Gina Stepp
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Gina Stepp: Wired To Connect
People who are good at maintaining important relationships in their lives have always instinctively known what researchers are now discovering: good relationships are crucial to our health and well-being. In Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman excavates the still-emerging field of social neuroscience for clues to a better understanding of human relationships. nnSays Goleman, "These new discoveries reveal that our relations
June 20, 2008
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Gina Stepp: Are Babies Born With Morals?
The UK's online Telegraph cited a new Yale study suggesting that babies as young as six months old can tell the difference between people who are likely to help them and people who are not. This prompted the author to ask, "Are babies born with morals?" nnIf it seems a huge leap from "babies can tell who is likely to help them" to "babies are born with morals," it's only because it is rather. One has only to take a cursory look inside oneself to understand that our standards
June 4, 2008
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Who Am I? The Question Of Violence
“In violence, we forget who we are,” said American novelist Mary McCarthy.nnIf these words are true, we may be facing a generation of children who, despite the number of profile pages they may have on MySpace or Bebo, are increasingly missing a sense of identity.nn“Violent Youth Crime up a Third,” asserts a January headline in the online U.K. Telegraph. Beneath this header are statistics illustrating that between 2003 and 2006 the number of violent cri
April 15, 2008
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Grand Cultures: Strengthening Grandparent and Grandchild Ties
A soft, comfortably-sized woman in a bib apron and oven mitts sets a batch of steaming cookies on a cooling rack: her grey hair is caught neatly in a generous bun, and she wears a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses and a warm smile. It’s a scene that appears in countless children’s books, and there’s no need to read the text to find out the woman’s name. It’s some version of “Grandma,” and when the page is turned “Grandpa”
March 31, 2008
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Give Sorrow More Than Words
The last decade has seen great strides in understanding some of the brain science behind emotions like sorrow and joy—at least of the mechanics. Using the latest technology, scientists can see what goes on materially in the brain when we have certain feelings, but there is still much more to understand. nnOne area that begs further study is that of grief and bereavement. How can we use the discoveries of neuroscience to help those who are grieving avoid the pitfalls tha
March 27, 2008
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Smart Men Make Passes At Women With Glasses
Meet Christine Whelan—an attractive, 29-year-old woman with a PhD from Oxford University. When I spoke with her she happened to be single, having been dumped two years earlier by a man who told her she was intellectually intimidating. For a break-up line it seems fairly believable. After all, Dr. Whelan is a successful author, journalist, and commentator who has taught at Princeton University and has been published by the likes of The Wall Street Journal and The New Yor
March 20, 2008
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Single But Not Solitary: Shattering The Myths Of Singlehood
“Tell new acquaintances that you are single and often they think they already know quite a lot about you,” says social psychologist Bella DePaulo. “They understand your emotions: You are miserable and lonely and envious of couples. They know what motivates you: More than anything else in the world, you want to become coupled. If you are a single person of a certain age, they also know why you are not coupled: You are commitment-phobic, or too picky, or have
February 20, 2008
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Child-Development Illiteracy: A Growing Problem?
The structure of the modern nuclear family is a relatively new invention when considered along the timeline of human history. Long before “Leave It to Beaver” ideals became the norm, families didn’t isolate themselves from their relatives, and parents didn’t leave home to spend their days in an office. Extended families lived together in the same community, every individual contributed to the welfare of the whole, and a wide variety of close, personal
February 14, 2008
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The Neuroscience Of Motherhood
Forget the “decade of the brain”: it’s becoming evident that the modern fascination with neuroscience is not going away anytime this century. The fact is, thanks to the neurobiological revolution, nothing is what it used to be. Including motherhood. nnIn this vein Katherine Ellison, author of The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter (2005), brought welcome news to mothers everywhere: Having babies doesn’t zap a woman’s brain cells after a
January 29, 2008
Article
Like Father, Like . . . Daughter?
Baseball hard-hitter Harmon Killebrew tells a story that hints at the importance of fathers to boys: “My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard,” he says on his Web site. “Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’”nnObviously, Killebrew’s father was tuned in to the needs of his sons, an admira
January 15, 2008
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Through The Looking Glass: Mirror Neurons And Moral Nonsense
Scanning the past week's news, one gets the distinct impression there has been an unusually high number of "man's inhumanity to man" stories. Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. Kidnapped children, boys arrested for planning an attack on their school, and a murdered family in a Dallas suburb. A familiar question tugs at the edges of consciousness when we begin to feel the human experience is laden with these kinds of stories. Does the fact that there is so much cruelty to report s
January 10, 2008
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Feminism: The Complementary Angle
When it first dawned on Betty Friedan that something was wrong with the role of women in society, she was quite correct. Of course, she was not the first in history to notice, or the first to hit on an inadequate definition of or solution to the problem. The issue was the discontent of the average suburban housewife with a role perceived as smothering and unfulfilling, inferior and therefore unfair. Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was printed in the early 1960s a
December 27, 2007