Ever since, we've been either slouching toward Gomorrah or, as Clare Boothe Luce once famously announced, living in an age when the "modern woman is at last free as a man is free, to dispose of her own body, to earn her living, to pursue the improvement of her mind, to try a successful career".
Typical examples include Bluestocking Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), which went through at least sixteen editions in the last quarter of the 18th century, and the classically-educated historian Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education (1790).
One example is Hester Chapone's 1770 text Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: Addressed to a Young Lady, in which she warns against "reading novels which raise expectations of extraordinary adventures and cause readers to admire extravagant passions, and lead to unacceptable conduct".
One biographer of Wollstonecraft notes that Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which influenced Wollstonecraft's earlier Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), dedicates several chapters to these "friends of the heart"; such friendships would not have seemed unusual to 18th-century readers.
But in a presentation Monday at the Magazine Publishers of America conference in Boca Raton, Fla., Mr. Nardelli, who most recently ran Home Depot, talked about the auto industry in a way that suggested he was still in a home-improvement state of mind.
The MSCT group demonstrated a significant improvement in theory of mind, social perception, emotion recognition and social functioning.
For instance, research shows that reading storybooks to young children or having them watch movies was linked to an improvement their Theory of Mind scores, while watching TV wasn't.
Therefore, researchers have proposed that improvements in 'state of mind' and psychological coping described by participants following selected therapies may lead to improvements in physical symptoms of distress and treatment tolerance [ 27, 30].
Evidence that conversations about the mind foster improvements in theory of mind (ToM) is growing, but their efficacy in typically developing school-aged children has yet to be demonstrated.
Viewed this way, it's not surprising that, although study participants rated the popular fiction more fun to read, those assigned to the literary fiction group were the only ones to show improvement in their theory-of-mind abilities.
