is “not welcome in the context of this relationship.”

We essentially tell the person: “I don’t want to hear that you’re sad right now; let’s focus on something happier, because this is making me uncomfortable,” Gillette said. We essentially tell them that we don’t want to have a real conversation about their experience, she said.

We also send another damaging message: You better hold it together. Which is exactly what people try to do. They try to deal with their pain and heartache on their own. They try to push through. They do this so the people around them can feel more comfortable, Torres said. “As you can imagine, this can add layers of emotion, [such as] resentment, sadness, frustration, guilt on top of the initial pain, which is why I think we often don’t reach out for support.”

Offering genuine support doesn’t have to be complicated. These tips can help.

Just listen. “When we are struggling, what we really need is to feel seen, heard, and know that we are not alone,” Torres said. “We need someone to just sit there and be with us in our pain rather than trying to make it go away.”

In fact, being present with a person’s pain is the most loving thing we can do, Gillette said.

Torres shared this poignant quote from Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton, which speaks to this: “We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain…people who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpless vigil to our pain.”

Honor their experience. According to Gillette, you might say something like: “I am so sorry you are experiencing this. I want you to know I am here and will continue to be here. I will check on you in a couple of days to see how you’re doing.” She noted that this honors the person’s experience, instead of dismissing it or trying to change it.

Anticipate their needs. Asking someone what they need might make them even more overwhelmed, so it’s important to try to anticipate their needs, and meet them. For instance, when tragedy strikes, people usually aren’t thinking about day-to-day needs, such as grocery shopping or dinner or laundry or who’s taking the kids to school.

According to Gillette, you might say: “I would love to cook dinner for your family. Would it be better to come by on Saturday or Sunday to drop it off on the porch for you?”

Seek out additional resources. If you’d like to read more on this topic, Gillette loves the book There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love by Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell.

When tragedy strikes, it’s understandable that we don’t know what to say. Even therapists get tongue-tied. “I know that I have held back or turned to clichés when I’m stuck in trying to say the right or perfect thing to support someone,” Torres said. And that’s OK.

The individuals who made unhelpful comments to Gillette weren’t trying to hurt her. It had nothing to do with them not caring. They also were shocked and scared, and in their distress insensitive words stumbled out. Which Gillette now understands.

“There is no perfect thing to say that will make things better,” Torres said. “All we have to do is show up and be there with our love and tenderness.”

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The Type Of Hobbies That Make You Happier

For the study, 582 people described strategies for improving their well-being.

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Managing Dental Anxiety

Fear of going to the dentist is a common health-care related anxiety. Patients often express a broad range of triggers, such as the fear of pain, claustrophobia, needles, sounds, or sensations. Unfortunately, long term avoidance of oral healthcare can lead to deeply debilitating problems that can be physically, psychologically and socially impactful. Our mouth represents a center point for our survival, by impacting our ability to eat comfortably and communicate. So, caring for this immensely important part of our bodies is crucial for both our general health and psychological wellbeing. 

Often minor dental problems can be easily ignored. Many people may be aware that something feels wrong or isn’t right in their mouths. It might be an area where food becomes stuck, it could be a sharp or rough part of a tooth, or it could be the experience of sensitivity to hot, cold or sweet foods. It may simply manifest as a general feeling of irrigation around the gums. Unfortunately, most minor dental problems tend to progress to major dental problems with time and ignoring small issues can culminate into a larger and more impactful concern. 

There are many aspects of dental treatment recognized as specific causes or triggers of anxiety. Undergoing dental treatment is a very multi-sensory experience. There is the feeling associated with having the teeth, lips, cheeks tongue and gums touched. There is the sound of the drill and suction. There is the taste of the gloves, instruments, and materials, the sight of the tools and instruments, and the smell that every dental practice seems to have. For some people, this can culminate in an overwhelming experience. 

For others, it is a specific part of the dental experience that induces their anxiety. The most common of these are the fear of needles or injections, the sound or feel of the drill, and the experience of people within their personal space. In many cases, a previous dental experience (often as a child) has become the nucleus of the anxiety. In these circumstances, many patients report that the experience of pain and the feeling of powerlessness are the areas of greatest concern. 

Unpacking common dental anxieties

It’s difficult to address something that can’t be identified. Exploring and unpacking the negativity associated with any previously difficult experience(s) is the first step. Sometimes this is best done with a counselor or psychologist, depending of the severity of the trauma. However, opening up to a friend or family member that is available to accompany and support you throughout any interactions with a dentist can also be very important. The outcome that you are trying to achieve is to be able to identify and articulate the components of dental treatment that you find difficult, so that these many be carefully minimized or avoided.

Anxiety associated with experiencing pain can be one of the easiest phobias to address. Often this has developed as a result of experiencing unexpected pain during a dental procedure. This may have been when a filling was being placed, or a tooth was being removed, and typically causes tense anticipation and fear during subsequent dental interactions.

The use of local anesthesia and local anesthesia placement techniques have developed considerably. There are many strategies and approaches that we commonly take to ensure “profound anesthesia” prior to undertaking a procedure. Clinically, it is often appropriate to take a trust-building approach with patients who carry this form of anxiety, where we aim to complete simple procedures in a pain-free manner in order to build a patient’s confidence and experience with the normal sensations associated with dental treatment.

Needle phobia can also be easily mitigated. Many dental procedures can be performed without the need of anesthesia, and there are new non-traditional forms of delivering local anesthesia that don’t involve a conventional syringe. Utilizing local anesthetic delivery devices can allow a patient to receive profound anesthesia painlessly. This technique is commonly combined with the use of a topical anesthetic that pre-numbs the area which needs to be anesthetized. 

Anxiety related to personal space and bring touched around the mouth can be very impactful and make even simple non-invasive dental care such as a check-up difficult. Phobias of this nature often derive from a feeling of helplessness, or not being in control. In many circumstances, the dental experience can be greatly improved by ensuring patients know they have the power to stop the procedure at any time, and that this will be respected under all circumstances. Many patients who experience this type of anxiety benefit from having the steps in a procedure verbally explained or narrated to them, so they can anticipate any sensations that they may experience. In my clinical experience, the core component of this anxiety relates to trust, and through familiarity with the dental team, and patient exposure to the dental setting this kind of phobia can be overcome.

Many patients suffer from anxiety related to the status of their oral health, the extent of treatment they may need, and the cost related to that treatment. This fear of the unknown can be remedied with clear and forthright communication. Every dentist is trained in clinical diagnosis and intervention, but the time and care taken to communicate in an effective way is subject to an individual’s personality. Some people can be told something once, and they’ll never forget it. Some of us need to be shown something visually, some of us just don’t get it until we experience it first-hand. As a result, finding a dentist capable of communicating your oral health status, quantifying the options available, and establishing an itemised treatment plan in a way that you can understand is essential. Identifying, and understanding is the first step towards owning your oral health, and quantifying a challenge is the first step towards solving it.

