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Racial Essentialism Reduces Creative Thinking By Making People More Closed-Minded
New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think. In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking. “Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets,” Tadmor and her colleagues write.
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Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Some students seem to breeze through their school years, whereas others struggle, putting them at risk for getting lost in our educational system and not reaching their full potential.
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College Costs: Would Tuition Discounts Get More Students to Major in Science?
TIME: How much money would it take to get an English major to switch to engineering? Would a $1,000 discount on tuition every year do the trick? What about $5,000? What if switching majors not only reduced students’ debt load but also made it much more likely that they would find a job after graduation? Would that be enough to change their mind? Cheaper tuition might motivate some students to tough it out, but Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, urges schools and policymakers to proceed with caution.
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Energy Drinks Promise Edge, but Experts Say Proof Is Scant
The New York Times: Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade. ... Last August, Scottish researchers reported that 1,000 milligrams of taurine taken as a supplement appeared to improve the performance of middle-distance runners. But other taurine studies have been negative or inconclusive. “We found it difficult to make any conclusions about what taurine was doing,” said a graduate researcher at Tufts University, Grace Giles, who headed a study that ran participants through a battery of mental reaction and memory tests.
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Psychological Science Is Important (video)
APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut Psychological science is important, as APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut reminds us. By itself, psychological science produces a rich understanding of behavior. When paired with behavioral investigation, many other fields of scientific inquiry produce a richer understanding of our world. When he was APS President, John Cacioppo pointed out that an analysis of thousands of scientific journals (and literally millions of scientific articles) had identified psychological science — along with math, physics, and chemistry — as one of seven core disciplines that produces research cited widely by scientists in other fields.
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Babies’ language lessons may start inside the womb
CBC News: Newborn babies respond differently to their mother tongue as compared to foreign languages thanks to all the listening they did while in the womb, a joint study by American and Swedish researchers suggests. ... "This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth," lead author Christine Moon, a psychology professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., said in a statement. Moon described the study as the first to show that fetuses learn about these sounds prenatally.