John Cleese takes us on a tour of a laughter therapy practice in India.
Laughter promotes stress reduction, community bonding, stronger immune system... and joy. What a simple solution!
A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that spouses who use "we-ness" language are better able to resolve conflicts than those who don't.
UC
Berkeley researchers analyzed conversations between 154 middle-aged and
older couples about points of disagreement in their marriages and found
that those who used pronouns such as "we," "our" and "us" behaved more
positively toward one another and showed less physiological stress. Marital issues are more easily resolved with a "we" attitude.
In contrast, couples who emphasized marital issues that arise from their "separateness" by using pronouns such as "I," "me" and "you" were found to be less satisfied in their marriages. This marital approach was especially true for older couples. Their use of separateness pronouns was most strongly linked to unhappy marriages, according to the study.
Moreover, the study found that older couples identified more as "we" than did their middle-aged counterparts, suggesting that facing obstacles and overcoming challenges together over the long haul, including raising families, may give couples a greater sense of shared identity.
"Individuality is a deeply ingrained value in American society, but, at least in the realm of marriage, being part of a 'we' is well worth giving up a bit of 'me,'" said UC Berkeley psychology professor Robert Levenson, a co-author of the study published last semester in the journal Psychology and Aging.
Previous studies have established that the use of "we-ness" or "separateness" language is a strong indicator of marital satisfaction in younger couples. These latest findings, however, take this several steps further by showing how powerful this correlation is in more established couples, linking it to the emotions and physiological responses that occur when spouses either team up or become polarized in the face of disagreements, researchers said.
"The use of 'we' language is a natural outgrowth of a sense of partnership, of being on the same team, and confidence in being able to face problems together," said study co-author Benjamin Seider, a graduate student in psychology at UC Berkeley.
In addition to Seider and Levenson, co-authors of the marital issues study, "We Can Work It Out: Age Differences in Relational Pronouns, Physiology and Behavior in Marital Conflict," are Gilad Hirschberger and Kristin Nelson, who conducted their research while at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research.
Through a holistic, human-centered design approach, the QoLT Center works with real people in the real world to ensure our technologies are sustainable, acceptable, and support a person's place in their community as well as society at large. Our long-term goals are to:
Her company, The FloH Club, set up a partnership with an online computer-support company, Support.com, to staff the hot line. It is open seven days a week, 8 a.m to 2 a.m. Eastern time.
Members can call with any type of technical
issue, from dealing with frozen screens and sputtering systems to
configuring a new printer, figuring out e-mail mysteries and even
backing up a hard drive.
Memberships to the FloH Club run $25 per month or $250 for a year. In addition, the service offers one-time, dedicated training sessions for $50 covering a number of topics, including learning how to download pictures from a digital camera and setting up a Facebook account.
Currently, the service is only available for Windows-based operating systems. But if the demand is there, the FloH Club will expand to Mac operating systems.
"Now you can stay connected with your family," Henderson said. "And you don't have to feel embarrassed or stupid about asking for help."
Sounds like the motherly advice Mrs Brady would hand out to learners of all ages!
The cost of providing health care to seniors is rising more than twice as fast in Dallas as in San Diego, and Medicare now spends nearly three times more to care for its enrollees in Miami than it does in Honolulu.
The researchers project that, at current spending rates, Medicare will be $660 billion in the red by 2023.
But by reducing the annual growth in per capita spending from 3.5 percent, the national average, to 2.4 percent, the rate in San Francisco, Medicare could save $1.42 trillion and turn the deficit into a healthy surplus.
The authors call on physicians to lead an effort to reform how the U.S. delivers and pays for health care to bring spending under control.
Baby boomers may be popularly portrayed as whiners, complainers and narcissists, but a new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst psychology Professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne says the 50-somethings are getting a bad rap.
Connection to Younger Generations...Social Conscience
"It's wrong to say baby boomers are selfish and only care about staying young," says Susan Krauss Whitbourne. "They have a feeling of connection to younger generations and a social conscience."
Whitbourne's findings, based on three decades of data from two groups of baby boomers, were published in the September issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.
The study began in 1966 at the University of Rochester in New York, when a group of students participated in a research project on personality development. Similar studies of successive generations of students at Rochester as well as follow-up surveys with participants in the earliest groups have yielded 34 years of information about the life changes experienced by leading edge boomers, who were in their mid- to late 50s, and trailing edge boomers, who were in their mid-40s, at the time of the most recent survey.
Boomers in Midlife
"What's most interesting is seeing what happened to baby boomers in midlife," says Whitbourne. "Some became more fulfilled, others became despairing, and yet others remained relatively stable. My research design allowed me to suggest which changes in their lives were most closely connected with a growth in fulfillment.
- More fulfilled
- Despairing
- Relatively Stable
According to Whitbourne, the results suggest that personality growth doesn't follow a ladder model where one stage succeeds another, but more closely resembles a matrix, in which issues associated with early stages of life are continuously revisited through life.
