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New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."

Article abstract: Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations. In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15-20 minutes on 3-5 occasions. Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics. Here we present an overview of the expressive writing paradigm, outline populations for which it has been found to be beneficial and discuss possible mechanisms underlying the observed health benefits. In addition, we suggest how expressive writing can be used as a therapeutic tool for survivors of trauma and in psychiatric settings. This article provides a succinct review of relevant studies in this area, from 20 years ago to the present.

In a study, it is predicted that bilinguals have enhanced brain networks because they had a delayed onset of Alzheimer's by five years compared to monolinguals of similar educational backgrounds. Through CT scans, it was discovered that bilinguals physically had twice as much atrophy of the brain as monolinguals at the time symptoms started. This means that bilinguals showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's even though their brains physically looked like they did.

This article was about how a gratitude journal can affect someone's life. A college student began writing monthly gratitude lists when she was "at a point when [she] was just not in a very good place in [her] life." There is an increasing amount of research being done on the benefits of a gratitude journal. Multiple studies show that expressing gratitude can help people sleep better, lower stress, and improve relationships. Then there is a lack of research on how the expression of gratitude can affect those with clinical depression, anxiety, or suicidal tendencies. Gratitude journals aren't for everyone, it's all dependent on how you feel.

While most are pushing towards being more grateful, researchers are explaining the benefits of journaling gratitude. The research on gratitude is beneficial to us emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. It's a simple practice that can benefit people, and it's free! While being grateful is something good to practice and turn to habit, it doesn't effect everyone the same. There is still undergoing research on the impact that gratitude has on those that have depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

"Participants in the warm room used more concrete, physical language to describe the film and reported feeling socially closer to the experimenter than did the participants in a cold room... participants in a warm room were more likely to recognise the "relational similarity" between objects." Related to temperature metaphors, e.g. "Holding warm feelings toward someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder". Actual study at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19732385

links to Pennebaker's research, such as how using pronouns flexibly is linked to mental and physical health!?

By George Lakoff. Includes indexes of conceptual metaphors, e.g., - A force is a moving object- A problem is a body of water- Psychological forces are physical forces- Time is a landscape we move through- Words are weapons Includes examples for each. E.g., for "A problem is a body of water": - He dived right into the problem.- The murky waters of the investigation frustrated him.- He'd been fishing for the answer for weeks.- Finally the answer surfaced.- The answer's just floating around out there.

AHH! We needed this. Thanks, Ryan!

This article is relevant to the Genie case, outlining the many ways isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and are also more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Loneliness also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation unleashes an extreme immune response - a cascade of stress hormones and inflammation. This response might've been biologically advantageous for our early ancestors, when being isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for modern humans, the outcome is mostly harmful. A 1957 McGill University study, recreated in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George's Hospital, Tooting, found that after only a matter of hours, people deprived of perceptual stimulation and meaningful human contact, started to crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word association tests. In addition, subjects started hallucinating. The brain is used to processing large quantities of data, but in the absence of sensory input, Robbins states that "the various nerve systems feeding in to the brain's central processor are still firing off, but in a way that doesn't make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of them, to make them into a pattern." It tries to construct a reality from the scant signals available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.

by Bruce Schoonmaker As we learn more about the value of physical fitness in quality of life, the question naturally arises, how does fitness affect singing? How important to singing is one's physical condition?

Due to advances in the modern day language around the world is constantly changing and evolving. In fact, there are even some people who decide to give up one language in favor of another. In this article scientists attempt to explain why this happens by following the history of a language movement in Southern Carinthia, Austria and using methods from the field of physics originally devised for the use of identifying the motion of atoms.

Born between 1995 and 2012, teens are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet. 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.. Some interesting (and disturbing) findings: 1. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 2. While teens are physically safer than they've ever been, they're also more isolated and more subject to psychological harm. Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. In addition, 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. It's not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. 3. 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. 4. 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. While boys tend to bully one another physically, girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim's social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform to ostracize and exclude other girls 24/7. 5. Sleep deprivation: nearly all teens sleep with their phones in close proximity, and the devices are interfering with sleep: Many teens 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 signific

"Humans may love music, biologically speaking, because it mimics the sounds of our own voices. Neuroscientists say the use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech and conveys emotion." The study: http://purveslab.net/publications/bowling_purves_2009.pdf

Studies have traced a range of impressive benefits to writing down the things for which we're grateful-benefits including better sleep, fewer symptoms of illness, and more happiness among adults and kids alike. Robert Emmons, a UC Davis professor who studies the science of gratitude, offers the following research-based tips to enhance journaling effectiveness: 1. Don't just go through the motions. Research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and others suggests that journaling is more effective if you first make the conscious decision to become happier and more grateful. "Motivation to become happier plays a role in the efficacy of journaling," says Emmons. 2. Go for depth over breadth. Elaborating in detail about a particular thing for which you're grateful carries more benefits than a superficial list of many things. 3. Get personal. Focusing on people to whom you are grateful has more of an impact than focusing on things for which you are grateful. 4. Try subtraction, not just addition. One effective way of stimulating gratitude is to reflect on what your life would be like without certain blessings, rather than just tallying up all those good things. 5. Savor surprises. Try to record events that were unexpected or surprising, as these tend to elicit stronger levels of gratitude. 6. Don't overdo it. Writing occasionally (once or twice per week) is more beneficial than daily journaling.

Writing down what you're grateful for greatly impacts your social, physical, and physiological health but to some the impacts are unclear. This article page has a link that has created their very own technological gratitude journal that deepens and practices efficient journaling. Included in this article are 6 tips: 1) Have passion behind jotting down your gratitude. It put more motivation and thought in your writings. 2) Be specific with what you're grateful for. 3) Lean towards focusing your gratitude on people rather than things. (You learn to become less materialistic.) 4) Consider mentioning what it would be like with out the blessings. 5) Record events that were surprising & out of the ordinary. 6) Occasional writing over daily writing because it's easy for us to get numb to the good side of life. Writing our thoughts down rather than thinking about them or saying them, deepens our emotional connection and makes us more self aware.

This article talks about swearing and the hidden benefits that come with it. It also talks a little bit about swearing in different languages and how what words are considered swear words evolved. One thing I found particularly interesting in the article is that swearing has an observable, physical effect on a person. In the article, it said that "Students who repeated a curse word were able to keep their hand in a bucket of ice water longer than those who uttered a neutral word." I think that's both crazy and amazing that repeating a word that's considered taboo can have a physical impact on one's body.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

There are numerous positive effects of writing in a journal. The action of writing our thoughts, ideas and feelings benefits us in numerous aspects of our lives. One benefit of writing in a journal is that is boosts memory and comprehension. This is because there is a relationship between our hands and brains created by writing thoughts and ideas. Words are representation of ideas and the formation of letters causes the mind to compose or re-compose ideas while journaling. The second benefits is emotional, physical and psychological healing. This is because translating an experience into language makes the experience graspable and allows you to free yourself from emotional blockages and lowers anxiety, stress and induces better sleep. These are two out of ten benefits of writing in a journal that is proposed in this article.