Youth Culture Update: Seriously Stressed Freshmen
College freshmen—grappling with the pressures of new schools, new expectations and a persistent recession—are feeling incredibly stressed. Research of 200,000 incoming full-time students found that more rated their own mental health as “below average” than at any time in the last 25 years. Granted, a slim majority of freshmen—52 percent—rated their mental health “above average,” which is encouraging; but comparing those figures to those of 1985, when nearly two-thirds of freshmen said their mental health was above average, the downturn is a little alarming. Some experts blame the economy. “This fits with what we’re all seeing,” says Brian Van Brunt, director of counseling at Western Kentucky University and president of the American College Counseling Association. “More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support; and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.” (The New York Times)

Put on a Happy Face?
Social networking sites such as Facebook have become great platforms to meet other people and engage in a bit of small talk. As such, the site is populated with happy updates and smiling photos and “likes”; but for many, all that online happiness can be downright depressing. New research finds that most of us overestimate how happy our friends and associates are and that we’re each little islands of misery in a sea of contentedness. All those chipper Facebook updates reinforce those feelings, and that makes folks feel more alone. “If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy,” said researcher Alex Jordan, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, quoting Montesquieu. “But we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” (Slate)

‘We Are Starting to Resemble Our Avatars’
Given how much time we spend texting, Tweeting, blogging and communicating through Facebook, most of us would agree that technology radically has changed the way we communicate with each other. Some experts say that it’s changing us, as well. “What I see more and more, we are starting to resemble our avatars,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a psychologist from Stanford University and author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. Aboujaoude says that our world is growing angrier—largely he believes because the Internet has undercut all the socialization techniques we’ve developed through the centuries. In days gone by, growing up meant learning how to fit into society: We’d learn how to delay gratification, how to fulfill various moral obligations, how to talk with people with a sense of decorum. Aboujaoude believes that in social media, those better angels of our nature have “gone AWOL. Society at large is becoming a more angry, uncivil place,” he says. “We should ask ourselves if one reason we’ve become so uncivil is because of what we do online and how we act on our blogs and in our chat rooms.” (ABC News)

Snoozing to Good Health
Children who get their nightly dose of sleep are less likely to be obese than their less-rested peers, according to a study from the universities of Chicago and Louisville. Research examined the sleep patterns of children ages 4-10 and found that kids who got 9.5 or 10 hours of sleep—what pediatricians recommend for that age—were less likely to be overweight. Most children only get about eight hours of sleep, though; and researchers found that the less sleep kids got, the more likely they were to be obese. Kids who weren’t getting their recommended Zs were also more likely to have some irregularities show up in blood work, such as higher-than-recommended glucose, triglyceride or cholesterol levels. (USA Today)