emotional-resilience

Study: Trigger warnings don’t work, may undermine emotional resilience

by

___

It’s Official—Trigger Warn­ings Might Actu­al­ly Be Harm­ful (Medi­um):

“In the era of col­lege stu­dent sen­si­tiv­i­ties to a seem­ing­ly ever-increas­ing list of pos­si­ble offend­ing mate­r­i­al, the use of so-called “trig­ger warn­ings” has become com­mon­place on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es. These warn­ings are usu­al­ly giv­en at the begin­ning of a class (or at the begin­ning of spe­cif­ic sec­tions of a class) to pre­pare students…”

After con­trol­ling for var­i­ous fac­tors, such as sex, race, age, psy­chi­atric his­to­ry, and polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion, the researchers found that those par­tic­i­pants who received trig­ger warn­ings were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly (com­pared to those in the con­trol con­di­tion) to sug­gest that they and oth­ers would be more vul­ner­a­ble to emo­tion­al dis­tress after expe­ri­enc­ing trau­ma. [Read more…] about Study: Trig­ger warn­ings don’t work, may under­mine emo­tion­al resilience

How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age (New York Public Library talk)

by

This is the actu­al slid­edeck pre­sent­ed by Alvaro Fer­nan­dez at New York Pub­lic Library on Sep­tem­ber 24th, 2014. Slides can be down­loaded and used for edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es [Read more…] about How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age (New York Pub­lic Library talk)

Six tips to build resilience and prevent brain-damaging stress

by

These days, we all live under con­sid­er­able stress — eco­nom­ic chal­lenges, job demands, fam­i­ly ten­sions, always-on tech­nol­o­gy and the 24-hour news cycle all con­tribute to cease­less wor­ry. While many have learned to sim­ply “live with it,” this ongo­ing stress can, unless prop­er­ly man­aged, have a [Read more…] about Six tips to build resilience and pre­vent brain-dam­ag­ing stress

Computerized Cognitive Assessments: opportunities and concerns

by

You know your weight. And your phys­i­cal fit­ness. And a vari­ety of health-relat­ed metrics.

What about your brain fitness?

Two recent announce­ments bring out how the assess­ment of cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, or brain func­tions, is increas­ing­ly being done thanks to new com­put­er­ized options:

1) Last week, OptumHealth announced an exclu­sive 3‑year agree­ment (esti­mat­ed at $18m) with the Aus­tralian com­pa­ny Brain Resource. OptumHealth will be embed­ding the Brain Resource plat­form into their over­all Behav­ioral Solu­tions program.

- OptumHealth Behav­ioral Solu­tions will work with Brain Resource to pro­vide clin­i­cians with a Web-based assess­ment that mea­sures gen­er­al cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple process infor­ma­tion) and social cog­ni­tion (how peo­ple man­age their emo­tions). This 40-minute assess­ment is based on well-known and val­i­dat­ed tests of mem­o­ry, atten­tion, exec­u­tive func­tion, and response speed, and mood, social skills and emo­tion­al resilience.

[Read more…] about Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments: oppor­tu­ni­ties and concerns