Finding a path forward:

1. Identify the aspect of dental treatment that is causing you anxiety. Understand that you are not alone, and dental anxiety is relatively common.
2. Communicate your concerns to friends and family and find someone who can accompany you during appointments. 
3. Communicate with the dentist, or dental practice you feel will be the best fit for you. For some people, prioritising quick appointments and availability is most important. For some, the gender of the doctor, their training, language or cultural background, or specific interest in managing anxious patients are more important. Dentists dedicate their professional lives to helping people through difficult procedures, and many find particular satisfaction in helping anxious or phobic patients overcome their fears.
4. Understand that dental treatment takes time, and it’s not in anyone’s best interest to jump into treating an anxious patient at the first appointment. Anxious patients often “just want it over with” and can further perpetuate their phobia by engaging in unplanned or sporadic treatment.
5. The first appointment is to meet and discuss. If an examination is possible, then this can be completed but discussing the type of anxiety, any possible triggers, and how you need to be treated is the most important outcome of this first visit. 
6. Find out the extent of any treatment that is required and ensure this is communicated to you in a way that you fully understand it. There are often a number of different options to solve a dental issue, and it is an important step in anxiety management to derive empowerment from making important decisions about the future of your oral health.
7. Taking the first step: By this stage you will have identified extent of your dental anxiety, found a suitable and sympathetic dentist, and identified the extent of your oral health needs. It’s at this stage that it’s appropriate to discuss the clinical approach that will best serve your needs, which may involve the experiential minimisation, or trust-building strategies outlined above. The adjunct use of sedation therapies may also be beneficial where appropriate.

Whether overcoming dental anxiety is to eat comfortably or is to strengthen the influential psychosocial components of self-esteem, the necessity for oral health is important for everyone. Developing an empathic and trustful relationship with an oral healthcare professional is possible and feeling empowered to approach this challenge on your own terms can become a source of strength which impacts across many aspects of our lives.

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How Self-Compassion Can Fight Perfectionism

“Be kind to one another.”

You don’t need to be a die-hard Ellen DeGeneres fan to appreciate the value of that motto. And while we’re reminded how kindness goes a long way in our everyday interactions with others, we often forget to apply it to those who need it most: ourselves.

Whether it’s setting a personal weight-loss goal, or believing that we can ace a final exam—all of us are familiar with the experience of setting high standards. We’re even more familiar with the inevitable let-down that comes from not living up to those very standards.

Enter, the life of a perfectionist.

But, importantly, not all perfectionists operate the same. There are different types that are associated with different psychological outcomes.

On the one hand, if you strive to attain your ambitious goals and prevent yourself from being overly self-critical, you might be a personal strivings perfectionist. This isn’t so bad. In fact, this type of perfectionism is more likely to lead to relatively higher levels of self-esteem and decreased levels of negative affect.

On the other hand, if you constantly believe that you are not good enough, if you judge yourself by your shortcomings, and if you are constantly worried that other people won’t approve of you, then you might be more on the side of maladaptive perfectionism. This form of perfectionism has been linked to depressive symptoms in both adolescents and adults.

It’s no wonder then that researchers are curious to know more about interventions that help buffer against this maladaptive perfectionism. In one recent study, researchers examined the possibility that self-compassion can protect us against the negative effects of maladaptive perfectionism. The questions is, can self-directed kindness increase our chances of living a full, healthy life? Can it combat the symptoms of depression that come from this less ideal version of perfectionism?

Understanding self-compassion

You may ask, “What exactly is self-compassion? And is it something that can be cultivated by anyone, or is a skill that is only available to some of us?” To shed some light on these questions, researchers have broken down self-compassion into three main components: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.

While the first component is self-explanatory, the other two require careful consideration. When something terrible happens to us, often the initial reaction is to sit and wallow in our grief and self-pity. We convince ourselves that no one else is going through similar problems in their lives. But that is simply not true. Statistically speaking, it’s an erroneous judgment.

In order to be more accepting of ourselves, we need to realize that we are never as alone and isolated as we think we are. This is at the heart of common humanity.

At the same time, many of us are prone to over-analyzing painful experiences, or trying to avoid negative feelings altogether. Mindfulness then, is about acknowledging our thoughts, feelings, and emotions without judgement, and accepting them as part of the common human experience.

Back to our study. Taking into account these three sub-components, the researchers in the present investigation set out to predict that self-compassion would weaken the relationship between perfectionism and depression in both adolescent and adult populations.

The study

541 adolescents from grades 7 to 10 were recruited for the first study. Participants were asked to complete three online questionnaires during school hours, as part of a larger well-being intervention study. The questionnaires tapped into perfectionism, mood/feelings, self-worth and self-esteem, as well as reported self-compassion.

As predicted, self-compassion was found to moderate, or weaken, the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in this sample of adolescents. Next, the researchers wanted to see if the results would hold for adults.

515 adults from the general population were recruited through online advertisements. Again, participants were asked to complete the same questionnaires. Once again in line with the researchers’ predictions, self-compassion was found to weaken the relationship between perfectionism and depression in the adult sample. What was true for teens was also true for adults later on in life.

Why it matters

It seems that more than anything, today’s culture values perfection. Parents and teachers may push us towards excellence at school, our friends may judge us by how we dress and act in their company, and perhaps worst of all, our social media accounts constantly fool us into thinking that there are people out there who actually have perfect lives.

Good news, bad news. The bad news is that we can’t completely eradicate perfectionistic thoughts. Good news is that we can try to change our relationship to those thoughts through self-compassion. If we learn to cultivate self-kindness, connection, and mindfulness as we strive toward achieving our goals, any setback we face along the way will be met with greater resilience and mental strength. As a result, we are less likely to fall victim to the debilitating effects of depression, and more likely to live a happy, balanced life.

So, as Ellen DeGeneres reminds us, always be kind to others. But before you do, be sure to look after yourself first. In this case, it’s okay to be a little selfish.

References

Ferrari, M., Yap, K., Scott, N., Einstein, D., & Ciarrochi, J. (2018). Self-compassion moderates the perfectionism and depression link in both adolescence and adulthood. PLOS ONE, 13(2), e0192022. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192022

Hill, R., Huelsman, T., & Araujo, G. (2010). Perfectionistic concerns suppress associations between perfectionistic strivings and positive life outcomes. Personality And Individual Differences, 48(5), 584-589. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2009.12.011

NEFF, K. (2003). The Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Self-Compassion. Self And Identity, 2(3), 223-250. doi: 10.1080/15298860309027

Stoeber, J., & Otto, K. (2006). Positive Conceptions of Perfectionism: Approaches, Evidence, Challenges. Personality And Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 295-319. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1004_2

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I Have Problems with Depression

One of The Main Problems I Have Noticed Is Things That I Like Make Me Sad. Why? So for a few years now I’ve had problems with depression and also anxiety. I don’t have the funds or time to see a therapist, so i try to take care of my mental health on my own, by seeing friends and keeping busy with hobbies, etc. Logically, things i enjoy should make me happy, like watching tv shows, reading or listening to music for instance. But lately these have just made me feel more depressed. It’s gotten to the point where i won’t finish books or series or won’t draw or won’t listen to certain songs because i just feel really sad and empty when i do. I don’t understand why, and that is a problem because if i can’t understand it i can’t fix it. Why do the things that i love not make me happy anymore?

