【推荐1】Imagine a friend has just asked how you’re feeling. “I’m fine,” you protest. You’re clearly anxious but respond in this way, unable to express how it is you really feel. Try as you might, you can’t quite understand your emotions, and truth to be told, you’re not sure whether you really want to.

Research shows that being aware of your emotions is hugely beneficial and people with high emotional awareness have better social and emotional functioning. “Emotional awareness is being able to identify and make sense of not only our own emotions but those of others, ”explains Rachel Vora, psychotherapist and founder of CYP Wellbeing. “It’s absolutely essential in maintaining good mental health. When we are able to identify and reflect on our emotional responses, we can understand how this influences our behaviours and in turn, change the way we respond to challenging situations.”

Of course, finding out how we feel can often prove difficult. It’s the very reason we turn to general phrases like ‘I feel blue’ or I’m not myself today’. It’s not always easy to put a finger on exactly what’s wrong, without digging a little deeper. Vora says this is often because on some level we don’t want to know how we really feel. “We can often try to numb or suppress because they feel overwhelming or distressing and this can often lead to a lack of emotional awareness as we feel disconnected from ourselves,” she explains.

Without emotional awareness, we can also develop emotional blind spots: unhealthy thoughts, behaviours and coping mechanisms that are hidden from our view. Perhaps you lash out or withdraw when you feel overwhelmed or go into criticism and self-doubt when you receive negative feedback. Unless you take time for self-reflection, you’ll remain unaware of these habits and continue to repeat the same destructive patterns again and again. Vora says tuning into your emotions and honestly reflecting on how you feel is the key. “When we do this, we are more able to work with our emotions and put strategies in place to improve our mood,” she points out. “By identifying our emotional blind spots, we can feel more in control of our emotions, and also how we respond in challenging situations.”

【推荐2】While socializing comes naturally for some, it can be a struggle for others. Shyness is a normal, common personality trait (特征).     1    . If you’re often hesitant to engage in social situations, you may interact with those around you in a more comfortable way. We outline four strategies for overcoming shyness in life.

You may have been shy most of your life.     2    . Working through shyness and developing increased confidence may seem like a discouraging task for you, but viewing the journey as an exciting adventure to parts unknown can be exciting and, in turn, may boost your self-esteem.

    3    . Talking to yourself in a negative way when describing yourself can damage your self-confidence. Consider replacing phrases like “I am shy” with “I am learning to be more comfortable” in social situations. This can go a long way toward moving from shyness to confidence.

Mindfulness involves drawing your attention to the present and being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.     4    . In one study, participants in a mindfulness program experienced an improved view of their self-worth.

Getting started can be the hardest part of learning how to be more social for those who are shy.     5    . You can start out small. Try chatting with the teller at the bank or the person ahead of you in the checkout line. This can help you build confidence and work your way up to more difficult challenges.

【推荐1】The 1930s and early 1940s were a good time to fish for sardines (沙丁鱼) off California. Centered on Monterey Bay, catches increased dramatically and supported the state’s economy. But the situation began to change in 1946, and sardine catches eventually fell from an average of 234,000 tons to just 24,000 tons. The industry went belly-up.

Scientists have guessed for decades about what caused this phenomenon, but they lacked data to test their theories. Now researchers have finally found one apparent cause: cycles of ocean upwelling, a defining feature of the West Coast sea environment in which deep, nutrient-rich water rises to the nutrient-poor surface and restores the food supply there. The key that unlocked this phenomenon turned out to be old seaweed specimens (标本) gathered around the U. S.

“Plants are just sitting there, recording data about the state of the ocean,” says Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and senior author of the new study. Van Houtan and others had suspected the impact of upwelling, but scientists only started measuring the process in Monterey Bay in 1946. Historic seaweed specimens, Van Houtan realized, might fill in the blanks for earlier years—similar to the way ice cores can help reconstruct CO₂ levels from times before researchers started collecting real-time measurements.

For the new study, the scientists relied on the fact that deeper water near Monterey typically hosts more of a particular nitrogen isotope (氮同位素). Looking at modern upwelling data and recently collected seaweed, they found that higher levels of this nitrogen in the plants’ cells corresponded with periods of more upwelling. Next they measured the isotope levels in 70 historic specimens of the red seaweed Gelidium, gathered from Monterey as far back as 1878. The results suggested a gradual increase in upwelling and then a dramatic decrease, which lined up with the sardine population’s growth and decline.

“This paper is an excellent example of the creative detective work of historical ecology,” says Loren McClenachan, a marine ecologist at Colby College, who was not involved in the research. “There are thousands and thousands of similar specimens in collections around the world, and applying similar methods could teach us a great deal about long-term ocean change.”

【推荐2】In English, grown-ups often say that babies make “goo goo ga ga” sounds. In French, it’s “areau areau”, and in Chinese, it’s “yi yi ya ya”. So, do babies really make different sounds in different parts of the world?

Professor Sundara at UCLA, who conducts research on how babies listen before they start speaking and how they learn languages, finds that when babies first begin to babble (咿呀学语) at around 6 months old, they all make similar sounds, even deaf babies. Afterward, they begin to copy the sounds of the language they are exposed to. Babies, it seems, are skilled at copying the language they hear.

Sundara also studies how babies react to hearing different languages. In bilingual (双语的) families, babies adjust their babble depending on the language they are responding to. She conducted an experiment where, at the start, participating babies, who were 9 or 10 months old, could only babble in a way that sounded like English. After spending a little time with a Spanish-speaking research assistant, the babies were able to make changes to their babbling to match Spanish sounds.

