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Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are more central to their social networks—in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmates considered them to be friends. They also got more romantic interest from others in a separate speed-dating study.

It seems that “our own way of being has an emotional signature,”

affective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings—those with positive affective presence make other people feel good, even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative affective presence.

“To use common, everyday words, some people are just annoying. It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed all the time,”

“They may be content because they’re always getting their way.

Some people bring out great things in others while they’re themselves quite depressed.”

The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers

leaders who make other people feel good by their very presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to more innovation. Subordinates are more likely to voice their ideas, too, to a leader with positive affective presence.

xactly what people are doing that sets others at ease or puts them off hasn’t yet been studied. It may have to do with body language, or tone of voice, or being a good listener

a big part of affective presence may be how people regulate emotions—those of others and their own.

Throughout the day, one experiences emotional “blips” as Elfenbein puts it—blips of annoyance or excitement or sadness. The question is, “Can you regulate yourself so those blips don’t infect other people?” she asks. “Can you smooth over the noise in your life so other people aren’t affected by it?”

This “smoothing over”—or emotional regulation—could take the form of finding the positive in a bad situation, which can be healthy.

it could also take the form of suppressing one’s own emotions just to keep other people comfortable, which is less so.

Elfenbein notes that positive affective presence isn’t inherently good, either for the person themselves, or for their relationships with others. Psychopaths are notoriously charming

Neither is negative affective presence necessarily always a bad thing in a leader—think of a football coach yelling at the team at halftime, motivating them to make a comeback.

chemical communication between humans in laboratory experiments

Whether pheromones play a role in human life outside the lab remains unknown. In animals pheromones affect the whole panoply of behavior - mating, aggression and fear.

rats that fear change have shorter lives than their more flexible counterparts, and that social isolation can also affect the longevity of rodents

the social and psychological world changes the fundamental mechanisms of biology, and vice versa

I've tried to situate biology in a rich social and psychological context and make it simple.

the chemosignal. Molecules produced by a person or animal that can change behaviors of others, even though they are not detected as an odor.

for two months, we exposed nonlactating women to this breast-feeding compound, which is found naturally in nursing mothers and infants. Women with regular sex partners reported a 24 percent increase in sexual desire; those without partners increased their sexual fantasies by 17 percent

Along the banks of the Maniqui River and in adjacent forests, the Tsimane people hunt, fish and plant plantains, rice and sweet manioc. They live in villages that range in size from 30 to 700 people. During village meetings, decision making is consensus-based. No individual has the right to coerce anyone else.

that doesn’t mean there are no status distinctions. When you attend a Tsimane village meeting, you soon notice that the opinions of certain men are more influential during the consensus-building process. These same men are often solicited to mediate disputes or to represent villagers’ interests with outsiders.

My colleagues and I measured the social status of all the men from four Tsimane villages (nearly 200 men between the ages of 18 and 83), by asking them to evaluate one another on their informal political influence. The men also provided urine samples and received medical examinations from physicians

We found that Tsimane men with less political influence had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which has many important physiological functions. This result persisted after controlling for other factors that might affect stress levels, including age, body size and personality.

In addition, we found that the less influential Tsimane men had a higher risk of respiratory infection, the most common cause of sickness and death in their society. Stress may contribute to this disparity in infection risk; when chronic, stress can dampen immune function.

Studying the same individuals over a four-year period, we also found that for men whose influence declined over time, greater declines were correlated with higher levels of cortisol and respiratory illness. Downward mobility is harmful, it seems, even in an egalitarian society.

Why might low status cause such stress for the Tsimane? One possibility is that status offers a greater sense of control.

Another is that status acts as a form of social insurance. Influential Tsimane men have more allies and food-production partners, who can be helpful in mitigating conflict, sickness and food shortage. The relative lack of such support may cause psychosocial stress.

It is interesting that even in industrialized societies, the status comparisons most consequential for psychosocial stress are often among individuals who live near one another or occupy the same social network, not individuals at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Those living just above the poverty line may resent welfare for those living just below it, and a millionaire may envy a multimillionaire more than he envies a billionaire.

The importance of relative status perceptions may have its roots in the small-scale societies of our ancestors, which were similar to that of the Tsimane. In such societies, both our political competitors and our cooperative partners were likely individuals with whom we interacted regularly.

As our society debates the effects of wealth inequality, the Tsimane help us understand why we care so deeply about relative social position — and why our health depends on it.

30 years ago, he says he saw plenty of “dowagers’ humps, where the upper back had frozen into a forward curve, in grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” Now he says he’s seeing the same stoop in teenagers.

