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4th Summer Institute in Human Ethology
4th Summer Institute in Human Ethology Sponsored by ISHE and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI August 6-9, 2013 www.ISHE.org Details: The International Society for Human Ethology will hold its 4th Biennial Summer Institute on Human Ethology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, USA, on 6-9 August, 2013. ISHE Summer Institutes are specifically designed to be more student friendly than many other scientific conferences, and include generous financial support for student participants (such as free registration and lodging stipends for students who are first author presenters of accepted proposals).
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Music, Multivitamins And Other Modern Intelligence Myths
NPR: Playing Mozart to young children will make them smarter, right? Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence. The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion.
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How Disasters and Trauma Can Affect Children’s Empathy
TIME: Do children become more kind and empathetic after a disaster— or does the experience make them more focus more on self-preservation? The first study to examine the question in an experimental way shows that children’s reactions may depend on their age. ... “Our study demonstrates that a natural disaster affects children’s pro-social tendencies, and [does so] differently depending on their age,” says study co-author Jean Decety of the University of Chicago.
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In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
The Wall Street Journal: When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods. That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
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Lance Armstrong’s lies not so different from our own
The Washington Post: Lance Armstrong may have been branded liar and cheat of the month, but experts say he’s not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Lying, they say, is part of the human condition, something most people do every day. And that’s reflected in the cavalcade of celebrities cowed into confession after their deceptions were exposed — from Richard Nixon’s denial of the Watergate break-in to Bill Clinton’s denial of an affair with an intern, from drug-abusing baseball players to fraudulent Wall Street executives.
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Diet, Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ
Supplementing children’s diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child’s intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness of each type of intervention.