A. There are several possible reasons. One is that you might have depression. Depression makes it difficult to enjoy life. Another less likely reason is that the things you love could be changing. Young people are sometimes easily bored. Maybe your tastes are evolving. You might try reading other books, or listening to different music, etc. If you find that nothing makes you happy, then depression might be the problem and not changing interests.

It would be helpful to document your moods. It’s good to have a record of mood changes for counseling purposes. It might lead to a deeper understanding about the potential problem. For instance, you might find that you feel particularly upset after interacting with certain people or times when you don’t sleep well. Those types of facts would be good to know.

You mentioned not being able to afford therapy. What about your parents? Perhaps they would pay for therapy. If you have health insurance, there might only be a small co-pay. It might not cost as much you think and some therapists offer sliding scale fees. It’s good to ask.

You are correct when you say that it’s difficult to fix a problem that is not well understood. That is true for any problem. Professional mental health treatment is the solution. It works for many people and it could work for you too. Start the process of finding a therapist by asking your parents and or also the school counselor. Between your parents and the school counselor, you should be able to find help. Please take care.

Dr. Kristina Randle

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I Have Problems with Depression

One of The Main Problems I Have Noticed Is Things That I Like Make Me Sad. Why? So for a few years now I’ve had problems with depression and also anxiety. I don’t have the funds or time to see a therapist, so i try to take care of my mental health on my own, by seeing friends and keeping busy with hobbies, etc. Logically, things i enjoy should make me happy, like watching tv shows, reading or listening to music for instance. But lately these have just made me feel more depressed. It’s gotten to the point where i won’t finish books or series or won’t draw or won’t listen to certain songs because i just feel really sad and empty when i do. I don’t understand why, and that is a problem because if i can’t understand it i can’t fix it. Why do the things that i love not make me happy anymore?

A. There are several possible reasons. One is that you might have depression. Depression makes it difficult to enjoy life. Another less likely reason is that the things you love could be changing. Young people are sometimes easily bored. Maybe your tastes are evolving. You might try reading other books, or listening to different music, etc. If you find that nothing makes you happy, then depression might be the problem and not changing interests.

It would be helpful to document your moods. It’s good to have a record of mood changes for counseling purposes. It might lead to a deeper understanding about the potential problem. For instance, you might find that you feel particularly upset after interacting with certain people or times when you don’t sleep well. Those types of facts would be good to know.

You mentioned not being able to afford therapy. What about your parents? Perhaps they would pay for therapy. If you have health insurance, there might only be a small co-pay. It might not cost as much you think and some therapists offer sliding scale fees. It’s good to ask.

You are correct when you say that it’s difficult to fix a problem that is not well understood. That is true for any problem. Professional mental health treatment is the solution. It works for many people and it could work for you too. Start the process of finding a therapist by asking your parents and or also the school counselor. Between your parents and the school counselor, you should be able to find help. Please take care.

Dr. Kristina Randle

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Podcast: From Tragedy to Transformation – How a Psychologist is Born

Linda Meyers was twenty-eight and the mother of three young boys when her mother, after a lifetime of threats, died by suicide. Staggered by conflicting feelings of relief and remorse, she believed that the best way to give meaning to her mother’s death was to make changes to her own life. Bolstered by the women’s movement of the seventies, she left her marriage, went to college, started a successful family acting business, and established a fulfilling career. She recounts all of this in a memoir titled The Tell, and speaks candidly with our hosts to share her fascinating and inspiring story.

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Linda Meyers Show Highlights:

“It was a very very special time, because I had the support of Betty Friedan, of Gloria Steinem, of the whole women’s movement.” ~ Linda Meyers

[1:45]   What was it like for a woman in college in the 70s?

[2:55]   The impact of her mother’s suicide.

[9:10]   Being a psychologist as a kid.

[11:25] Was there discrimination in the classroom?

[13:44] The boy who became Ralph Lauren.

[15:24] The family acting business.

 

 

About Our Guest

Linda I. Meyers is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City and Princeton, N.J., who has been published in professional and academic journals. Two chapters from her debut memoir were published in 2016 — “The Flowers,” a top-five finalist in Alligator Juniper’s annual contest in creative nonfiction, and “The Spring Line” in Post Road.

The Tell: A Memoir

 

About The Psych Central Show Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar and anxiety disorders. In addition to hosting The Psych Central Show, Gabe is an associate editor for PsychCentral.com. He also runs an online Facebook community, The Positive Depression/Bipolar Happy Place, and invites you to join. To work with Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

 

 

Vincent M. Wales is a former suicide prevention counselor who lives with persistent depressive disorder. In addition to co-hosting The Psych Central Show, Vincent is the author of several award-winning novels and the creator of costumed hero Dynamistress. Visit his websites at www.vincentmwales.com and www.dynamistress.com.

 

 

 

 

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A.I. needs to learn like a human child.

Matthew Hutson summarizes efforts to nudge machine learning researchers away from the assumption that "computers trained on mountains of data can learn just about anything—including common sense—with few, if any, programmed rules." Some clips from his article:

In February, MIT launched Intelligence Quest, a research initiative now raising hundreds of millions of dollars to understand human intelligence in engineering terms. Such efforts, researchers hope, will result in AIs that sit somewhere between pure machine learning and pure instinct. They will boot up following some embedded rules, but will also learn as they go.

Part of the quest will be to discover what babies know and when—lessons that can then be applied to machines. That will take time, says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington. AI2 recently announced a $125 million effort to develop and test common sense in AI. "We would love to build on the representational structure innate in the human brain," Etzioni says, "but we don't understand how the brain processes language, reasoning, and knowledge."

Harvard University psychologist Elizabeth Spelke has argued that we have at least four "core knowledge" systems giving us a head start on understanding objects, actions, numbers, and space. We are intuitive physicists, for example, quick to understand objects and their interactions...Gary Marcus has composed a minimum list of 10 human instincts that he believes should be baked into AIs, including notions of causality, cost-benefit analysis, and types versus instances (dog versus my dog).

The debate over where to situate an AI on a spectrum between pure learning and pure instinct will continue. But that issue overlooks a more practical concern: how to design and code such a blended machine. How to combine machine learning—and its billions of neural network parameters—with rules and logic isn't clear. Neither is how to identify the most important instincts and encode them flexibly. But that hasn't stopped some researchers and companies from trying.

...researchers are working to inject their AIs with the same intuitive physics that babies seem to be born with. Computer scientists at DeepMind in London have developed what they call interaction networks. They incorporate an assumption about the physical world: that discrete objects exist and have distinctive interactions. Just as infants quickly parse the world into interacting entities, those systems readily learn objects' properties and relationships. Their results suggest that interaction networks can predict the behavior of falling strings and balls bouncing in a box far more accurately than a generic neural network.

Vicarious, a robotics software company in San Francisco, California, is taking the idea further with what it calls schema networks. Those systems, too, assume the existence of objects and interactions, but they also try to infer the causality that connects them. By learning over time, the company's software can plan backward from desired outcomes, as people do. (I want my nose to stop itching; scratching it will probably help.) The researchers compared their method with a state-of-the-art neural network on the Atari game Breakout, in which the player slides a paddle to deflect a ball and knock out bricks. Because the schema network could learn about causal relationships—such as the fact that the ball knocks out bricks on contact no matter its velocity—it didn't need extra training when the game was altered. You could move the target bricks or make the player juggle three balls, and the schema network still aced the game. The other network flailed.

