A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
We were pretty good at keeping computers and televisions out of bedrooms, but as technology developed we somehow missed that phones and tablets ARE computers. One of the main conversations I have with parents is about their exhaustion at parenting with so many devices in the home. Parents feel out of control. At my seminars [...]
It’s predominantly because people evolved to respond intuitively to all sorts of threats, rather than think about them too much. To think about them would require time and effort, so it was eminently more efficient to respond to the fear first and think about it later. Fear can have a powerful effect on our behaviour—motivating [...]
It’s not often that you look at your meal to find it staring back at you. But when Diane Duyser picked up her cheese toastie, she was in for a shock. “I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me,” she told the Chicago Tribune. [...]
The idea that people can be classified into types has a long history. Writing 23 centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus sketched 30 characters that are instantly recognisable to this day. They include the chatterbox, the back-biter, the ungrateful grumbler, the penny-pincher and the patron of rascals. This ancient attempt to sort people into types [...]
Kerry Stirling - SMH13 from Generation Next on Vimeo.
Political controversies often use the suffix “gate“ to embellish their significance. In pop psychology, the equivalent is the made-up “syndrome”, which involves a combination of symptoms and circumstances to explain behaviours and reactions. The latest is “rushing women’s syndrome”, which former swimmer Lisa Curry used to explain her hormonal shifts leading to her divorce. But [...]
Although it is perfectly possible to be both stupid and racist, only someone who hasn’t personally experienced it could be ignorant enough to claim racism not only doesn’t exist but is really just an expression of stupidity, and hence we should tolerate it as fact of life. And yet, the internet is littered with the opinions of [...]
Men who report watching a lot of pornography tend to have less volume and activity in regions of the brain linked to rewards and motivation, says a new German study. The results provide the first evidence for a link between pornography consumption and reductions in brain size and brain activity in response to sexual stimuli. [...]
Young adults who used marijuana only recreationally showed significant abnormalities in two key brain regions that are important in emotion and motivation, scientists report. The study was a collaboration between Northwestern Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. This is the first study to show casual use of marijuana is related to major brain changes. [...]
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, warned that "society has become increasingly drawn towards using medication as a substitute for authoritative teaching and child-rearing". He added that he believes that we are going through a "cultural redefinition of some of the normal problems of childhood." So when does being a naughty [...]
