We just returned from watching Karen present at the 2010 NCA convention on a timely topic in social media and crisis management!
Here is what I am reading today:
“What do you do when you’re stressed out? Talk to friends? Listen to music? Have a drink, or eat some ice cream? Or maybe practice yoga? These things are all pleasant options, and they’re obvious, effective ways to deal with stress. Chances are that you would not even think about doing something like, say, cutting your arm with a knife until you draw blood. Yet inflicting pain is exactly what millions of Americans – particularly adolescents and young adults – do to themselves when they’re stressed.”
“WHAT makes people psychopaths is not an idle question. Prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms. The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main characteristics of psychopathy) may lead, according to circumstances, to a criminal career or a business one. That has provoked a debate about whether the phenomenon is an aberration, or whether natural selection favours it, at least when it is rare in a population. The boardroom, after all, is a desirable place to be—and before the invention of prisons, even crime might often have paid.”
“Marijuana smoking often starts during adolescence — and the timing could not be worse, a new study suggests. Young adults who started using the drug regularly in their early teens performed significantly worse on cognitive tests assessing brain function than did subjects who were at least 16 when they started smoking, scientists reported on Monday.”
4 Comments
a_alkana · November 17, 2010 at 10:56 am
I agree with the opinion behind this article that if marijuana is legalized, there should be an age limit on it. But I feel as though the experiment was slightly flawed, and not a good representation of some issues. First, the amount of participants seemed small to me. Secondly, the amount of marijuana being consumed by these two groups was outrageous in my opinion. I went to a high school where about half the adolescents starting smoking marijuana before age 15, and half after that age. But neither group seemed to smoke more than, say, 2 grams a week. I don’t think that the general population that may partake in this substance use that early are getting as deep into use as represented in this article. Although any use could be bad use, the severity would greatly increase with the more that was smoked. In that case, maybe people who simply experimented with it would not have as much cognitive damage.
natzafis · November 17, 2010 at 12:56 pm
The article discussing the negative effects of early marijuana use was extremely enlightening. Although it was not as common at my middle school to smoke marijuana, the other main middle school in my district had a large group of students who were characterized as “stoners” at a very early age. The transition between middle school and high school is definitely crucial to brain development, academically and socially, so it is understandable that the executive function of the brain is the last to develop after age 15. Throughout high school, I had friends who developed frequent marijuana smoking habits around my sophomore year and was always surprised at how successful they still were academically. The results of these studies do seem very relevant because on the other hand, I also had friends who had come from the other middle school who had established their status as a “stoner” in their early years of middle school. I noticed that these friends had more difficulty with basic test-taking and some cognitive functioning. I do feel as though the greater quantity of marijuana smoked would also have an impact on performance, but that could be attributed to having ingrained smoking behaviors earlier on in teen years.
Katy Lackey · November 17, 2010 at 5:52 pm
I found the article about self injury to relieve stress very interesting. It was particularly intriguing to read that physical and emotion pain have been found to activate the same locations in the brain, which obviously leads to a link between emotional pain released by self induced physical pain. The part of the article where it was stated that some people simply have more negative emotions, and therefor more pain was also interesting to read because the possible explanation is so simple, yet makes logical sense. I like that it simplifies the issue and gives those who self injure themselves more logic behind their ways of coping; rather than judgmental claims that assume those who cut are merely seeking attention.
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