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Learning the Wrong Lessons
Inside Higher Ed: Here is the lesson people want to learn from the Penn State scandal: There are some smarmy folks out there who, through a combination of mindless groupthink and fear of antagonizing important people, will do unimaginable things, like not reporting child abusers to the police; perhaps there are other "Penn States" out there or possibly there even are people at our own institution who are hiding seriously dirty linen about which we know nothing. The one thing we know for sure is that we never would act the way those people did. That’s the wrong lesson. Here’s why. In the 1960s, the late Stanley Milgram did a series of studies while a faculty member at Yale University.
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Mind games of the victorious
Reuters: For decades after the first sports psychology lab was established in 1920 in Germany, mental coaches have been the water boys of sports science, viewed by their colleagues as not quite good enough to make the first-string team. That has changed. Virtually every top professional team and elite athlete has a psychologist on speed dial for help conquering the yips - when stress makes crucial muscles jerk and ruins, say, an archery shot - marshal the power of visualization, or just muster the confidence that can mean the difference between medaling or just muddling through.
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Helping others can give you free time: study
New Zealand Herald: If you're always feeling there aren't enough hours in the day, the answer could be to do a favour for someone else, say scientists. Despite the fact it involves giving up some of that precious time, devoting a few hours or even just minutes to others can make us feel as if we actually have more free time, a study claims. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania compared the effects of 'chillaxing', or wasting time, and giving time - for example, writing a letter to a sick child. They found that those who did the latter felt they had more time on their hands, reports the journal Psychological Science. Read the whole story: New Zealand Herald
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Geraldine Dawson – New Directions in Early Detection and Intervention in Autism
Recent prospective studies of infants at risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have provided insights into very early development in autism and allowed clinicians to develop new screening tools for identifying infants at risk for ASD. At the same time that early screening tools are being developed, novel approaches to early intervention are being tested with infants at risk for ASD as young as 12 months of age. The hope is that, by intervening very early in life, the course of early brain and behavioral development can be modified and the core symptoms of autism can be significantly reduced, or even prevented in some cases.
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Meditation, Exercise Could Protect You From The Flu
The Huffington Post: Who knew meditation could be so handy during cold and flu season? A small new study finds that mindfulness meditation and moderate exercise seem to have protective effects against cold and flu, with people who engage in the practices having less severe, shorter and fewer symptoms of acute respiratory infection -- and fewer days missed from work due to the sickness -- than people who don't engage in either practice. Specifically, undergoing mindfulness training was linked with a 40 to 50 percent decrease in symptoms, while exercise was linked with a 30 to 40 percent decrease in symptoms, researchers reported, compared with people who did neither activity.
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Rethinking Labels Boosts Creativity
Scientific American Mind: To become more inventive, new research suggests, we should start thinking about common items in terms of their component parts, decoupling their names from their uses. When we think of an object—a candle, say—we tend to think of its name, appearance and purpose all at once. We have expectations about how the candle works and what we can do with it. Psychologists call this rigid thinking “functional fixedness.” Tony McCaffrey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, developed a two-step “generic parts technique,” which trains people to overcome functional fixedness.
