A hug or touch can have a major influence on mood, overall attitude, and even income. Image via Wikipedia
I’m not a very “huggy” person, but this article makes me give that attitude a second thought. Touch, particularly the non-sexual kind, has many benefits for humans, such as creating friendly feelings, calming nerves, and help others be more sympathetic.
Touch is a sense that’s often forgotten. But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think. To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.
Adults are starting to turn fitness back into play. Image via Wikipedia
I have noticed a growing trend in fitness. Rather than taking Spin classes or training to run marathons, or even heavy weight lifting, many adults are starting to pay to play. They are buying gym memberships or punch cards for classes that offer an hour of having fun! Many classes that incorporate dance, parkour, or toys like hula hoops or trampolines, are starting to become very popular all over the United States.
The majority of these classes are geared towards women. Jazzercise has had a resurgence in popularity the past couple of years, while new fitness classes like Zumba or HoopDance are starting to surface. There are also trampolining classes offered in some places. Below are descriptions of some of these classes for those of you like me who had no idea what these classes were exactly, (thanks to Vibe Dance Studio and Sky High Sport for descriptions):
Zumba: This Adult Fitness class features easy-to-follow routines of interval training sessions where fast and slow Latin rhythms and resistance training are combined to tone and sculpt your body while burning fat. Add some Latin flavor and international zest into the mix and you’ve got a Zumba class!
HoopDance: This fun, low impact Adult Fitness class will tone the entire body while using a hula hoop on and off the body. You will explore dancing while hooping and linking moves together to create a feeling a flow. This class will build coordination, body awareness, and is great for any fitness level. You laugh and smile while learning a new skill and burning calories.
AIRobics, or trampolining: AIRobics is low impact fat burning exercise that improves balance and coordination and it is fun and energizing! The workout consists of moves from many different workout activities, and it incorporates some moves that can only be done on a trampoline.
For men, there are also options: rock climbing has been around in the U.S. since the mid to late 70s, and gyms geared towards those athletes opened up soon after. More recently sports like Parkour or Freerunning are also being offered in gym or class settings. Interestingly, at least anecdotally it seems that women are more likely to try these “manly” sports in the safe confines of a gym and with a coach’s guidance.
Adult recreational sports are also gaining popularity, from rugby and soccer to even roller derby.
Why the sudden increase in playful classes and gym offerings?
I suspect it’s because we adults are super stressed out (according to the American Psychological Association, Three quarters of Americans experience physical and psychological symptoms related to stress in a given month) and don’t get enough time to play and relax, but know we need to workout and at least attempt to stay healthy. Rather than do the traditional workout activities like running or lifting weights, which some find relaxing while others just find it tedious or stressful or even painful, I think many adults figure if they’re going to devote what little time they have to working out, it might as well be FUN!
What are your thoughts, experiences, attitudes towards fitness? Have you discovered other fun sports teams or classes that people wouldn’t usually think of as fitness-focused?
It’s Friday, and I’m looking forward to the weekend, and apparently so is the rest of the online world. A team of sociologists measured the amount of “happy” tweets people put out around the world, and found it matched previously known patterns of happiness trends:
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.
Studying emotions through Twitter and other social media can always be a little tricky (for example, most algorithms don’t get sarcasm). But, that aside, I am very intrigued to see the results that market researchers and sociologists are finding using social media, and seeing how much our “real” lives are accurately reflected in our online worlds as well.
A lot of parents freak out about how to provide enriching environments for their children and help them grow, from music lessons to early reading to math flash cards.
In one of those “well duh” books, two neuroscientists, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang remind us it doesn’t take all that much…
Babies may look helpless, but as soon as they come into the world, they’re able to do a number of important things. They can recognize faces and moving objects. They’re attracted to language. And from very early on, they can differentiate their mother from other humans.
“They really come equipped to learn about the world in a way that wasn’t appreciated until recently,” says neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt. “It took scientists a long time to realize that their brains are doing some very complicated things.”
Aamodt and fellow neuroscientist Sam Wang explain how the human brain develops from infancy to adolescence in their new book, Welcome to Your Child’s Brain. The two researchers also offer tips for parents to help their children eat their spinach, learn their ABCs and navigate elementary school.
They talk with Terry Gross about complicated concepts like self control, abstract thought, and things that are even hard for some grown-ups, and how to create an environment that makes kids want to practice these things.
Reading fiction can improve empathy. Image via Wikipedia
I had a great vacation – I got out into nature, I slept in (some mornings when I wasn’t out looking for wildlife), and I even read a little bit. Turns out the reading was good for me in more ways than one; reading is not only relaxing, some studies find it improves empathy:
Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, both from the psychology department at the University of Buffalo, gave 140 undergraduate students passages to read from either the Harry Potter series or the Twilight series. Afterward, the students were asked how much they related to the characters in the novels. Gabriel and Young found that despite the fact that both the stories rely heavily on otherworldly magic and mysticism, the undergrads felt a real affinity for the characters. “[T]he study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires,” they wrote. ”
And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups. Books provide the opportunity for social connection and the blissful calm that comes from becoming a part of something larger than oneself for a precious, fleeting moment.”