Besides our innate abilities, humans also benefit from something most AIs don't have: a body. To help software reason about the world, Vicarious is "embodying" it so it can explore virtual environments, just as a baby might learn something about gravity by toppling a set of blocks. In February, Vicarious presented a system that looked for bounded regions in 2D scenes by essentially having a tiny virtual character traverse the terrain. As it explored, the system learned the concept of containment, which helps it make sense of new scenes faster than a standard image-recognition convnet that passively surveyed each scene in full. Concepts—knowledge that applies to many situations—are crucial for common sense. "In robotics it's extremely important that the robot be able to reason about new situations," says Dileep George, a co-founder of Vicarious. Later this year, the company will pilot test its software in warehouses and factories, where it will help robots pick up, assemble, and paint objects before packaging and shipping them.

One of the most challenging tasks is to code instincts flexibly, so that AIs can cope with a chaotic world that does not always follow the rules. Autonomous cars, for example, cannot count on other drivers to obey traffic laws. To deal with that unpredictability, Noah Goodman, a psychologist and computer scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, helps develop probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). He describes them as combining the rigid structures of computer code with the mathematics of probability, echoing the way people can follow logic but also allow for uncertainty: If the grass is wet it probably rained—but maybe someone turned on a sprinkler. Crucially, a PPL can be combined with deep learning networks to incorporate extensive learning. While working at Uber, Goodman and others invented such a "deep PPL," called Pyro. The ride-share company is exploring uses for Pyro such as dispatching drivers and adaptively planning routes amid road construction and game days. Goodman says PPLs can reason not only about physics and logistics, but also about how people communicate, coping with tricky forms of expression such as hyperbole, irony, and sarcasm.

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Social Anxiety or Avoidant Personality Disorder?

A few months ago, I started seeing a counselor for the first time at my college. The reality is, I should have seen a counselor a very long time ago but I was always reluctant too until a recent breakdown. My entire life, I’ve always felt very anxious around almost any social situation. I have always been extremely shy and struggle making friends. I assume people are thinking negative of me and won’t like me, therefore I may come off really distant and very difficult to get to know. I struggle trusting anyone, making it really hard for me to make friendships (or keep friendships of any kind). It causes me a lot of issues in my job and my professional performance because I lack self-confidence and fear being judged. The counselor seemed to agree that what I was explaining seemed a lot like social anxiety. Even going to see a counselor was extremely challenging even after multiple sessions, I was still feeling as anxious/shy since the first few sessions. It’s really hard for me to warm up to people (if not seemingly impossible even if I know them for years) even though the counselor was very kind and nice. I found therapy hard and became frustrated with myself, so I called it quits after like the 8th or 9th session. I did make some progress and learned a lot, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. But overall, I felt hopeless like things for me weren’t ever going to change. I’m able to “Challenge” my negative thoughts with more positive ones but it didn’t really change how I truly felt. So, I began doing some research online about SAD and came across the term “avoidant personality disorder”…the description seemed very similar to SAD and began to wonder what if I had APD? Then, I also learned that treating personality disorders can be very difficult and may not be curable but treatment may relieve some symptoms. It kind of made me feel hopeless because what if the reason I haven’t been able to be “free” from this is because I have APD? Or am I overreacting? I’m not a huge fan of labels but wondering if it’s common for a therapist to tell you if they diagnosed you or not? Mine didn’t really ever “diagnose” me, they did however tell me the therapy we did was CBT.

A:  It is time to return to the therapist. By your own words you made progress and it would be reasonable that after only 8-9 sessions that not all the work needed was completed. The real question here isn’t what the proper label is, but rather why you left therapy. Consider therapy like a microcosm of your life. You had an okay relationship with the therapist and then couldn’t maintain it. The work is in figuring out what pushes you away, and talking it through with the therapist. In this situation (as many in therapy) the process is the intervention needed. I’d make an appointment with him and put your effort there rather than on trying to self-diagnose.

Wishing you patience and peace,
Dr. Dan
Proof Positive Blog @ PsychCentral

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7 Things Children of Divorced Parents Need to Hear

Alice’s parents sat her down to tell her that they were going to get a divorce. She expected it long before they spoke. Recently their fighting escalating into no communication at all and the tension in the house was unbearable. Even though she was only a pre-teen, Alice was already worried about what the divorce would look like. Her best friend’s parents divorced the year earlier and they were constantly using their children to communicate simple exchanges.

Allen was an adult by the time his parents decided to divorce. But he still had some of the same worries as Alice. Not wanting to take sides between his parents, Allen was confused by his parents continual confiding in him details that he would rather not know. His parents thought that because he was older, he did not need to hear the same things a child needed. But they were wrong.

Regardless of the age, a child of divorced parents needs to hear these seven things. More importantly, they need to see the statements reinforced by their parent’s behavior. Divorce is hard for a child and sadly many parents make it even harder by doing the opposite of these statements.

1. “It’s not your fault.” This statement cannot be said enough to a child. Most kids blame themselves for the divorce. Kids are naturally self-centered so they see all events, especially traumatic ones, as being all about them. Thus, they take on excessive responsibility and make the divorce about how terrible they were. This is why many kids are well-behaved during and immediately after the divorce process. Saying this to the child heals their insecurity and minimizes their feelings of guilt.
2. “Both of us still love you.” It is important that a child hear from both parents on a regular basis that they are still loved by their parents. This also means regular and consistent communication (at least one time per day but not more than three times) between the child and parent who is not physically with the child. However, if the divorce means one parent has physically abandoned the marriage and their child, giving the child false hope of a parent returning someday is hurtful. Rather, statements like, “My love for you is so much that it could fill 10 people,” is helpful.
3. “You will not be placed in the middle.” It is so sad the number of times a parent selfishly places a child in the middle of their anger over the divorce. This is far more traumatic to a child then the divorce itself. Using a child manipulatively to get back at the other parent is disgusting. The only good part is that when the child becomes an adult, this backfires on the manipulative parent as the child often turns the manipulation back on that parent. The better decision is for both parents to agree not to place the child in the middle of their divorce, anger, grief, sadness, and/or shame.
4. “The marriage was not a mistake.” Too often parents try to give a simple explanation for the divorce by saying the marriage was a mistake. They do this to blame the marriage rather than blaming themselves or the other parent. However, if the child is a product of that marriage/relationship, then what they hear is that they are a mistake. Once spoken, these words never leave a child and often generate self-confidence issues throughout adulthood. Instead, parents should take individual responsibility by saying, “I made some mistakes in the marriage.” They should not blame the other parent solely for the breakup of the marriage.
5. “We commit to you not to tear the other parent apart.” A child who is the product of a divorce situation is still one half each of their parents. This is even more so when the parent is a biological parent. Tearing the other parent apart in front of the child sets the child up for believing that they will be just like that parent thereby increasing the number of insecurities. By committing to the child that there will be no disparaging remarks, their insecurities will be minimized.
6. “You are a priority.” Now that the marriage is over, the child should become the priority. Even when a parent remarries, the child needs to be reassured that they will not be abandoned but rather will remain a main focus in the life of their parent. Whatever the timesharing agreement, when the child is with the parent, the parent should prioritize the child. However, if a parent fails to do this, regularly pointing this out to the child is cruel. Children are not stupid, they will draw their own conclusions and their relationship with the neglectful parent will naturally suffer.
7. “We will answer your questions.” Parents incorrectly believe that the child wants to know why the marriage ended. Most kids are observant and already know why. Their parents fight, one parent is never around, they are not nice to each other, or they never talk. It is better for the child to initiate any questions about the cause of the divorce rather than a parent offering the information. However, parents should be careful to answer only the question that the child asked in the simplest form possible without any elaboration and with complete honesty. This is a bad time to lie to a kid as they will eventually discover the truth no matter how well it is hidden.