When we’re sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression adopt a posture that eerily resembles the iHunch.

Posture doesn’t just reflect our emotional states; it can also cause them.

assigned non-depressed participants to sit in an upright or slouched posture and then had them answer a mock job-interview question, a well-established experimental stress inducer, followed by a series of questionnaires. Compared with upright sitters, the slouchers reported significantly lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear.

Posture affected even the contents of their interview answers: Linguistic analyses revealed that slouchers were much more negative in what they had to say. The researchers concluded, “Sitting upright may be a simple behavioral strategy to help build resilience to stress.”

Slouching can also affect our memory

clinical depression, participants were randomly assigned to sit in either a slouched or an upright position and then presented with a list of positive and negative words. When they were later asked to recall those words, the slouchers showed a negative recall bias (remembering the bad stuff more than the good stuff), while those who sat upright showed no such bias.

Japanese schoolchildren, those who were trained to sit with upright posture were more productive than their classmates in writing assignments.

We found that the size of the device significantly affected whether subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter, suggesting that the slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones actually makes us less assertive — less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls for it.

In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become.

Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level.

Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture, and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.

All of your devices emit short wavelength light, known as blue light. A Harvard study claimed that exposure to blue light before bed decreases natural melatonin production, a hormone that regulates sleep. The brightness from your phone screen can interrupt your natural circadian rhythm, and cause for shorter REM cycles and overall restless sleep.

With a constant influx of information grabbing your attention, it can put pressure on you to have your phone on you at all times to stay informed. Researchers agreed, telling The Chicago Tribune that the possibility of missing something if you don’t keep your phone nearby can induce a feeling of stress and anxiety. 

Remember the blue light? The cornea and lens can’t filter it, so the light goes to the back of the eye, which can weaken vision over time.

Though social media can be fun entertainment, it can also open up the door for harmful comparison. Being able to keep up to date with someone else’s success (or pitfalls) invites the opportunity for you to compare your life to theirs. That can invoke a feeling of inadequacy and unhappiness, according to Psychology Today

on a basic, even primitive level, girls need to experience the full pantheon of communication that comes from face-to-face contact, such as learning to read body language, and subtle facial and verbal cues.

The fact that the study was based on an online survey gave pause to some academics. While they said the paper raised good questions, they also expressed concern about giving it too much weight, given that the researchers were not able to follow up with the survey subjects to get important context, including their family circumstances, income or ethnicity.

The researchers found that the average amount of media use by the girls surveyed was 6.9 hours per day, a figure that included reading as well as screen time. The average amount of time spent in face-to-face social settings was 2.1 hours, a figure that did not include classroom time.

Ms. Gray said, she worries that her daughter, who is using Facebook more, is playing out her social life online sometimes without the benefits of the full emotional range that comes from face-to-face interaction.

Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life. 

Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals”

Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan.

Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career.

He teaches them that:   The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. 

From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence

Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same.

If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.

In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.

Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one. 

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person.

“The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.”

Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings.

Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them

To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence.

One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward.

after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies.

“I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”

“The intensity of this reorganization will depend, unsurprisingly, on the magnitude of warming.”

researchers seek to predict future impacts of global warming on marine life by examining how the oceans were affected during times of substantial temperature change in the distant past.

“Climate change may rapidly reorganize marine diversity over large oceanic regions,” s

More severe warming will have a major impact on marine life, with significant disruptions occurring across 50 to 70 percent of the world’s oceans, the authors concluded.

The impacts cannot fail to affect life on land, given the ocean’s role in supporting human populations

“When the temperature of the environment changes, animals and plants change in abundance locally or may move to new locations if the habitat is suitable,”

“These movements ultimately affect the food web and ecology, and if they are rapid, the food web may become uncoupled.”

humans “rely upon the ecosystem services that the interconnected web of life creates.”

The international team has found more than 4,000 "enhancers" in the mouse genome that appear to play a role in facial appearance.

"In the mouse embryos we can see where exactly, as the face develops, this switch turns on the gene that it controls.

"These mice looked pretty normal, but it is really hard for humans to see differences in the face of mice," explained Prof Visel.

"What this really tells us is that this particular switch also plays a role in development of the skull and can affect what exactly the skull looks like," he explained.

Understanding this could also help to reveal why and how things can go wrong as embryos develop in the womb, leading to facial birth defects.

"And they have severe implications for the kids that are affected. They affect feeding, speech, breathing, they can require extensive surgery and they have psychological implications."

