"Speaking of Psychology" is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important and relevant psychological research being conducted today. Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.
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Picking up a new skill as an adult can seem daunting, whether it's learning to play the guitar, attempting to reach your bathroom or learning a new language, you may feel like you just don't master new skills as fast as you did when you were a kid. And it can be hard to overcome the voice in your head saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But some psychologist research suggests that continuing to learn new things throughout adulthood may be key to keeping your cognitive skills sharp as you age and that in act, middle aged and older adults may be just as good at learning as younger people. So why does it seem so much harder to learn as we get older. What lessons can adults take from how children learn that can improve their own learning? Our of learning equally good for your brain health, doesn't matter whether you do crossword puzzles, learn home improvement skills, or audit college courses. And if you wanna learn something new, what's the best way to get started and persevere? Welcome to speaking of psychology. The flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Doctor Rachel Wu, an associate professor psychology at the University of California Riverside, where she runs the cognitive agility across the lifespan lab. Her research focuses on understanding cognitive development and to help learners maximize their learning potential at any age. She's authored dozens of academic studies, and her research has been covered by NPR, NBC News, and other media outlets. She's also a lifelong learner having taken a painting, singing, and other new pursuits in adulthood. Doctor. Wu, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be
Type of disorder, psychopathology, mental disorder, does not allow the person to inhibit their impulses. Mhmm. So when they see, for example, a victim that crosses their path, they strike out. And if you strike out impulsively, there may be witnesses around, you'll leave forensic evidence around, you didn't plan on killing anybody, and you're apprehended quickly. The other type has more what's often called psychopathic traits, narcissistic traits. And whatever personality they have, it doesn't disable them from planning. You could be narcissistic. You could be psychopathic, but you can still plan and inhibit your impulses, and that's what you see in those sorts of cases. And as a result, because they're forensically aware and they can plan, they can rack up a very high number of victims. Those are the cases that the FBI usually becomes involved in. Why? Because the FBI's called in you almost always when it's a difficult to solve case. Otherwise, if it's just 1 murder or 2, local law enforcement can usually make the apprehension. So so you mentioned, psychopathy, but I'm wondering about sociopathy. I mean, are these people sociopaths, psychopaths? What's the difference? Can you be one and not the other? Yeah. Yes. Let me talk about 3 different terms. Psychopathic personality, sociopathic, and antisocial personality disorder, because they get kind of mushed together Yeah. Particularly when you speak about these things that people refer to and so on. The only official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that's the manual that psychologists, psychiatrists, and so on rely on, is antisocial personality disorder. That's been the official diagnosis for years. Sociopathic personality was in the manual back in 19 fifties, but it has since been eliminated. Interestingly, when someone
I think the framing of estrangement's really important. What are some of the most common reasons that estrangement happens? Again, we're still learning about this, but common causes that I found in my own research are that of emotional abuse. So people feeling that there is a quality in the relationship that isn't safe, and that might be, referring to acts in the relationship like, you know, calling somebody names or, kind of teasing someone, bullying someone, or that might be that the relationship just doesn't have a quality of closeness or safety in it. And I think other common causes that we know about are divorce, so really common family experiences rather than rare things that happen in families, they're the everyday things that happen, so if a parent is going through a divorce it might be that children feel drawn into taking a side, or it might be that relationships weaken over time, especially we find between fathers and their adult children, and there there'll be some variation there, obviously, depending on how close those relationships were before the divorce and all different kinds of factors like that. Other causes might be about not having the same values as a family member, so feeling that your family member doesn't have the same way of thinking about important issues perhaps like gender or sexuality, or religion, and sometimes those values can can drive people into a distant relationship or into estrangement. So that that's certainly not all of the reasons. There are all sorts of different pathways to estrangement, but I think those are some of the most common ones. Mhmm. Do these rifts usually build slowly over time, or are they more often precipitated by some kind of a dramatic event?
For Psychology Today, the column that that you write for that outlet about whether kids need a best friend, what's your take? Is it important for kids to have a bestie, or is it okay to have multiple friendships that just aren't that close? You know, every now and then in the popular literature, I see articles about, oh, kids shouldn't have best friends because I don't know why. I guess it's exclusive because then they might break up, which is true. But to me, having a best friend is a little bit like falling in love. So we, parents and adults, we don't get to control that for our children. That that's theirs. There are very few ways that children actually have autonomy, but this is one of them in in the relationships that they choose. So about a third to a half of kids have best friends at any point. There are payoffs to having a best friend in terms of, how kids feel and their happiness and sense of belonging. So it can be good. But, of course, we know that there are different friendship qualities. So a best friend who is getting our kid in trouble, maybe not so good. Right? And there there's also research showing that the peer group can have a negative negative influence on our kids. So we wanna help our children to make good choices about whom they decide to be friends with. So we can ask them questions like, how do you feel when you're with them? Or do you feel like you can be yourself with them, or do you feel like you have to kinda fake it or or hide things from them? Do you feel like these friends bring out the best in you and guide them towards thinking it through? The one on one play dates can deepen the friendship spending time together. Friendships take time. I read one study, and I I never saw the original study. So I don't know how true this is, but it was saying that, for adult friendships, it takes 30 hours to make
University where she studies how organizations can benefit from generational diversity in the workplace. She's the author of many academic studies and of the book Gentelligence, a revolutionary approach to leading an intergenerational workforce. Her work has been featured in media outlets, including Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, and CNN among others. Doctor Gearhart, thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Kim. I called out a few stereotypes in my introduction, the gen x slacker, the entitled millennial, for example. So let's start there. Where do these stereotypes come from, and how accurate are they? I think in most cases, any stereotype is a shortcut we take to decision making. It is, I think, the lazy way of trying to understand things that are difficult and complicated. There's roots in every stereotype or label we hear that come from places that are actually really interesting and make a lot of sense. So for example, with I'll start with my own generation, the slacker Gen Xers. The roots of that are actually quite interesting. If you think about the fact that Gen X as a generation, not by the person I always like to say, but the norm of Gen X was that we grew up valuing free time and autonomy, and actually, we're the least supervised generation ever. So I always like to say, you can look at statistics on this. We had the highest level of dual career families, single parent families of all time, before or since, during Gen X's childhood, which meant a lot of freedom and autonomy growing up, something that we were hesitant as a generation to maybe give up when we started our our careers, wanted more balance, wanted more flexibility, wanted to hold on to that independence through the lens of the baby boomer generation who as a norm again, I don't I don't ever wanna characterize a whole generation as being a certain way. We're always wrong when we do that.