Fortunately for Alice, her parents said and did all of the seven statements. As a result, she was able to move past the divorce and onto her age appropriate stage of discover who she was. By contrast, Allen’s parents did just the opposite. This caused him to go into a deep depression which eventually led to hospitalization.

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The Facial Feature That Reveals A Narcissist

Just this part of the face is enough to reveal narcissistic tendencies.

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Managing Depression: 3 Simple Strategies to Create Joy

There is a very subtle and insidious cycle that frequently occurs for those who are struggling with feelings of depression. Whether it’s situational, acute, or chronic, feelings of depression build on themselves.  When we don’t feel great, we succumb to a sort of molasses-like slowdown … because we don’t feel great, we don’t feel like doing much. And because we don’t feel like doing much, that usually includes slowing down or stopping doing the things that have the potential to make us feel better. 

Thus begins the Vicious Cycle of Nots: 

Not feeling well leads to not doing stuff, which leads to not engaging in activities that could counter not feeling well, and so on.  

Creating joy to counter depression often requires us to acknowledge — really be conscious — that not feeling like engaging in helpful, joy-promoting activities is part and parcel of depressive feelings. Not feeling like it, however, is not a reason not to.  

Consider this: How often have you felt like going to the dentist to have your teeth cleaned, or heaven forbid, a root canal? Most likely never. Most people never EVER feel like going to the dentist for any reason. But we go. We go when it’s time or when we need to because we know — intellectually, in the place that stands aloof and independent from how we feel about the dentist — that it’s what needs to be done. Regardless of how we feel about it. For most of us, if we waited to feel like getting dental work, it wouldn’t ever happen and we’d all be walking around with terrible dental issues (if we still had any teeth at all).

When you feel depressed, you’re less likely to feel like calling a friend, getting some exercise, volunteering, doing some art or writing, or engaging in any of the other activities that have the potential to create joy in the face of depressive feelings. But like the dentist, if we allow our feelings to dictate our behaviors — we’re likely to stay stuck in the downward Vicious Cycle of Nots. 

Strategies for creating joy in the face of feelings of sadness or depression, and stress and anxiety, too, revolve primarily around making intellectual decisions with what you know, as opposed to how you feel. 

Strategies for creating joy when you have feelings of depression:

1. Accept your heart and your head.

Recognize that your heart and your head are rarely in lockstep, and that’s an advantage when it comes to creating joy. Just like you know you need to pay your taxes by April 15th regardless of how you feel about it, you likely know that any one of a number of activities will help you feel better, even if you don’t feel like doing them. Pay your taxes when they’re due and engage in activities that help you feel better, regardless of your feelings about either. Your feelings will lead you astray if you don’t, on both counts. 

2. Schedule things that make you feel good — don’t wait for inspiration.

We usually wait to feel like doing something to do it, which is counterproductive if you’re not feeling well and need to do something to feel better. If you already know you’re feeling down (and feeling like staying rooted on your couch with a pint of ice cream), do yourself a kindness and treat going on walks, calling friends, taking a bubble bath, or any other helpful activity as if it were a dental appointment … put it on your calendar and do it because your calendar tells you it’s time to do it, regardless of your feelings of motivation in that moment.

3. Err on the side of distraction.

Often when we feel depressed about a particular issue, we decline to engage in distracting activities (socializing, exercising, and working) because we get some sense of control or satisfaction out of hyper-focusing on the problem. You know, as if keeping our eye on it ensures that it won’t get any further away from us. Of course, we intuitively know that this isn’t helpful for our mood or for solving the issue. Yet we often will turn down offers from concerned friends and family to get us out of the house. Sometimes it’s because we don’t want to feel obligated to “act” somehow better than we’re feeling; or we don’t want to be surrounded by merriment when we’re feeling low.

If you need some time to yourself, you should take it, and there’s no reason to force yourself into social settings where you feel like you have to fake feeling good. But if and when you decide to have some alone time, don’t wallow on the couch. Work on a project, get some healthy movement, organize something you’ve been avoiding, or do some journaling. Give yourself the gift of constructive alone time, not destructive isolation.

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Here’s What People Regret Most In Their Lives

Research reveals people's biggest regrets in life.

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A Nudge From The World’s Most Famous Prison

The Tower of London has been a prison, a palace, and a fortress. Now, it offers a lesson in behavioral economics.

The post A Nudge From The World’s Most Famous Prison appeared first on Neuromarketing.

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Learned Helplessness and C-PTSD

In 1967, Martin Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology and his research group carried out a fascinating, if somewhat morally dubious experiment in his quest to understand the origins of depression. In this experiment, three groups of dogs were confined in harnesses. The dogs in group 1 were simply placed in their harnesses then released after a period of time, but the dogs in groups 2 and 3 did not have it so easy. Instead they were subjected to electric shocks that could only be stopped by pulling a lever. The difference was that the the dogs in group 2 had access to the lever, whereas the dogs in group 3 did not. Instead, the dogs in group 3 would only receive relief from the shocks when their pair in group 2 pressed the lever, with the result that they experienced the shocks as random events.

The results were revelatory. In the second part of the experiment, the dogs were placed in a cage and again subjected to electric shocks, which they could escape by jumping over a low partition. The dogs from groups 1 and 2 did what any dog would be expected to do and searched for an escape root, but the dogs in group 3 did not, despite no other obstacles being placed in their way. Instead, they simply lay down and whined in a passive fashion. Because they had been habituated to thinking of the electric shocks as something over which they had no control, they did not even try to escape in the way they would have done without this acquired “training”. Indeed, trying to motivate the dogs with rewards of other forms of threat produced the same passive result. Only by physically prompting the dogs to move their legs and guiding them through the process of escaping could the researchers prompt the dogs to act in the normal fashion.

This experiment introduced to the psychological community the concept of “learned helplessness”. It goes without saying that designing a similar experiment for humans would cross the line between dubious ethics and outright illegality. However, we don’t need such a controlled experiment to observe the phenomenon of learned helplessness among humans; once you understand the concept you’ll find it everywhere. One of the things Seligman’s experiment shows us, perhaps, is that the irrational defeatism and despair that characterizes depressed individuals is not so much a product of our uniquely human brains, but a result of processes that are so deeply ingrained in our evolutionary makeup that we share them with dogs.