Matrix of Early Life's Issues
For Whitbourne, the study illustrates that we are not
locked into a narrowly defined life by the time we are of college age.
"I've seen people overcome social deficits over the course of the
study," she says. "This really shows that you don't have to give up on
yourself. People can change through their entire life."
Fulfillment Beyond the Workplace
Since the last study, the boomers have found fulfillment beyond the workplace, says Whitbourne. In the 1980s, the "me generation" was working hard and making a lot of money, but something was missing from their lives. At the time, Whitbourne said the results were shaped by Reagan-era social values.
Volunteerism
By the '90s, however, the volunteerism of the Clinton years seems to have taken root among those unfulfilled boomers, she says. "There is a real concern about social well-being that goes back to the core values they developed in college."
Industriousness
Another change Whitbourne notes concerns "industry," a personality trait associated with the work ethic. The oldest boomers in the study had measured far lower on industry than other age groups in earlier surveys, but the latest data show they've caught up with their peers.
"It would appear from the present analyses that the very lowest industry scores were obtained in college from participants who, in early adulthood, had jobs with extremely low prestige," says the study. "However, they managed to exceed their peers in industry scores throughout the course of the study."
Self-confidence and Determination in Women
For midlife women, the results also support other studies that found gains in self-confidence and determination through the workplace, says Whitbourne. "It is possible that for these leading-edge baby boomer women, feelings of competence were suppressed in college, when it seemed as though their careers would play an important role in their future success," she writes.
Intimacy and Relationships are Not the Only Change Agents
The study also reinforces the idea that individuals can
overcome early issues with intimacy and relationships, notes
Whitbourne, and "catch up" with their psychologically more fortunate
peers.
According to the data, participants who were not in a committed relationship early in adulthood showed continued gains throughout the period of the study and moved toward an increasingly favorable resolution that exceeded those peers who were in a committed relationship in early adulthood.
Later Parenting
"Enhanced development gains"
were also noted for boomers who became parents after the age of 31. By
waiting until their careers were established, those study participants
may have been "best able to enjoy their new parenthood status to the
fullest," says Whitbourne.
What Midlife Crisis?
Whitbourne says the study also lays to rest the myth of the midlife crisis. Based on the interviews and surveys, she says, "My study confirms others in the empirical literature that despite its popularity in the pop culture, the majority of adults don't freak out in their 40s or 50s."
That's not to say the study participants haven't had their ups and downs, says Whitbourne, but individuals grapple with their problems in a variety of ways. "People may experience depression in midlife, but it's too glib to write that off as a midlife crisis. Other factors must be considered."
The study is co-authored by Joel R. Sneed of Queens College, City University of New York, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Aline Sayer, visiting associate professor of psychology at UMass Amherst.However, maintaining a healthy body mass index (BMI), not smoking and being physically active are associated with higher fitness levels throughout adult life.
"The U.S. population
is aging and is becoming more obese and sedentary," the authors write
as background information in the article. "It is well documented that
the cardiorespiratory fitness of men and women declines with age and
that body composition and habitual physical activity are related to
cardiorespiratory fitness."
Low fitness levels increase the risk of diseases and interfere with older adults' ability to function independently.
Andrew S. Jackson, P.E.D., of the University of Houston, and colleagues studied 3,429 women and 16,889 men age 20 to 96. During the study, participants completed between two and 33 health examinations that included counseling about diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors along with a treadmill exercise to assess fitness.
Statistical models showed that while fitness levels declined continuously over time, the decrease was not linear or steady--cardiorespiratory fitness declined more rapidly after age 45. The decline for men was greater than that for women.
The
results also "showed that being active, keeping a normal BMI and not
smoking were associated with substantially higher levels of
cardiorespiratory fitness during the adult life span studied," the
authors write.
"Being inactive and having a high BMI were associated with a lower age at which an individual could be expected to reach threshold cardiorespiratory fitness levels associated with substantially higher health risks."
Given the high rates of
obesity and low levels of physical activity previously observed in the
general population, the results also suggest that more men and women
will reach the fitness level designated by the Social Security
Administration as representing disability at a younger age, the authors
note.
CONCLUSION:
"These data indicate the need for physicians to recommend to their patients the necessity to maintain their weight, engage in regular aerobic exercise and abstain from smoking," they conclude.
Editor's Note: The ACLS was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Here's what to do about it.
Get organized
If you have several to-dos, decide what to tackle first, and clear all other projects off your desk and computer screen.
Participate
If you daydream during meetings, challenge yourself by thinking of questions and actively joining the discussion.
Change your scenery
When
you start to lose concentration, leave your desk and take a walk
outside or to the office common space for a mental breather.
For more tips on corraling your brain power, visit Interns Over 40 for a wide variety of Boomer work insights and tips.