Mindframe

For adults, the benefits of meditation are no mystery. As the Mayo Clinic notes , meditating has a whole host of upsides, from lowered stress to increased self-awareness to reduced negative emotions to a spark of extra creativity and intelligence.   Even the United States Marines—not a community known for their love of New Age-y practices— have begun using meditation training to help boost decisiveness and clear-headedness in times of conflict. But while you make an effort to incorporate more guided relaxation techniques into your daily routine, don’t forget about the children in your life, writes Alice G Walton in Forbes . Whether a kid needs some help calming down before things reach tantrum territory, or strategies for not getting so stressed about homework and tests, studies are increasingly showing that meditation can be an important aid at any age. While we still have less overall data about the benefits of meditation on the developing brain, David Gelles of T...

Since the days of Hippocrates, science has struggled to quantify human personality, and group the seemingly infinite combinations of traits into a number of discrete “types”. However, it’s difficult to design a personality-sorting scheme that produces replicable results. In the case of the now oft-derided Myers-Briggs, even beloved systems have earned harsh criticism from the scientific community. Now, from Northwest University, a new study led by Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering has crunched data from more than 1.5 million participants to devise a brand-new way to categorize personality. The subjects were a self-selecting group of internet users willing to answer one of several different online questionnaires developed over the years. These surveys contained between 40 and 200 questions, designed to measure the degree to which each respondent demonstrated five widely agreed-upon personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness...

  Is there someone in your life with an unusually short fuse? Maybe you’ve witnessed a co-worker repeatedly go ballistic on the printer whenever it runs out of ink, or maybe you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a boss who is a yeller, trapping you in meeting after meeting full of angry rants. Well, according to a new scientific paper from the University of Western Australia, this person most likely has another, connected trait: they’re not as smart as they think they are. Yes, in contrary to the age-old legend of the temperamental genius with a stormy, high-trigger attitude, the study found that “trait-anger” (that is, people who experience anger as a part of their everyday disposition) is linked with narcissism, and thus an inflated sense of one’s abilities. Undergraduates from Warsaw, Poland answered questions designed to assess their trait-anger, emotional stability, and narcissism. They were asked to rate their intelligence on a 25-point scale—and then they too...