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Older siblings play an important role in the lives of their younger siblings. Like parents, older brothers and sisters act as role models and teachers, helping their younger siblings learn about the world. This positive influence is thought to extend to younger siblings' capacity to feel care and sympathy for those in need: Children whose older siblings are kind, warm, and supportive are more empathic than children whose siblings lack these characteristics. A new longitudinal study looked at whether younger siblings also contribute to their older sisters' and brothers' empathy in early childhood, when empathic tendencies begin to develop. The research found that beyond the influence of parents, both older and younger siblings positively influence each other's empathic concern over time.

Researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 452 Canadian sibling pairs and their mothers who were part of the Kids, Families, and Places project and from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. They wanted to determine whether levels of empathy in 18- and 48-month-old siblings at the start of the study predicted changes in the other siblings' empathy 18 months later. The researchers videotaped interactions in the families' homes and mothers completed questionnaires. Children's empathy was measured by observing each sibling's behavioral and facial responses to an adult researcher who pretended to be distressed (e.g., after breaking a cherished object) and hurt (e.g., after hitting her knee and catching her finger in a briefcase).

"Our findings emphasize the importance of considering how all members of the family, not just parents and older siblings, contribute to children's development," suggests Sheri Madigan, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, who coauthored the study. "The influence of younger siblings has been found during adolescence, but our study indicates that this process may begin much earlier than previously thought."

Simply asking people how old they feel may tell you a lot about their health and well-being.

“I don’t know if she dropped something and had to pick it up, or if her shoe was untied,” Ms. Heller said, but she eagerly bounded over to help. The woman blamed old age for her incapacity, explaining that she was 70. But Ms. Heller was 71.“This woman felt every bit her age,” she recalled. “I don’t let age stop me. I think it’s a mind-set, really.”

People with a healthy lifestyle and living conditions and a fortunate genetic inheritance tend to score “younger” on these assessments and are said to have a lower “biological age.” But there’s a much easier way to determine the shape people are in. It’s called “subjective age.”

Go ahead lie about your age. It may be the very thing that helps you live a longer life.

The study looked at data from from 6,489 people with an average age of 65.8 years who reported that they felt a little less than 10 years younger. What's interesting is most people in the study didn't feel like their actual age. Most said they felt about three years younger. Only a tiny percent, some 4.8%, felt at least a year older than their actual age.

the scientists found only a little over 14% of those who felt younger than their years had died. That was compared with the more than 24% of the people who reported feeling older or feeling their age who had died. Some 18% of the people who felt like their chronological age died in that same time period.

THIS fall, one in 11 kindergarten-age children in the United States will not be going to class. Parents of these children often delay school entry in an attempt to give them a leg up on peers, but this strategy is likely to be counterproductive.

Teachers may encourage redshirting because more mature children are easier to handle in the classroom and initially produce better test scores than their younger classmates.

This advantage fades by the end of elementary school, though, and disadvantages start to accumulate. In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well. By adulthood, they are no better off in wages or educational attainment — in fa

The research “shows you can take older people who aren’t functioning well and make them cognitively younger through this training,” said Earl K. Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not affiliated with the research. “It’s a very big deal.”

Neuroscientists there, led by Dr. Adam Gazzaley, worked with developers to create NeuroRacer, a relatively simple video game in which players drive and try to identify specific road signs that pop up on the screen, while ignoring other signs deemed irrelevant.

One of the main early findings of the study reinforced just how challenging it is to multitask successfully, particularly as people age.

Memory’s speed and accuracy begin to slip around age 25 and keep on slipping.

Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.

Gen Z, like a youthful cavalry, will start entering the electorate in large numbers this year, and will reinforce the change that Millennials began. These young Americans, born from 1997 to 2012, are even more racially diverse than Millennials. Forty-nine percent of Gen Z are people of color, versus 45 percent of Millennials, according to a recent analysis of census data

By contrast, more than 70 percent of Baby Boomers are white.

Given that the younger generations align much more closely with Democratic ideological views on almost all policy questions, this shift underscores the stakes in the generational roulette Trump has played by defining the GOP so narrowly around the priorities and preferences of his core groups: older, nonurban, non-college-educated, and evangelical white people.

As part of a lifelong experiment on circadian rhythms, Sothern, now 69, is trying to confirm or reject a widely held belief: Many people feel that time flies by more quickly as they age.

So far, Sothern's results are inconclusive

"I'm tending now to overestimate the minute more than I used to," he tells me. But then again, he had detected a similar pattern — more overestimates — in the 1990s, only to have his estimates fall in the 2000s. "Time estimation isn't a perfect science," he says.

Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.

The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism

More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.

Fifty minutes.That’s the average amount of time, the company said, that users spend each day on its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms

there are only 24 hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than one-sixteenth of the average user’s waking time is spent on Facebook.

That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies (an average per day of 2.8 hours)

While the majority of jihadists around the world are not teenagers, official figures show that their involvement in violent Islamism is growing.The number of under-18s arrested for alleged terror offences in the UK almost doubled from eight to 15 from 2013-14 to 2014-15.

Experts say this bears out fears that more and more young people are being drawn to extremism, with followers in their early teens among them. "We are seeing this kind of thing happening more and more with the rise of Islamic State," says Charlie Winter, an expert in jihadist militancy.

The main target for groups like Islamic State is said to be young people between 16 and 24 years old.However the radicalisation process can start as early as 11 or 12

No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance

The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.

his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?

she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.

Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.

My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart.

in just about every aspect of my life I seek order and safety.

Picture me on Tinder circa 2014.

Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

How the World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory

At 12,500 years old, the Shigir Idol is by far the earliest known work of ritual art. Only decay has kept others from being found.

The world’s oldest known wooden sculpture — a nine-foot-tall totem pole thousands of years old — looms over a hushed chamber of an obscure Russian museum in the Ural Mountains, not far from the Siberian border

that age and emotional well-being tend to increase together, as a rule, even as mental acuity and physical health taper off.

that age and emotional well-being tend to increase together, as a rule, even as mental acuity and physical health taper off.

Do people somehow develop better coping skills as they age?

Intuitively, it is tempting to think that a child who has an elder brother or sister will grow up in a stimulating linguistic environment and will develop their language skills faster than the family's firstborn. However, several studies have shown the contrary: the acquisition of language in a child with an elder sibling is reported to be slower than a child who has none.

More than 1000 children have been followed from birth to five and a half years old in the mother-child cohort EDEN.* Their language skills were evaluated at 2, 3 and 5.5 years old by tests measuring several aspects of language, such as vocabulary, syntax and verbal reasoning

Children who have an elder brother had on average a two-month delay in language development compared with children with an elder sister.

Remember the good old days when kids just watched YouTube all day? Now that they binge on 15-second TikToks, those YouTube clips seem like PBS documentaries.

Many parents tell me their kids can’t sit through feature-length films anymore because to them the movies feel painfully slow. Others have observed their kids struggling to focus on homework. And reading a book? Forget about it.

What is happening to kids’ brains?

The commonly recommended age for a first cellphone is 13 years old. Most kids that age are in the eighth grade, getting ready to learn algebra. The desperate phone calls to 911 coming from inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., where 21 people were killed last month, were placed by children younger than that.

In the aftermath of another school shooting, concerned parents are weighing whether phones are a distraction or a potential lifeline for their children.

Phone ownership already is widespread among younger children, with 43 percent of 8-to-12-year-olds owning their own smartphone