How to Think about Mental Health

The concept of learned helplessness also has great implications for the way we think about mental health — and mental illness — in general. One way of thinking about mental illness is to look at the brain as an extremely complicated, organic machine. If everything is working correctly, the result is a happy, balanced, and productive personality. If something is not, whether it has to do with chemical transmitters, neuron pathways, grey matter, or something else entirely, then the result is one or another form of mental illness.

One problem with this model is that our knowledge of the brain is not sufficient to use it as a guide to action. You may have heard, for instance, that depression is caused by “a chemical imbalance in the brain”, but in fact there has never been any real evidence for this claim and the psychiatric industry has quietly dropped it. There is a lot of evidence that antidepressants and other psychotropic medications work at combatting certain symptoms, but there is little agreement about how or why they do so.

However, there is a deeper problem: if we conceptualize the brain as a machine, why does it so frequently “go wrong”? It is true that some mental problems are caused by pathogens or injuries to the head, and others are the result of genetic causes, but most cases of depression or anxiety are responses to adverse life experiences. We often use the concept of “trauma” to explain the mechanism by which, for example, losing a loved one can lead to prolonged periods of depression. We have used the term for so long that we forget that it originated as a sort of metaphor. Trauma comes from the ancient Greek term for wound, so by using the term we are saying that traumatic events wound the brain and that symptoms which follow are the result of this wounding. We are coming to more and more appreciate the role that trauma, especially childhood trauma, plays in a wide range of common mental health diagnoses. By looking in the brain in this way, we are essentially subscribing to the view that the brain is not only an extremely complex machine, but an extraordinarily fragile one, so fragile, one might add, that it would appear a wonder that the human race has survived at all.

However, this is not the only way of looking at the issue. Let us return to the Seligman’s experiments with dogs. These experiments were far from being the first of their kind. Indeed, they had been a mainstay of psychological research for decades. Ivan Pavlov started when he demonstrated in 1901 that a dog who heard a bell ringing every time he was given food would start to salivate when he heard the bell even when no food was present. Subsequent research would demonstrate that dogs could be trained quite easily to perform a wide range of tasks through a structured set of rewards and punishments. What Seligman’s experiment showed is that the same kind of inputs can be used not to make a dog perform a particular task, but to make it entirely dysfunctional. “Learned helplessness” describes a state that comes not from a kind of metaphorical injury so much as a process of learning in which the dog learns that the world is random, cruel, and impossible to navigate through.

So too, victims of trauma should not be seen as possessing a brain that has been damaged by outside injury, but as having gone through a process of learning under unusual circumstances. While our knowledge of the brain remains incomplete, one thing we do know is that it is not a fixed entity which will fall apart if one part is altered, but a flexible organ that grows and develops in response to different stimuli. We call this phenomenon “brain plasticity” — the ability of the brain to reorganize itself. The enormous potential of the human brain to adapt to new circumstances is what has allowed human beings to adapt to a wide variety of different environments. One of the environments that humans have had to learn to survive is that of childhood abuse and even the most extreme symptoms of complex trauma or C-PTSD, such as dissociative episodes, lose their bewildering character when they are understood as part of the process of learning to survive under adverse circumstances.

However, though the brain is plastic, it is not infinitely so. Victims of complex trauma suffer immensely from having to live with patterns of thought that were necessary to help them survive, but are profoundly maladaptive in new circumstances. What is important to understand is that when these individuals go to therapy they are not healing a wound so as to restore a pristine brain that never existed, but starting a new learning process altogether. The dogs in the Seligman’s experiment could not simply “unlearn” their learned helplessness, they had to learn to be functional again. So, too, individuals who are suffering with the after effects of complex trauma have to undergo a new learning process which therapy facilitates.

The concept of complex trauma presents a profound challenge to the way we look at mental health issues, a challenge that is also an opportunity. After much debate, it was decided not to include Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM V and though many in the profession see this as a tragic mistake it is understandable. C-PTSD is much more than another diagnosis that can be slotted into the nearly 300 already found in the DSM, it is a different kind of diagnosis altogether that transcends many well-established, symptom-based classifications, and may come one day to replace them. Even more that that, however, it points the way to a different and more realistic understanding of mental health, in which it is viewed not as a default state to be restored, but as the result of a process of learning and growth.

 

References

• Sar, V. (2011). Developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and the current proposal of DSM-5 . European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2, 10.3402/ejpt.v2i0.5622. https://ift.tt/2wfIP6v
• Tarocchi, A., Aschieri, F., Fantini, F., & Smith, J. D. (2013). Therapeutic Assessment of Complex Trauma: A Single-Case Time-Series Study. Clinical Case Studies, 12(3), 228–245. http://doi.org/10.1177/1534650113479442
• McKinsey Crittenden, P., Brownescombe Heller, M. (2017). The Roots of Chronic PostTraumatic Stress Disorder: Childhood Trauma, Information Processing, and Self-protective Strategies. Chronic Stress, 1, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2470547016682965
• Ford, J. D., & Courtois, C. A. (2014). Complex PTSD, affect dysregulation, and borderline personality disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 1, 9. http://doi.org/10.1186/2051-6673-1-9
• Hammack, S. E., Cooper, M. A., & Lezak, K. R. (2012). Overlapping neurobiology of learned helplessness and conditioned defeat: Implications for PTSD and mood disorders. Neuropharmacology, 62(2), 565–575. https://ift.tt/2LHdpKo

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Do All Teens Feel Like Yhis?

From a teen in Italy: (All the things written started more or less 2 years ago but now they’re going worse and worse) I’m an almost 16 years old girl and I don’t know if what I feel is normal. I know that adolescence is a difficult period for most teenagers but I think that for me it’s a little bit too much. I’ve got a lot of problems that my friends don’t have or that at least don’t show.

First of all I’ve got a lot of relationships issues (especially romantic ones): I don’t trust anyone, I think that they will abandon or leave me when i’ll need them, I think that everybody hates me even if they tell the opposite. For example if my bestfriend doesn’t answer to a message I immediately assume that he’s going to leave me because I’m a mess and that he hates me. I know that it’s irrational but I can’t help it.

I love too much. I know that I’m only 16 but if what I feel isn’t love I don’t want to know what real love is. When I love I do it with every fiber of my body. If my boyfriend left me I would kill myself. Unfurtunately I’m not kidding. I just can’t even imagine what I would feel if someone that I love left me. When I love you, you’re my world, my life. After a break up I couldn’t even sleep or eat. That’s what happens everytime I fall in love with someone: at the beginning I love him. I want to spend every single minute with him. When I’m without him I feel so empty or sad, I feel like my life doesn’t have a reason. I’m very possessive and really jealous. He must love me unconditionally like I do, he must be everytime with me, the largest part of the time there isn’t space for friends or other people. I’m suffocating but I can’t control myself.

After few months I convince myself that he wants to leave me because he’s fed up with staying with me or that he has never loved me at all or things like that. And I don’t know why but I start hating him. I really hate him. I want him to die. I’m always mad to see or be with him. I’m constantly angry with him. He disgusts me. And I want to break up. But I expect him to love me and not to leave me even if I reject him. Sometimes I love and hate someone at the same time.I think that I’m crazy…

Another problem is the fact that I don’t know who I am and what I want. I know that’s a normal thing for teens but I have already changed school 3 times, I don’t know if I’m bisexual or straight, I don’t know if I love only black or all the colours except black, If I love myself and I’m the best or if I’m the worst person in the world, If I’m introverted and shy or extroverted and always happy, etc etc. I have mood swings everyday, and I never understand the reasons.

