Category: Body & Mind

Say Good Things About People

It turns out that if you speak highly about those you know then you yourself are a good person. New research shows that the way you think about others reflects on how happy you are.

The researchers found a person’s tendency to describe others in positive terms is an important indicator of the positivity of the person’s own personality traits. They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others.
“Seeing others positively reveals our own positive traits,” Wood says.
The study also found that how positively you see other people shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.
In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. “A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively,” Wood says. “The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.” Given that negative perceptions of others may underlie several personality disorders, finding techniques to get people to see others more positively could promote the cessation of behavior patterns associated with several different personality disorders simultaneously, Wood says.

Keep reading about this positive news.

Study: Sisters Protect Their Brothers

New research shows that siblings are very important and that they provide different benefits to one another. One finding that seems pretty neat is that having a sister can protect brothers from depression.

Padilla-Walker’s research stems from BYU’s Flourishing Families Projectand will appear in the August issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. The study included 395 families with more than one child, at least one of whom was an adolescent between 10 and 14 years old. The researchers gathered a wealth of information about each family’s dynamic, then followed up one year later. Statistical analyses showed that having a sister protected adolescents from feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful. It didn’t matter whether the sister was younger or older, or how far apart the siblings were agewise.
Brothers mattered, too. The study found that having a loving sibling of either gender promoted good deeds, such as helping a neighbor or watching out for other kids at school. In fact, loving siblings fostered charitable attitudes more than loving parents did. The relationship between sibling affection and good deeds was twice as strong as that between parenting and good deeds.

Keep reading at Science Daily

And a big thank you to my sister!!!!!

Expanding Education

Liz Coleman is the president of Bennington, a college in the USA, and she has some wise things to say about education. She suggests that the more classical take on a liberal-arts education has fallen short of creating the proper citizens for the 21st century and her solution is to broaden the school’s concept of education itself.

Vaginal Gel Cuts HIV Infections by Half

The International Aids Conference is currently underway in Vienna right now and some exciting news has been announced there. A new vaginal gel containing an AIDs drug is excellent at curtailing HIV infections.

The gel was found to be both safe and acceptable when used once in the 12 hours before sex and once in the 12 hours after sex by women aged 18 to 40 years.

Salim Abdool Karim, one of the two leading co-researchers, told reporters in Vienna that the 889 women involved in the trial, conducted in the coastal city of Durban and a remote rural village, had largely used the gel as directed.

They were also given condoms and advice about sexually transmitted diseases, and tested for HIV once a month.

After 30 months, 98 women became infected with HIV – 38 in the group that got tenofovir in the gel and 60 in the group that got placebos.

Faces of the G20

Readers of this site should be aware that the G20 came to Toronto and caused a bunch of noise. Some sad news came out of that in terms of how the police acted (the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history). As a direct reaction to the abuse that occurred that weekend some people have turned to the net.

The Faces of the G20 is a place for people who have been affected by police brutality during the G20 to share their stories.

It is always good to see communities protect one another in the face of oppression. These people are looking to educate others while changing the system so that what happened to them cannot happen to others:

We are a small group of citizens affected by the G20 weekend in a variety of ways. We want to get our stories out, and to build a knowledge base as to what exactly happened before, during and after the weekend of July 26th, 2010.

Thanks to Dave!