Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults.

Eight-year-olds respond better to positive feedback (‘Well done!’) than negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’) whereas twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

Developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered this difference using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and barely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their strategic “control centers” in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

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The top level [of risk], he said, was parents smoking in cars, where children were “trapped” and exposed to a “high intensity” of fumes.

A leading hospital says up to a third of the children it treats for certain conditions are ill because their parents smoke around them.

Dr Steve Ryan, Medical Director of Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital, says bronchitis, asthma and ear infections could be cut if parents quit smoking.

He said parents often lied about whether they smoke near their children. The British Lung Foundation says 17,000 under-fives are treated every year for exposure to second-hand smoke.

Speaking to BBC Radio Five Live, he said out of the 35,000 children the hospital treats every year, 2,000 are there because they have been exposed to their parents’ smoke.

He said between a quarter and a third of those suffering from certain conditions such as chest infections and asthma were the victims of passive smoking. Read the rest of this entry »

Doctors could benefit from support to help them cope with the trauma of patient death, says a psychologist speaking at the Death, Dying & Disposal conference organized by the University of Bath in the UK.

In a preliminary study, Dr Elaine Kasket from London Metropolitan University carried out detailed interviews with eight US physicians about their experiences of death. Half of those she spoke to wept as they recounted stories of traumatic death they had experienced as physicians, even though some of these events had occurred as much as 30 years ago.

“There is an unwritten rule for doctors that suggests it is not wise or possible for them to feel emotions over a patient’s death because there is always another patient to help,” said Dr Kasket.

“Whilst this detachment might help when presented with a patient with a severe injury, I question how well it serves them in the longer term.

“This emotional detachment is socially ingrained through medical school, and the cultures in both the UK and US medical establishments would see a physician’s emotional response to death as a sign of weakness and even incompetence.

“It feeds into this popular image of the physician as some kind of superhuman ultimate rescuer of human life; unable to do his or her job if they give in to or even acknowledge their emotions.

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Compassionate Healing, A Surrogate Approach is available at CreateSpace.

Compassionate Healing, A Surrogate Approach – Based on years of  seminar presentations on the subject of proxy healing.

Surrogate (or Proxy) Healing uses a person’s own judgments and perceptions to heal. It is the secret “Back Door” to your most powerful healing faculties.

As you become more skilled in the use of surrogacy, you will discover untapped potential for individual and planetary healing unimagined otherwise.

In this book, you’ll learn how to turn the negative emotions and energies of others into a beneficial force – until all are healed and the world awakens into the light of real physical, emotional, and mental health.

This book presents fundamentals and specific methods and tactics for surrogate or proxy healing.

Healers, learn how you can affect change in resistant clients, help clients more easily heal their relationship problems, turn troubled teens into super-healers, speed healing after surgery, and much more using this amazing attribute of the human mind.

You can apply the techniques offered in this book to any healing modality and to yourself personally. You may use the technique to amplify empathy and thereby help resolve many issues in the process.
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I fully agree with Michael Moore’s Prescription. Too bad universal greed trumps universal health care in the USA.