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I know I hate it.  "What do you want for dinner?" Nothing.  "Did you do your homework?"  Nothing.  "Did you clean your room?" Grunt. I'm talking, of course, about my teenager, who ignores just about every word out of my mouth.  But now researchers are saying that mastering the art of ignoring makes people more efficient. I suppose it makes sense.  If you've ever been in one of those moments where you're working so hard on something, you don't notice the house is on fire, just get that paragraph written, you've been there.  I've left pots boiling on the stove, driven right past my road when thinking about a word, even been able to tune out my husband when he's raving about Bill O'Reilly again. But don't listen to me.  Get it from the experts. Johns Hopkins University researchers have found that when people are given time to learn what’s possible to ignore, they’re able to search faster and more efficiently.   ...

I don't know about you but when my son was little and carrying on about something, the advice was to ignore him. Now we're learning that just may not be the way to do it. According to a new study , parents who intentionally ignore children’s negative emotions may actually increase their children’s expressions of anger, aggression, and disproportionate emotional behaviors, newswise.com reports. Oh boy. Ignoring children’s emotional outbursts is a strategy commonly employed by parents with a wide range of psychological know-how, drawing on their intuition, family tradition, modeling, or simple desperation.   "For whatever reason, the folks who are developing questionnaires to assess these kinds of behaviors didn’t focus on ignoring responses,” notes Scott P. Mirabile, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at St. Mary’s College of Maryland at the web site. Here's what researchers found: If a child is begging for candy in the checkout aisle and starts...