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World Series Psychology
The Red Sox won’t be participating in this year’s World Series, but it’s safe to say that the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is here to stay. That makes those teams’ fans an obvious choice for studying rivalry and aggression. Read Wray Herbert’s summary of what happened when Princeton University social neuroscientists studied which neurons light up when loyalists and rivals experience moments of victory or defeat. In other baseball-related psychology, fans aren’t the only ones whose aggression at the baseball stadium has become the subject of psychological research.
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How to Learn by Believing In Yourself
If you want to be smarter, the first step might be to believe that you can get smarter. In a study that will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, Jason S. Moser and his colleagues found that people who believe they can learn from their mistakes are more likely to do so. In the study, participants were asked to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” This task may seem simple, but task is repeated several times in a row, people tend to make mistakes and feel bad about it.
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Earlier Autism Diagnosis Could Mean Earlier Interventions
Autism historically was diagnosed between the ages of 2 and 3, but new research is finding symptoms of autism spectrum disorders in babies during their first years of life.
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Language Lessons From Babies
The New York Times: In today’s 18 and Under column, Dr. Perri Klass writes about new science of bilingualism and how scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age. Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning.
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How Our Brains Turn Women Into Objects
Scientific American: Recent reports of a mountain lion or cougar stalking the campus of the University of Iowa prompted campus jokesters to tweet their surprise that Michelle Bachman was in town. A cougar, colloquially, is an attractive older woman who seeks out trysts with younger men, and to some, it seems that Bachmann fits the bill. This emphasis on appearance is nothing new for high-profile women who are anything but homely, and feminist scholars are quick to point out its potential detrimental effects on perceptions of female competence. Of course, we don’t need to consider reactions to political candidates to understand this idea.
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Pain At The Plate: Heat Increases Pitcher Retaliation
NPR: Richard Larrick has been bothered by something for two decades. "Twenty years ago, I'd done a paper with some graduate students just showing that in hotter temperatures, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with pitches," says Larrick, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Was it because they would sweat more, and the ball might get slippery and hard to control? Or was it something intentional? "Laboratory research has shown that if you put people in a hotter room, they're more likely to act aggressively toward someone else," sometimes without even being aware of it, he says.
