Word: chess
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...wedding, the football coach, in the newspapers and on morning television. Whatever taboo made grief a private matter is for now a casualty of war. Has there ever been so intimate a reckoning as this--and not just on our side? Mohamed Atta was a scrawny kid who liked chess and got upset if someone killed a bug. Osama bin Laden was devoted to his mama and liked to drive tractors and watch nature videos. We compare his pallor from video to video to assess his failing health. This is indeed the devil we know...
...idea of telltale infant behavior is not new. In the 1950s, husband-and-wife psychiatric team Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas, both now 87, identified nine parameters of temperament--activity level, attention span, adaptability, intensity, distractibility, mood, sensory threshold, response to challenge and predictability of functions such as eating and sleeping--that emerge at about four weeks and indicate a lot about personality. "At one month, behavior starts to be discernible," says Chess today. "These differences define...
Half a century ago, that message didn't get through. Chess and Thomas were dismissed as "determinists"--a damning label during an era in which babies were seen as blank slates upon which parents could scribble any personality at all. But practitioners see new wisdom in the old findings...
Using Thomas and Chess's methods as well as newer personality tests, behavioral scientists find that only 60% of babies have easy temperaments from birth. Most of the rest exhibit significant moodiness, defiance or other traits that place them in the so-called difficult category. Without intervention, 80% of these kids--mostly boys--will act out, becoming oppositional and hyperexcitable, and run a greater risk of developing ADHD. The remaining 20%--mostly girls--become withdrawn and run a greater risk of developing phobias, depression or compulsions. Clearly, not every baby in the difficult group deteriorates this...
...think he has done extremely well. I admire the control he's shown in the handling of the crisis. He has been clear and decisive but also restrained. One senses almost the air of chess moves on the part of the Administration...