My emotions overwhelm me, I can’t control them in anyway. I can be happy, laugh and joke one hour and cry in the bathroom the next. The more I’m happy the more I will be sad after. Most of the time I’m depressed. I feel hopeless, tired, very sad. I don’t want to go out, to see my friends or to do things that I like. I just go out if there’s alcohol or drugs. I know that it isn’t good for me but when I’m blue and lonely or when I don’t feel anything at all (that’s even worse) forget about everything seems a good idea. I feel almost always empty, as if I had a big black hole in my chest or stomach,especially when I’m alone.

At least twice a month I have a “break down” which is a day when I’m too much sad and I think about suicide continously. In these days I cut myself (I have done it since I was 12), I cry all the time and I stay alone at home. I selfharm (cut/burn/scratch myself) also when I feel an emotion too deeply or when I’m totally numb. Another thing that I can’t control is my anger. I’m always angry. I haven’t patience at all, I lose my temper everyday on stupid things. When I get mad I’m out of control. I can go from screaming to throw and break things to hit everything and everyone around me to burn down things. I’ve fighted many times, even at school.

Lately I’ve been having nightmares almost everynight. Sometimes I wake up 4-5 times per night, especially when I’ve got something important the next day (either good or bad). Could it be anxious? I suffered from a mix of anorexia and bulimia (anorexia binge/purge) for about 6 months last year. When I was about 7 years old I went to a psychologist because I missed someone and I didn’t know who. When I was 10 I got lost on a mountain with my mum and dad (not really, there was fog and we took the wrong ski slope and we didn’t know how to go back, but I thought that they were leaving me alone in the snow).

Is there something wrong with me? Does every teen feel like me? Is it just adolescence? Should I see a psychologist?
Sorry for the lenght of this text but I had to write a lot

A: I’m very glad you wrote. You are a sensitive person who seems to be highly atuned to other people. It makes sense to me that you are often overwhelmed.

There is too much to respond to in your letter. I can only give you a few ideas to consider. I hope you will follow up with appintments to both your medical doctor and to a counselor for a more thorough evaluation.

The first stop is to your doctor. There are a number of physical problems that can contribute to the emotional ups and downs at your age. Just make sure that something medical isn’t going on. Do keep a food diary and a sleep log for a few weeks prior to your appointment and bring them with you to your doctor. There may be a nutrition issue. Or a sleep disorder may be contributing to your difficulties.

If everything checks out okay medically, please consider seeing a therapist who specializes in teen issues and who has training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). DBT is based on the idea that a person’s problems are often caused by insufficient skills in dealing with emotions and relationships. A DBT therapist will help you learn new skills for coping with feelings as well as new ways to manage relationships.

I do think you are expecting too much from yourself and from relationships. You have plenty of time to discover who you are and who you want to be with. What’s your hurry? It is normal and appropriate to be asking the questions you are asking about yourself. It is normal and important to try out a number of relationships in order to figure out what kind of person is the best “fit” for you – both for friendships and for romance.

Please relax. Take care of your body as well as your mind. You made an important step by writing to us here at PsychCentral.
Now please follow up by seeing your doctor and a counselor.

I wish you well.
Dr. Marie

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How to Foster Your Kid’s Emotional Intelligence, Right from Birth

Many benefits are associated with helping kids foster their emotional intelligence. When your kid has learnt to identify and manage his emotions, he is more likely to better deal with difficult emotion-provoking situations in the childhood years and beyond. Research suggests that much is to be gained by teaching kids to manage their emotions from the earliest age. In other words, problem behavior can often be explained by your kid’s inability to manage his or her emotions. If the emotions your little one experiences are too big, her inability to manage them may be manifested in behavior such as clinginess, tantrums, meltdowns, extreme shyness or even aggressiveness.  

We now know that talking to kids about emotions using age-appropriate strategies is the first step in helping them foster their emotional intelligence. Evidence suggests that from around age three, kids can be taught to become more aware of their emotions and the emotions of others. But is it possible to help infants and toddlers develop their emotional intelligence? In other words, when your kid is too young to understand why it is important to name emotions, what other strategies can help him start working on his emotional intelligence? Here are a few tips to help you foster your kid’s emotional intelligence right from birth.

1. Do not underestimate the remarkable power of touch.

There is strong evidence that touch heals. One long-term study analyzed the impact of touch on premature babies. In a follow up study when the babies were older, the researchers found that those who had been held longer and more often had greater physiological and neurological development, fewer anxiety-related issues, and greater ties with their parents.

Following these and other studies, several hospitals have now adopted “kangaroo care” for both premature and full-term infants. Kangaroo care means holding a kid wearing only a diaper against one’s bare chest.

According to David Linden, the neuroscientist and author of the book “Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind”, appropriate touch strengthens bonds by building trust and cooperation. Moreover, a special bond is developed in the first four to six months. There have also been suggestions that babies touched often display less aggressive behavior.

What you can do:

• Hold, caress and cuddle your baby as often as you can. Snuggle with him at naptime.
• Practice baby wearing if you can.

2. Practice responsive parenting

There is ample evidence that even the youngest kids experience distress and adapt their behavior to reduce this distress. For instance, thumb-sucking is proof that infants are capable of adopting self-soothing behavior to deal with unpleasant stimuli.

Some studies have found that toddlers are capable of adapting their behavior depending on the emotional impact of a situation. In other words, even young kids are capable of knowing they should approach or avoid certain situations. However, infants look up to their parents to deal with distressing situations. In a recent study, Professor Darcia Narvaez and colleagues suggest that leaving kids in distress by letting them cry can be detrimental to their development. According to these researchers, letting your baby cry can trigger stress and is bound to have an impact on how he manages stress, anxiety and other difficult emotions in adulthood.

What you can do:

• Be conscious of the difference between fussing and genuine distress and respond to your kid’s distress.
• The appropriate response to your infant’s distress is not always what you think it is. Find what works best to calm your kid down. According to a recent study, recordings of play songs are more effective than lullabies or even maternal speech at reducing distress and calming highly aroused infants (under one-year-olds).

3. Develop an emotionally-safe relationship.

Although the concept of emotional safety is often used when referring to couples, it is a concept that is also valid when referring to parent-child relationships. There is solid evidence that the innate need for safety is pre-wired into our brains and that feeling emotionally unsafe can send our nervous systems into a state of defense.  

An emotionally-safe relationship is one in which there is a solid attachment. We now know that a baby’s attachment to his/her parents (primary caregiver) has a great impact on social and emotional outcomes in later years.

What you can do:

Developing a solid attachment is not about privileging one parenting style (for instance attachment parenting) over another. Regardless of your parenting style, you can develop a solid attachment with your kid. Developing a solid attachment is about being sensitive to your baby’s needs and being capable of reassuring her. Responding to your baby with kindness and making an effort to minimize her distress sets the stage for emotional intelligence. Indeed, there is evidence that feeling safe is a first step that makes it easier for kids to develop appropriate emotion regulation skills to deal with the difficult situations they encounter.

