Mindsets and stigmas about mental health and obesity
Babij et al. (2023 ) looked at how our mindset – our beliefs about the changeability of personal traits – can influence the way we view mental health and the associated stigmas.
Posts
Self-downing and the fixed mindset
"I'm just stupid. Just a loser," said a 19 year old boy after he failed his final exam. A sad response. New research sheds some light into how such response may happen.
The benefits of social cognition vs the benefits of task-focused processing
In Social: why our brains are wired to connect (also read this post ), Matt Lieberman explains that, within our brains there are two quite distinct neural systems for respectively social and non-social thinking. These two systems appear to be antagonistic in the sense that when one of the two is very active, the other is largely inactive. In addition to this he explains that whenever a person is focused on a specific task the non-social system is turned on and as soon as the person stops focusing on the task, his or her social system will turn on. Because this neural system becomes active as soon as one finishes a specific task, it is called the default nework. It seems that when we are not focusing on a specific task we are not doing nothing. We are engaged in social cognition, in other words, thinking about other people and our relationships with them. Lieberman writes: