【推荐2】When you think of life skills, you typically think of things like cooking or fixing broken objects. These sorts of skills help regulate the environment around you.     1     In other words, there are skills you can learn to help manage difficult emotions.

Take responsibility

When I wasa child, I often accused my brother of making me mad. My mom was quick to correct me. “He can’t make you mad,’’ she would say. “He just does things, and you choose how your espond.’’ Although people sometimes try to annoy us, each of us is responsible for our own reaction. We can choose how we interpret the actions of others and whether we will act on how we feel.     2     Fear, for example, is a common feeling that can sometimes cause trouble. Learning to do things that we’re afraid of is an important part of becoming mature.

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On the other hand, we also don’t have direct control over our feelings. If we’re sad, we can’t suddenly decide to be happy and create positive feelings using pure willpower.     4     These thoughts and actions will eventually guide our emotions. Choosing to smile even if you don’t feel happy can create happy feelings. Concentrating on good things in life works the same way.

Recognize others’ feelings

Another set of skills related to emotions involves recognizing other people’s feelings. Just as other people can’t force us to feel things, we also can’t control what others feel.     5     This involves reading their facial expressions. But it’s also helpful to think about how we would feel in the other person’s circumstances. If we know how other people feel, we will be better able to help them handle their feelings.

Feelings can be difficult to handle, so managing them is an important life skill.

【推荐1】Previous studies have found that the number of years spent in school relates to cognition (认知) later in life, but few studies have examined the influence of educational quality.

“Our study establishes a link between high-quality education and better later-life cognition and suggests that increased investment in schools could be a powerful strategy to improve cognitive health among older adults in the United States,” said Jennifer Manly, senior author of the study.

The study, led by Manly and Dominika Šeblová, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, used data from Project Talent, a 1960 survey of high school students across the United States, and follow-up data collected in the Project Talent Aging Study. The researchers examined the relationships between six indicators (指标) of school quality and several measures of cognitive performance in participants nearly 60 years after they left high school. Since high-quality schools may be especially beneficial for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the researchers also examined whether associations differed by geography, gender, race and ethnicity.

The researchers found that attending a school with a higher number of teachers with graduate training was the most consistent predictor of better later-life cognition, especially in language fluency (for example, coming up with words within a category). Attending a school with a high number of graduate-level teachers was about equal to the difference in cognition between a 70-year-old and someone who is one to three years older. Other indicators of school quality were related to some, but not all, measures of cognitive performance.

According to Manly and Šeblová, there may be many reasons explaining why attending schools with well-trained teachers may affect later-life cognition. “Instruction provided by more experienced and knowledgeable teachers might be more intellectually inspiring and provide additional neural or cognitive benefits,” said Šeblová, “and attending higher-quality schools may also influence life track, leading to university education and greater earnings, which are in turn linked to better cognition in later life.”

【推荐3】Though researchers have long known that adults build unconscious (无意识的) preferences over a lifetime of making choices between things that are essentially the same, the new finding that even babies engage in this phenomenon demonstrates that this way of justifying choice is intuitive (凭直觉的) and somehow fundamental to the human experience.

“The act of making a choice changes how we feel about our options,” said Alex Silver, a Johns Hopkins researcher. “Even infants who are really just at the start of making choices for themselves have this preference.”

The findings are published today in the journal Psychological Science. People assume they choose things that they like. But research suggests that’s sometimes backwards: we like things because we choose them. And, we dislike things that we don’t choose. “Adults make these inferences unconsciously,” said co-author Lisa Feigenson, a Johns Hopkins scientist in child development. “We justify our choice after the fact.”

This makes sense for adults in a consumer culture who must make random choices every day, between everything from toothpaste brands to styles of jeans. The question was when exactly people start doing this. So they turned to babies, who don’t get many choices so, as Feigenson puts it, are “a perfect window into the origin of this tendency.”

The team brought 10-to 20-month-old babies into the lab and gave them a choice of objects to play with; two equally bright and colorful soft blocks. They set them far apart, so the babies had to crawl to one or the other — a random choice. After the baby chose one of the toys, the researchers took it away and came back with a new option. The babies could then pick from the toy they didn’t play with the first time, or a brand new toy. Their choices showed they “dis-prefer the unchosen object.”

To continue studying the evolution of choice in babies, the lab will next look at the idea of “choice overload.” For adults, choice is good, but too many choices can be a problem, so the lab will try to determine if that is also true for babies.