Professor Visel added that scientists were just at the beginning of understanding the processes that shape the face, but their early results suggested it was an extremely complex process.

Instead of leading to a search for certainty, as Descartes’s dream did, Zhuangzi came to the realization that he had perceived “the transformation of things,” indicating that one should go along with this transformation rather than trying in vain to search for what is real.

the views of Mencius and his later opponent Xunzi’s views about human nature are more recommendations of how one should view oneself in order to become a better person than metaphysical assertions about whether humans are by nature good or bad. Though each man’s assertions about human nature are incompatible with each other, they may still function inside the Confucian tradition as alternative ways of cultivation.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self surely looks metaphysical, but its real aim is to free one from suffering, since according to Buddhism suffering comes ultimately from attachment to the self. Buddhist meditations are kung fu practices to shake off one’s attachment, and not just intellectual inquiries for getting propositional truth.

The essence of kung fu — various arts and instructions about how to cultivate the person and conduct one’s life — is often hard to digest for those who are used to the flavor and texture of mainstream Western philosophy. It is understandable that, even after sincere willingness to try, one is often still turned away by the lack of clear definitions of key terms and the absence of linear arguments in classic Chinese texts. This, however, is not a weakness, but rather a requirement of the kung fu orientation — not unlike the way that learning how to swim requires one to focus on practice and not on conceptual understanding.

It even expands epistemology into the non-conceptual realm in which the accessibility of knowledge is dependent on the cultivation of cognitive abilities, and not simply on whatever is “publicly observable” to everyone. It also shows that cultivation of the person is not confined to “knowing how.” An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others.

Western philosophy at its origin is similar to classic Chinese philosophy. The significance of this point is not merely in revealing historical facts. It calls our attention to a dimension that has been eclipsed by the obsession with the search for eternal, universal truth and the way it is practiced, namely through rational arguments.

One might well consider the Chinese kung fu perspective a form of pragmatism.  The proximity between the two is probably why the latter was well received in China early last century when John Dewey toured the country. What the kung fu perspective adds to the pragmatic approach, however, is its clear emphasis on the cultivation and transformation of the person, a dimension that is already in Dewey and William James but that often gets neglected

A kung fu master does not simply make good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever preferences a person happens to have. In fact the subject is never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be the result of a sound rational decision, a good action that demonstrates kung fu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it. It also brings forward what Charles Taylor calls the “background” — elements such as tradition and community — in our understanding of the formation of a person’s beliefs and attitudes. Through the kung fu approach, classic Chinese philosophy displays a holistic vision that brings together these marginalized dimensions and thereby forces one to pay close attention to the ways they affect each other.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct. Yet unlike Aristotelian ethics, the kung fu approach to ethics does not rely on any metaphysics for justification.

This approach opens up the possibility of allowing multiple competing visions of excellence, including the metaphysics or religious beliefs by which they are understood and guided, and justification of these beliefs is then left to the concrete human experiences.

it is more appropriate to consider kung fu as a form of art. Art is not ultimately measured by its dominance of the market. In addition, the function of art is not accurate reflection of the real world; its expression is not constrained to the form of universal principles and logical reasoning, and it requires cultivation of the artist, embodiment of virtues/virtuosities, and imagination and creativity.

If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.

the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.

The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen

Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.

iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.

only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer

The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.

Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.

The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.

The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness

Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.

Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)

Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.

Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.

Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.

Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much

The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys

Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning

the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived

Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.

Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.

correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them

Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

It makes it hard to follow directions and instructions because they require holding multiple steps in mind. It can lead to losing important items and missing deadlines

We have a hard time prioritizing, and having a “good” memory involves paying attention to what is important. One study required children to remember specific words from a list. These were the “important” or priority words. Those with ADHD remembered the same number of words as those without the condition, but they were less likely to recall the important words.1

working memory is the ability to manipulate that information

People with ADHD sometimes interrupt others because they are afraid of forgetting what they want to say

Attention and memory are connected.

ADHD makes it hard to control one’s attention. Experts note that having problems with “source discrimination3" and “selective attention” lead to being “overwhelmed by unimportant stimuli.4"

In other words, we experience an information overload and do not know what to remember. It goes back to the test with the ADHD children who recalled the same number of words as their peers but not the “right” words.

On average, it was low, but when looked at individually, it showed that each ADHD child alternately processed problems quickly and slowly, though often as accurately as the other children.5

FOMO—fear of missing out—also plays a role

A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance.

Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly. Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.

The earlier teens start using social media, the greater impact the platforms have on mental health. This is especially true for females. While teen males tend to express aggression physically, females do so relationally by excluding others and sharing hurtful comments. Social media increases the opportunity for such harmful interactions.