Babies possess this remarkable ability to learn languages due to something called enhanced neuroplasticity, meaning their brains are exceptionally adaptable: if a baby regularly hears different languages, they can react to all of them. That heightened ability to learn language lasts until children are around 5 years old with some lingering language superpowers lasting until age 12. Therefore, speaking more than one languages has cognitive and social benefits, and the idea that trying to learn two languages at once would confuse babies has been proved proved false.

So, while my baby is not yet walking and insists on scooting (快速移动) backward on his bottom while making strange sounds, I know that his brain is accomplishing incredible things.

【推荐3】I Am Not a Robot

An annoyance, an important security feature, an uncomfortable request: however you feel about being asked to prove you are not a robot, it has become a daily occurrence for most of us, but perhaps not one we would miss if it were to suddenly go away.

A new feature in the latest versions of iOS and macOS, Apple’s operating systems for smartphones and computers, promises to give the boot to “captchas” once and for all.     1    

“Sometimes a captcha is just a button to press,” said Apple engineer Tommy Pauly. “But other times it can be a challenge to fill out.”

The term captcha is in fact an acronym (首字母缩略词) for   “completely automated public Turing test (图灵测试) to tell computers and humans apart.” To help stop fraud (欺诈), these little tests often pop up when you’re signing up for or onto a website.

    2     If you get it wrong, it may ask you to start again, leading you to wonder if you really know what a traffic light looks like—or if you might really be a robot after all.

But captchas are now fast becoming unusable, making the Internet a wasteland of difficult puzzles. Users must struggle to do the most basic things. “We’ve literally all found ourselves at one time or another complaining: ‘Those were all the pictures with traffic lights,” said Effie Le Moignan, a researcher in social computing at Newcastle University.

Internet users struggle to tell the difference between a wear of paint on a sidewalk and a formalized crosswalk that’s often requested in a traditional captcha, and worry that one wrong answer may lock them out of an account.     3    

“You likely don’t enjoy being interrupted by these,” said Apple’s Tommy Pauly. “I certainly don’t. The reason these experiences exist is to prevent dishonest activity. If you run a server, you don’t want it to be defeated by fraud.     4    ”

The company worked with Fastly and Cloudflare to build the new feature. It works by allowing your device to send a statement confirming it is being used by a human to the requesting website.

【推荐2】In the lab, most mice go as far as to take electric shocks in their desperation to consume sugar. Mice aren’t alone. Humans do something similar. Daily snacking on processed foods, recent studies show, rewires the brain’s reward circuits(回路).

Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychologist at the University of Michigan, argues that highly Processed foods, very high in fat and carbohydrate, don’t exist naturally. “They’re designed by food scientists to look a certain way, feel a certain way in your mouth, smell a certain way when you open the package.” she says, “People aren’t losing control over beans.”

In highly processed snacks, sugar often goes together with fat-a combination that could make such foods even more addictive. For a 2023 study, DeFeliceantonio’s team asked 82 people to snack on either high-fat, high-sugar yogurts or low-sugar, low-fat ones for eight weeks. The scientists discovered not only that the first group’s preference for the healthier yogurts decreased after the trial but that their brain activation patterns changed, too. When tasting fatty, sugary milkshakes, they had an increased response in their reward circuits. “Highly processed foods are controlling the brain in a way you’d see with addiction to drugs,” DeFeliceantonio says.

In 2022,Gearhardt and DeFeliccantonio published an opinion piece in the journal Addiction arguing that highly processed foods should be classified(分类) as addictive. Hebebrand, a psychiatrist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, however, worries that rushing to classify certain foods as addictive could let the sugar industry make an easy escape. It may be following “the playbook of the tobacco industry.” After all, there was no clear proof that nicotine(尼古丁) was addictive, either: researchers didn’t know the dosage(剂量) at which it became addictive. As a result, the addictive nature of tobacco was opposed for decades. Considering highly processed foods’ harmful health effects, Gearhardt argues that it’s better to risk misclassifying highly processed foods as addictive than to fail to label (贴标签) them as such. “It’s cigarettes all over again.” She says.

【推荐3】As a result of COVID-19 precautions, many of us are part of this secondary epidemic: people who really need a hug. A survey conducted in 112 countries said more than 50% of the people didn’t get enough such physical interaction as cuddling (拥抱). And that was before the pandemic set in. As the COVID-related lockdowns are taking effect, that number increases to 60%, according to a study published in the Medical Research Archives of the European Society of Medicine. Health-care professionals have given a name to this condition — touch starvation.

Touch starvation may sound emotional in the most literal sense, but the idea is supported by hard-core biology. It starts with hormones. “Cuddling increases levels of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and decreases levels of cortisol, the stress hormone,” says Lina Velikova, an immunologist.

A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have found that this very act can help ease pain, especially if the person you are touching is someone you feel close to personally. “Even minor physical contact can be beneficial to both of you,” says Romanoff, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Physical touch is an essential part of how human beings communicate. Part of the power of physical touch comes from the very fact that it does not involve spoken language. Body language is often harder to fake. The act of cuddling authentically communicates trust and safety in ways people can’t speak.

Not all cuddling is created equal, and there’s no one right way to do it. If one way doesn’t feel right, try something else. Foot rubs, head rubs, back rubs, hand-holding laying your head on someone’s chest sitting on a lap or side by side on the couch with legs touching — all these things count. For people who aren’t fully comfortable with physical touch and are not accustomed to giving or receiving physical affection, it’s important to start slowly, both in the quantity and quality of physical contact.