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Fractions Are Key To Math Success, New Study Shows
CBS Detroit: ANN ARBOR — What part of math success comes from knowing fractions? More than you might think, according to a new study that analyzed long-term data on more than 4,000 children from both the United States and the United Kingdom.
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A Fan’s Brain
The New Yorker: The psychology of sports fandom is often so obvious and unsubtle in its raw tribalism that it can seem silly to apply academic rigor to the subject. “They Saw a Game: A Case Study” is considered a seminal paper in the sports-psychology subgenre. First published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, in 1954, it brought the scientific method to bear on students’ reactions to a particularly violent football game between Princeton and Dartmouth.
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Respect of peers more important than money
The Telegraph: The admiration and respect of our peers has a greater bearing on our overall happiness in life than our bank balance or the status associated with being rich, researchers found. Psychologists from the University of California, Berkeley carried out four studies to observe the connection between various types of status and our overall happiness in life. In one study, the researchers carried out a survey of 80 university students who between them were involved in 12 different social groups such as sororities.
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You Choose, They Lose: The Psychology of Income Inequality
Pacific Standard: Paper or plastic? PC or Mac? Do you want fries with that? American culture is all about making choices. And two scholars report that mulling over our options affects how we think about economic inequality. “When the concept of choice was highlighted,” they write, “people (taking part in a series of experiments) were less disturbed by statistics demonstrating wealth inequality, less likely to believe that societal factors contribute to the success of the wealthy, less willing to endorse redistributing educational resources more equally between the rich and the poor, and less willing to endorse increased taxes on the rich.” Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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Social-class discrimination plays a role in poorer health for teens
Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: A study of teenagers led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher reports that social class discrimination can contribute to poorer health. Previous studies have linked poverty and poor health, but UW researcher Thomas Fuller-Rowell says this study is one of the first to examine the health impacts of class discrimination. The new research is detailed in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers examined 252 teenagers, all 17-year-olds from upstate New York. Most of the teens were white, so race was not one of the factors examined.
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Studies Find That Gossip Isn’t Just Loose Talk
The New York Times: GOSSIP. Almost all of us do it, most of us are embarrassed about it, and sometimes, to our horror, we get caught. But not all gossip is bad, and, in fact, gossip can be useful in maintaining social norms and keeping people in line. Maybe it sounds as if I’m just trying to rationalize the desire to sometimes spread a few juicy bits of information, but recent research looks at the good side of gossip. First, the definition of gossip is fairly neutral.
