Thing #5: Using Google Reader -- NY Times

I love reading the NY Times online, and I used to be a subscriber to the paper edition, but I simply could not keep up with it -- and then, it seemed that I was subscribing solely to contribute the newspapers to the recycle bin. Senseless, because all content was offered to me free online, wherever I had an internet connection (virtually everywhere these days). Anyhoo, NY Times is my home page, and I allow myself to skim over the front page daily -- once I start reading, though, I am sucked in for a while. So, of course, I made it one of my Google Reader feeds. It might make the skimming more efficient for me. Here is the article that drew my attention today: Understanding The Anxious Mind. How do you NOT read that article? It deals with a study done by Harvard psychology professor Jerome Kagan, in which, in 1989, he took as his subjects babies whose temperament and its effects he wanted to observe in a longitudinal study. He opted to track the babies' temperaments based on a single dimension: whether or not they were easily upset when exposed to new (unfamiliar) things. His hypothesis was that the most edgy infants would grow up to be the most inhibited, anxious, and shy adults.

Throughout the article, he refers to "Baby 19." In his study, the first eighteen babies proved not to be "high reactors" to the unfamiliar stimuli, but Baby 19 was visibly distress, flailing, crying, and arching her back. Kagan goes on to share results of an interview he did with Baby 19 when she was a fifteen-year-old high school student. She tells the interviewer at first that she does not know what she worries about, but then pauses and goes on to share a laundry list of all of the things in her life/surroundings that provoke worry and anxiety in her: social issues, performance issues, how she will deal with the world when she is grown.

The articles notes that four significant long-term studies are in progress which have all, with minimal differences, determined "that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious." The author notes that cognitive behavioral therapeutic interventions appear to work with children as they do with adults. Therapists try to teach anxiety-ridden clients to replace the tendency to ruminate with a more rational inner voice.

One interesting finding in Kagan's study was that higher-reactive kids appear to avoid some of the traditional pitfalls of adolescence. He says that because the higher-reactive kids are more restrained, they are less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant, or to drive recklessly. Interesting.