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‘Drawings may indicate later intelligence,’ according to new study
The Washington Post: Don’t throw away your kid’s stick figure drawings just yet. Researchers found a “moderate correlation” between drawing and intelligence, a link that “seemed to be influenced by genes,” according to a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. The test centered on identical and nonidentical twins, with 15,504 children participating. Each child was asked to draw a picture of a child and then given verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. The children were first tested when they were 4 years old, and again 10 years later at age 14.
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Emergency Plane Landing Yields PTSD Clues
LiveScience: Interviews with the survivors of a 2001 emergency plane landing are helping researchers understand how certain memories may increase the risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new study finds. The study's lead researcher has firsthand knowledge of the calamity. Margaret McKinnon, an associate professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, was on her honeymoon when Air Transat Flight 236, en route from Toronto to Lisbon, Portugal, ran out of fuel over the Atlantic. Read the whole story: LiveScience
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Tooth Fairy feels the pinch after overspending
USA Today: The Tooth Fairy is holding her purse strings a bit tighter. She left 8% less this year - or an average of $3.40 for every lost tooth she finds under a pillow - down from $3.70 in 2013, according to a survey from Visa out Thursday. Still, she's leaving more than she did in 2012 before tooth inflation rose 23% from 2012 to 2013. "She's had her wings clipped a little bit," says Jason Alderman, Visa's vice president of global financial education. "Even though it is down, this is the first real decline we've seen even during the recession because Tooth Fairy inflation has far exceeded the rate of traditional inflation." ...
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Is Racism Just a Form of Stupidity?
The Huffington Post: I think that a lot of us are shying away from an obvious truth: that the kind of blatant racial prejudice we are witnessing in Ferguson, Missouri, has everything to do with stupidity. I'm talking about low intelligence, lack of mental ability, cognitive rigidity. Racists may be a lot of other things -- hateful, insecure -- but let's not sugar-coat what most fair-minded thinkers believe in their hearts: A person of intelligence cannot embrace such authoritarian and racist views. Intelligence is a scientific concept, something scientists can measure, and have for a long time.
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How racism shapes prison policy
The Boston Globe: WHY DOES AMERICA incarcerate so much of its population compared to other first-world countries? New research from psychologists at Stanford University suggests that some of our toughness on crime may be driven by racism. In one experiment, white voters in California were significantly less likely to sign a petition to weaken California’s three-strikes law after viewing a series of mug shots of which 45 percent were black men, compared to viewing a series of mug shots of which 25 percent were black men.
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Some Types of Fables May Be Better at Teaching Kids Not to Lie
Wired: To teach children not to lie, extolling the virtues of honesty may be more effective than focusing on the punishing consequences of deception. After listening to how a young George Washington admitted to chopping down a cherry tree—”I cannot tell a lie,” he famously said—children were significantly less likely to lie about their own dishonesty than if they heard “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or “Pinocchio.” The difference? Unlike the fairy tales with their grisly punishments, George Washington is lauded for telling the truth.