Raymond Mar, a professor at York University, has also noticed the link between reading and empathy. In a study of children, Mar found that the more a child reads, the likelier she is to be able to understand the emotions of others.
Interesting study to keep you motivated while I’m off in the woods:
Kids are spending less and less time outdoors. Why? We’re becoming more and more wired in and dependent on technology:
There is a growing disparity between the time kids spend indoors wired to technology and the time they spend outside enjoying nature. The vast majority of today’s kids use a computer, watch TV, or play video games on a daily basis, but only about 10 percent say they are spending time outdoors every day, according to a new nationwide poll from The Nature Conservancy.Why? Lack of access to natural areas and discomfort with the outdoors are two primary factors identified by the Conservancy’s poll.The poll was conducted from July 28 through August 4, and asked 602 kids between the ages of 13 and 18 about their attitudes toward nature, outdoor activity and environmental issues.
Humans are hard-wired to spot animals in our environment. Image by Rennett Stowe via Flickr
Have you ever sworn you knew what your cat was thinking? You may have been right. It turns out we are more tuned into animals and their emotional status than we might think:
Animals have a special place in the human heart. Now, researchers are reporting that creatures great and small also have a special place in our heads.
A team led by researchers at Caltech has found individual brain cells that respond when a person sees an animal, but not when that person sees another person, a place, or an object.
The cells were found in the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain involved in emotions, including fear. And they responded to any kind of animal, including spiders, dogs and rodents, says Christof Koch, a researcher at Caltech and the lead author of the study, published in Nature Neuroscience.
One reason present-day humans have these cells may be because some animals posed a threat to our ancestors, Koch says. Specialized cells could have helped the brain respond quickly to danger, he says.
I love the idea that urge to cuddle puppies comes from the amygdala, often referred to as the “lizard” part of our brain! It makes sense that as humans we’d survive better if we were more in tune with the animals in our surroundings and whether they wanted to eat us or not.
A couple of years ago I taught a course on digital storytelling to a group of middle schoolers. In preparation for the course, I remember arguing why this method of teaching was important in that it allowed students who were visual learners to be able to learn how to tell a story in a visual way, and auditory learners could listen to the story archs out loud. Now, some research is finding that people AREN’T in fact visual or auditory learners.
Several psychologists say education could use some “evidence-based” teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use “evidence-based medicine.”
Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we’re on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it’s a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it’s presented.
For example, if a teacher believes a student to be a visual learner, he or she might introduce the concept of addition using pictures or groups of objects, assuming that child will learn better with the pictures than by simply “listening” to a lesson about addition.
In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory.
I disagree with the idea that people’s brains are all uniform and work the same; we have all had the experience of having to explain the same thing in three different ways so three different people get the concept. And the researchers acknowledge we all have strengths and weaknesses. But I appreciate the idea of using evidence-based learning and variety, since they both make learning fun and easier to retain the information. If I ever get to teach that course again, I may instead argue that digital storytelling is beneficial for it’s hands-on, evidence and experiential based learning methods.
…creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
…the bad news: You have to make time to do this.
This means you have to grasp that your manic forms of connectivity—cell phone, email, text, Twitter—steal most chances of lasting connection or amazement. That multitasking can argue a wasted life. That a close friendship is worth more than material success.
It’s harder than it sounds theoretically (I can certainly testify to that), but I also agree with Lamott that it is sooo worth carving out time for.
What are you willing to give up in order to achieve your creativity goals? So far I have given up what little TV I already watched and this week living off the giant roast and yams I made on Sunday (it’s now Thursday), rather than attempting to create a brand new gourmet meal every night.
What are you willing to sacrifice in order to get the creative need filled?
This is a great article that was shared with me by a friend who has survived cancer (that’s a huge deal, by the way, I’ve had plenty of friends and family the last couple of years who didn’t). It was written Lissa Ranken for her project The Woman Inside. Lissa noticed that all of the cancer survivors she met shared some characteristics in common:
They had all faced down death and decided to live every day like it might be their last. And then they all beat cancer.The more interviews I did, the more I noticed that these women were living differently than most of the people I knew who had not been diagnosed with cancer. Here’s what I learned from those survivor women. Learning these lessons changed my life, and I hope they’ll change yours.
What they all boil down to is being yourself and living for the moment. These women all had days where that moment might have been their last, so they made the most of it. They got angry, they put themselves and their health first, and they got better.
It is a lesson that we can all learn, to not worry about doing what’s “right” for the future so much, or “right” for someone else. Yes it’s important to be nice and get along with people and make sure you have enough money saved for retirement, but so much of the time I’ve seen people, myself included, act a certain way or do something because they thought it would make other people happy, when the truth is if they did what they wanted to do for themselves it would have worked out just as well, if not better!
So go read the 10 things, and then tell yourself you’re beautiful and being feisty is a good thing!
Mental Flowers 