Word: held
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Iacono effectively picked up where Snowdon left off. Iacono and his colleagues discovered that not only did nuns who avoided dementia later in life have 20% higher linguistic scores as young women, compared with peers who developed symptoms of cognitive decline, but that the relationship held up even in nuns whose brains showed all the physical signs of Alzheimer's. "There is a special group of people who have comparable amount of plaques and tangles - the typical marks of the disease - without the cognitive impairment," says Iacono. "[It appears that] people with higher linguistic scores were protected even...
...interesting twist on that study, Cohen and colleague Sarah Pressman similarly analyzed a collection of autobiographies - this time, written by 96 leading psychologists at an average age of 65. Once again, there was a correlation between longevity and positive emotions, but in the newer study the relationship held only for "active" expressions of emotion, such as "excited," "thrilled" and "delighted" as opposed to passive emotions like "pleased" and "calm." Falling in line with other recent social research in the elderly, the analysis found that language indicating strong social relationships was powerfully associated with longer life. (See how to prevent illness...
That temptation was addressed head-on in a keynote speech by Ed Diener, president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Diener pointed out that some of the most popular findings on happiness have not held up to further study, that researchers have begun to the record straight...
Such findings support a widely held theory by happiness researchers that a person's level of satisfaction is determined largely by character and attitudes - less by external factors, like money or disability - and that we tend to return to our personal set point. But another branch of research - the one that leads to bestselling books and, at the conference, sessions that were packed to the point of fire-code violation - suggests that set point can be modified, and that people can learn to be happier...
...Equally important is the question of what impact the PRI's comeback will have on Mexico's fledgling democracy. There are few indications that the party - notorious for epic corruption, vote-rigging and often violent co-opting of opponents when it held power - has been much chastened by its ouster from power in 2000. Numerous PRI officials on the federal, state and local levels continue to face allegations, for example, that they're cozy with Mexico's powerful drug cartels. Just as troubling is the party's vacuous political philosophy, which critics say still consists of little more than...