Mindfully Healing

Some good can come of this emotion — not so much its close cousin, shame. People who are more prone to feeling guilt are better at reading other people’s emotions, a new study finds. The guilt-prone were able to read all types of facial emotions better, tests revealed. They were particularly good on relatively low-intensity emotions. Subtle facial expressions are (obviously) the most difficult to detect. This is not the first time guilt has been linked to empathy, as the study’s authors explain: “[there is] a large body of prior

Up to 1 in 3 people in the US report having been bullied during childhood — most often at middle school. Bullying is linked to mental health problems in later years, new research finds. However, these tend to fade over the years, showing the remarkable resilience of many children. The study followed 11,108 twins who were followed until they were 16-years-old. Dr Jean-Baptiste Pingault, one of the study’s authors, said: “Previous studies have shown that bullied children are more likely to suffer mental health issues, but give little evidence of

The most common anxiety disorder is social anxiety disorder. Cognitive therapy on its own is the best treatment for social anxiety disorder, new research finds. It is better than just taking drugs and better than taking drugs as well as having therapy. Cognitive therapy resulted in either a cure or significant improvement in 85% of patients. Professor Hans M. Nordahl, who led the study, said: “We’ve set a new world record in effectively treating social anxiety disorders. This is one of the best studies on social anxiety disorders ever. It’s

It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40%. Multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40%, research finds. And now brain scans show why. Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity. This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time. Dr Iiro Jääskeläinen, a neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors, said: “We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure different brain areas of our research subjects while they watched short segments of