Mindfully Healing

The two surveys involved around 370,000 people in the UK. Being married brings people more lifelong happiness than being single, new research finds. The boost to happiness in being married also persists into old age. The positive effect of marriage is even stronger for those people who described their partner as their best friend. The findings were just the same for those people who lived together but were not actually married. Professor John Helliwell, study co-author, said: “Even after years the married are still more satisfied. This suggests a causal

Only one personality trait is changed when people drink. Alcohol has much less effect on people’s personalities than they imagine, new research finds. Only extraversion — how outgoing you are — changes when you are drunk. People become more assertive, gregarious and move around more when drinking. However, people think that all their personality traits change when they are drunk compared with when they are sober. Dr Rachel Winograd, the study’s first author, said: “We were surprised to find such a discrepancy between drinkers’ perceptions of their own alcohol-induced personalities

The parental behaviour that lowers children’s IQ. Children who were spanked in childhood have lower IQs, a study finds. The more children were spanked, the lower their IQ, the research also found. The probable reason is that spanking is highly stressful for children. It can leave them with post-traumatic stress disorder. An ongoing fear of terrible things happening — being easily startled — is linked to a lower IQ. Parents who continue to use corporal punishment into the teenage years may hamper their children’s brain development even more. Professor Murray