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Why Gender Equality Stalled
The New York Times: This week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classic today are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals to change the status of women. But “The Feminine Mystique” had the impact it did because it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness. ...
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How a bad relationship can make you ill – by damaging your immune system
The Daily Mail: Feeling anxious about close relationships could make you fall ill - by damaging your immune system. Not only does anxiety appear to raise levels of stress hormones in the body, it also makes it less effective at fighting off illness. ... Though some scientists believe that attachment anxiety can be traced back to childhood, Dr Jaremka noted that people who feel anxious can change, over time. 'It's not necessarily a permanent state of existence,' she said in the study published in the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: The Daily Mail
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How To Use Deliberate Confusion To Learn Faster
Business Insider: We all know that confusion doesn't feel good. Because it seems like an obstacle to learning, we try to arrange educational experiences and training sessions so that learners will encounter as little confusion as possible. But as is so often the case when it comes to learning, our intuitions here are exactly wrong. ... That's the finding of Travis Proulx and Steven J. Heine, researchers who published their results in the journal Psychological Science. If you're about to engage in any sense-making activity, from analyzing data to solving word problems, you may want to try delving into material that doesn't make much sense first. Read the whole story: Business Insider
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The Oscar Pistorius Trial: Psychologists Predict How a Jury Would Decide
The Huffington Post: 'Are Celebrities Charged with Murder Likely to be Acquitted?' is the title of a unique psychology experiment, inspired by boasts of a famous US lawyer, Eric Dubin, who claimed practically unbeatable court room strategies for representing celebrities, accused of committing serious crimes. Dubin helped win in 2005 a $30million jury verdict in the wrongful death lawsuit against actor Robert Blake, accused of murdering his wife. Blake, had become famous, ironically enough, for his TV portrayal of Tony Baretta, an undercover police detective.
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Does Having Children Make You Happier?
NPR: There's been a debate raging in academic circles for years. Does having children really make one happier? Most parents say their kids absolutely make them happy, but some researchers have come to question that. One of the questions he asked was: How happy are you when you're taking care of your kids? I spoke with Sonja Lyubomirsky, she's at the University of California at Riverside, and she told me that 2004 study and found that parents really weren't very happy. "When they sort of ranked the different activities on happiness, they found that taking care of children was read it, you know, fairly low.
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Where’s the Beef? Obama’s Valentine to Early Education
The Huffington Post: We are starting to think that all good things start in Chicago. First, President Obama makes statements about the importance of preschool for our nation's children in his State of the Union address. Did you hear the collective jaw drop from people who study children for a living (like us) and educators? A president who understands the importance of early education for America's children? Are we dreaming? ... In a recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, aptly entitled, "How to Make a Young Child Smarter," scholars at New York University reviewed 16 studies with a total of 7,370 participants in which poor children were enrolled in preschool.