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Intelligent brains have more sparse and efficient nerve connections.

From Genç et al.:

Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with higher intelligence are more likely to have larger gray matter volume in brain areas predominantly located in parieto-frontal regions. These findings were usually interpreted to mean that individuals with more cortical brain volume possess more neurons and thus exhibit more computational capacity during reasoning. In addition, neuroimaging studies have shown that intelligent individuals, despite their larger brains, tend to exhibit lower rates of brain activity during reasoning. However, the microstructural architecture underlying both observations remains unclear. By combining advanced multi-shell diffusion tensor imaging with a culture-fair matrix-reasoning test, we found that higher intelligence in healthy individuals is related to lower values of dendritic density and arborization. These results suggest that the neuronal circuitry associated with higher intelligence is organized in a sparse and efficient manner, fostering more directed information processing and less cortical activity during reasoning.

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Getting a Healthy Friendship

I’ve been having issues with my friend for the past few days. I recently went to go visit him and when I came back he told me that he didn’t see us as friends anymore. He has been completely short towards me for the past few days and I really want to improve myself and be a better friend to him. We started off as internet friends in 2016 and started seeing each other in person last year. I would do anything to get my friendship back to the way it was where we are so close and having fun together.

A. You might ask him to explain why he no longer wants to be friends. It’s odd that you had been friends and then he no longer wants a relationship. The obvious question is what’s changed?

All you can do is ask for more information but if he no longer wants to be friends, you should respect his decision. You can’t force people to do anything they don’t want to do.

You stated in your letter that you “really want to improve yourself and be a better friend to him” but it’s not clear that you are the problem. It might be you but it might not be your fault. Something in his life may have changed. There could’ve been a miscommunication. You need more information. Once you know more, then you’ll better know what to do.

Please take care and write again if you have additional information and want more help.

Dr. Kristina Randle

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7 Ways to Live a Creative Life

Unless we’re artists, when we think of paintbrushes, play and simple pleasures, we often think that’s for people who aren’t that busy, people who don’t have the responsibilities I have, people who don’t have kids. That’s for people who are not me.  

But these things are the very ingredients of a meaningful, satisfying life. Of a creative life. And while different seasons allow for different opportunities, each of us has time for that.

According to Maya Benattar, LCAT, a music therapist and psychotherapist in New York City, a creative life is “being connected to a sense of play, spontaneity and permission.” She believes this is vital because it pulls us out of the everyday. It helps us connect to our true emotions, to who we really are, beneath our lengthy to-do lists.

For artist and art therapist Amy Maricle, LMHC, ATR-BC, a creative life means making art, spending time with other artists and recognizing that these activities are as critical as any self-care practice. “It means knowing there is an artist within you, and giving her some encouragement and a space to play.”

Whether she’s painting, writing or cooking, Maricle feels like the creative energy flows through her. “Art makes me feel connected to something bigger than myself.”

Stephanie Medford, an artist, writer and teacher, views a creative life as “a life of curiosity, wonder, play, and a little bit of magic.” It means paying attention to life’s details and small miracles. It means finding a way to share what she’s experienced with others.

When Medford starts to lose touch with her creativity, everything else also starts to wither. “When I’m not making room for creativity, I’m not present, and when I’m not present, I become consumed with worries, fears and judgment.”

Creativity also is a powerful cycle for Medford: The more she writes or makes art, the more open she is to curiosity, awe and wonder. The more curious she is, the more she pays attention and spots inspiration, which makes it easier to write and make art.

“When the cycle is working, I feel alive and my life [has] purpose. I feel more interested in what’s happening in the world, and more engaged and connected to other people.”

“A creative life to us is mainly: keeping an open mind,” said Irene Smit and Astrid van der Hulst, the founders and creative directors of Flow Magazine. For instance, when they started their magazine a decade ago, there were many rules for creating a successful publication—like having a smiling woman on the cover and not having blank pages. However, Smit and van der Hulst were drawn to covers of notebooks and children’s books and pages with quotes and illustrations. So they did what felt right to them. They still do, letting what resonates with them and makes them smile dictate their decisions.

How you define a creative life is really up to you. Below you’ll find an assortment of ideas—from connecting to your inner child to seeing the world anew to playing with specific projects.

Prioritize play. Benattar encouraged readers to play, “whatever playing means to you, whatever helps you feel lighter and freer.” “Find something that feels like flow and lets you turn your brain off a bit.”

You might define play as improvising musically, cooking, dancing or going to a playground. You might choose to swing on the swings, instead of trying a new art technique, Benattar said. Thinking back to your childhood may give you some good hints. For instance, you might build blanket forts, spin elaborate stories or run at top speed, she said.

Channel your creativity into everything. “I love being creative in a lot of the things I do,” said Maricle, founder of Mindful Art Studio. “It makes my life feel more meaningful and rich.” In addition to visual art, she channels her creativity into writing, dancing and cooking.

Follow the questions. Medford likes walking in the woods, where she sees and hears a lot of birds. Which sparked her curiosity. The more she researches these birds, the more excited she is to get outside and observe. “Lately birds have started appearing in my artwork as well, since they’re becoming such a powerful symbol of wonder for me.” What questions are you curious about? Follow them.

Start a long-term project. Medford calls this her go-to strategy for staying inspired and creating regularly. She picks something with specific parameters and an end goal. She then carves out time every week to work on it.

In the past, she’s done every exercise in the book Draw, Paint, Print Like the Great Artists by Marion Deuchars; given herself weekly drawing assignments for an entire year, with different monthly themes; and read 100 poems and created an Instagram post for each one. What long-term project can you take on? (Maybe pick one you think you absolutely can’t do, and prove yourself wrong.)

Go offline often. Smit and van der Hulst used to answer emails in the evenings and on vacation. They used to fill up quiet moments with their smartphones. Today, however, they savor more time offline, which actually ignites their imagination. “The best ideas come to us when we are standing in the queue at the supermarket, when we are bored, just sitting on the couch or in the sun, when we are waiting for a train.”

When we’re staring at our screens, we miss things, tender things, silly things, inspiring things: “a stork building its nest as you ride past on the train, the conversation two little kids are having while you’re waiting at the baker’s, the lamp a woman has placed on her head like a hat for a fancy-dress party.”

Make it easy to make art. Maricle suggested dedicating a space in your home for art making—no matter how small. “Leave your art out and in process, it will tempt you to keep going.” She also suggested carrying a portable art kit, filled with items like a small notebook and fun pens. This way as you’re waiting in the car or doctor’s office instead of scrolling, you can doodle and sketch and write.

Take your time. Living a creative life also means taking your time, according to Smit and van der Hulst, authors of A Book That Takes Its Time and the forthcoming Creativity Takes Courage. “When you slow down your pace, there is more time to enjoy the little things around you, to see the details in the street where you are walking, to smell the flowers, to stay open to what happens around you.” When we slow down, they said, it’s naturally easier to savor life’s tiny but meaningful pleasures.

For Medford engaging in activities such as writing, drawing and collage making is important. But what matters more is “the everyday attitude of creativity, of seeing the world as an interesting, awe-inspiring place, worthy of being explored.”

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