anxiety

"When the “clamor of terror” starts to interfere with functioning, as it did for Pearson when she was a crime reporter in her early 30s, worrying turns into a clinical anxiety disorder, of which there are several forms: panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and a catch-all called generalized anxiety disorder. Taken together, they make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And that figure doesn’t even count the far greater swath who are garden-variety worriers, people who fret when a child is late, who worry when they hear a siren headed toward home, who are sure that a phone call in the middle of the night means someone is dead."

from ny times article on anxiety.

I also liked this about Jungian terminology:

"Invoking Jungian terminology, he called it the difference between persona (the outer-directed personality) and anima (the inner-directed thoughts and feelings). The persona can be controlled, but the anima often cannot."

I also liked this about Kegan's research:

"Though its findings seem almost self-evident today, the Science paper made a splash at the time. “There are two kinds of great research,” Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams College, told me when I discussed Kagan’s study with her. “There’s research that is counterintuitive, that shows you something you’d never guess on your own, and there’s research that shows you irrefutably what you had an intuition about, something you thought was true but didn’t have evidence to support.” Kagan’s research was of the second type, she says: “a beautiful, elegant experimental demonstration of an old intuition.”"

This was interesting about parenting:

"one study, by Kagan’s graduate student Doreen Arcus in the early 1990s, found that what seemed to be best for high-reactive babies were mothers who set firm limits and did not rush too quickly to comfort them when they cried. And the other, by Fox’s postdoctoral fellow Amie Ashley Hane a decade later, found something slightly different: that the best fit for high-strung babies were sensitive mothers, who met their fearful children on their own terms and interacted with them in a way that was accepting and supportive without being intrusive. Sometimes, of course, there’s a fine line between firm and hardhearted, and a fine line between supportive and intrusive. This makes it especially tough to turn research findings like Arcus’s and Hane’s into clear guidance on how best to care for a fretful child."