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Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It?
A few years ago, when people heard I was a reading researcher, they might ask about their child’s dyslexia or how to get their teenager to read more. But today the question I get most often is, “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” Audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years while print and e-book sales are flat. These trends might lead us to fear that audiobooks will do to reading what keyboarding has done to handwriting — rendered it a skill that seems quaint and whose value is open to debate. But examining how we read and how we listen shows that each is best suited to different purposes, and neither is superior. In fact, they overlap considerably.
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For Gorillas, Being a Good Dad Is Sexy
He was tall and rugged, with piercing blue eyes, blond hair and a magnificent jawline. And what was that slung across his chest? A holster for his Walther PPK? When I saw what the actor Daniel Craig—aka James Bond—was actually toting, my heart skipped a beat. It was an elegant, high-tech baby carrier, so that he could snuggle his baby daughter.
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Gender Bias Sways How We Perceive Competence in Faces
Faces that are seen as competent are also perceived as more masculine, research reveals.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how trait anxiety relates to attention, how choosing different career paths may shape personality development, and how attentional selection contributes to risky decision making.
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Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings
Writers and filmmakers hoping to hoodwink their fans with plot twists have long known what cognitive scientists know: All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We get distracted. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable — so predictable that storytellers from Sophocles to M. Night Shyamalan have used them to lead us astray. In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brain scan?
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Superman May Inspire Altruistic Behavior
For all their box-office success, superheroes haven't gotten much respect of late. A 2017 study reported that preschoolers who identify with superheroes tend to be more aggressive than their peers. Numerous pop-culture commentators, including Bill Maher, argue that these characters share some blame for the presidency of Donald Trump, citing superheroes' advocacy of vigilantism, and the comic-book message that only one extraordinary man can save us. But new research suggests that the Man of Steel may have been maligned: It reports that people exposed to images of Superman were more likely than others to engage in helpful behavior. "Heroes loom large as exemplars of morality.