In the past, teens read magazines that contained altered photos of models. Now, these images are one thumb-scroll away at any given time. Apps that provide the user with airbrushing, teeth whitening, and more filters are easy to find and easier to use. It’s not only celebrities who look perfect—it’s everyone.

In recent years, plastic surgeons have seen an uptick in requests from patients who want to look like their filtered Snapchat and Instagram photos.

A person experiences impostor syndrome when feeling chronic self-doubt and a sense of being exposed as ‘a fraud’ in terms of success and intellect. “Whether it’s another pretty vacation or someone’s bouquet of flowers, my mind went from ‘Why not me?’ to ‘I don’t deserve those things, and I don’t know why,’ and it made me feel awful.”

Sperling encourages people to conduct their own behavior experiments by rating their emotions on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the most intensely one could experience an emotion, before and after using social media sites at the same time each day for a week.

Meanwhile, the Office of National Statistics in the UK has found that rates of depression have doubled. Both depression and anxiety are known to have an impact on memory.

Although levels of anxiety peaked when lockdown started and have gradually reduced, average levels have remained higher than in usual times, especially in people who are young, living alone, living with children, living on a low income or in urban areas

Repetition of stories helps us to consolidate our memories of what happened to us – so-called episodic memories. If we can’t socialise as much, perhaps it’s not surprising that those memories don’t feel as crystal clear as usual.

This is all made more difficult by a lack of cues to aid our memories. If you go out to work then your journey, the change of scenery and breaks you take punctuate the day, giving you time points to anchor your memorie

Then there’s a general fatigue, which also doesn’t help our memories. Zoom meetings are tiring, some work is much harder from home and holidays are getting cancelled. A lack of routine and anxiety about the pandemic can disturb our sleep. Put all that together – basically we’re consistently tired.

So with the combination of fatigue, anxiety, a lack of cues, and fewer social interactions, it’s no wonder that some of us feel our memories are letting us down.

The good news is that there are things we can do about it. Going for a walk, especially along unfamiliar streets, will bring your brain back to attention

Making sure the weekdays and the weekends are different enough not to merge into one can help with the distortions our new life can have on our perception of time.

They then compared the MRI data of participants who reported often feeling lonely with those who did not.

Researchers found the default networks of lonely people were more strongly wired together and surprisingly, their grey matter volume in regions of the default network was greater.

The fact the structure and function of this network is positively associated with loneliness may be because lonely people are more likely to use imagination, memories of the past or hopes for the future to overcome their social isolation.

In lonely people, the structure of this fibre tract was better preserved.

"In the absence of desired social experiences, lonely individuals may be biased towards internally-directed thoughts such as reminiscing or imagining social experiences.

Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a major health problem, and previous studies have shown older people who experience loneliness have a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

the urgency of reducing loneliness in today's society,

and that they would make perfect theoretical sense. The observation that the VHI was affected by the type of creativity task and performance in the creativity tasks was affected by the synchrony manipulation suggests some degree of overlap between the ways that engaging in particular creativity tasks and experiencing particular degrees of synchrony are able to bias perceived ownership and agency. In terms of our theoretical framework, this implies that engaging in divergent thinking biases metacontrol towards flexibility in similar ways as experiencing synchrony between one’s own movements and those of a virtual effector does, while engaging in convergent thinking biases metacontrol towards persistence as experiencing asynchrony does. What the present findings demonstrate is that both kinds of manipulation together bias the VHI in the predicted direction, but they do not allow to statistically or numerically separate and estimate the contribution that each of the two confounded manipulations might have made. Accordingly, the present findings should not be taken to provide conclusive evidence that priming tasks alone are able to change self-perception without being supported (and perhaps even enabled) by the experience of synchrony

between proprioceptive and visual action feedback.

JP Morgan itself has been strongly criticised in the past for heavy investment in fossil fuels.The Rainforest Action Network released a 2019 report claiming that the US banking giant provided the most fossil fuel firm financing of any bank in from 2016 to 2018.

He said if the bank's own researchers were "saying the very future of the human race is at stake" then the bank itself should change its direction."It's good they [the researchers] are telling the truth more - it's not good they [the bank] remain a strong funder of fossil fuels," he said."Everyone has to have responsibility for change, whether they are asset managers, or institutional investors, or chief executives, or shareholders," he added.

Talking about a timeframe he added: "We are a bit concerned about putting a date on it as yet because some of the technologies are still evolving. We will get there, the only question is how quickly we can get there.''