Nearly one in six children in the United States between the ages of 8 and 12 are considered obese, and parents play a major role in the development and maintenance of obesity in their children.Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) School of Medicine are looking at whether parent-only intervention programs – teaching parents skills to use in helping their children lose weight – might be a more effective method of targeting childhood obesity than sessions which bring parents and children together to work on the problem. [continue reading…]

Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples’ mental states, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. [continue reading…]

Here’s a maxim from the “duh” department: People typically prefer to feel emotions that are pleasant, like excitement, and avoid those that are unpleasant, like anger.  

But a new study appearing in the April issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, says this may not always be the case. Psychologists Maya Tamir and Christopher Mitchell of Boston College, and James Gross of Stanford University tested whether people prefer to experience emotions that are potentially useful, even when they are unpleasant to experience.   [continue reading…]