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Parents Urged Again to Limit TV for Youngest
The New York Times: Parents of infants and toddlers should limit the time their children spend in front of televisions, computers, self-described educational games and even grown-up shows playing in the background, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned on Tuesday. Video screen time provides no educational benefits for children under age 2 and leaves less room for activities that do, like interacting with other people and playing, the group said.
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Are handsome men never good in bed because they never had to be?
Examiner: A new study from the Association for Psychological Science says that people shouldn't take gender differences in sexuality at face value. To what gender stereotypes do TV shows expose most people? And which shows break the stereotypes? Does a new study from the Association for Psychological Science say in a press release that TV-repeated stereotypes say that good looking people are lousy in the bedroom because they're so attractive they don't have to be good in the bedroom? Or does a new study just look at entertainment's stereotypes of good-looking men in the bedroom? Read the whole story: Examiner
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Babies as young as six months remember more than we thought
The Star-Ledger: What do babies remember? Adults can’t recall their own infant years, so they often assume babies themselves don’t remember much, either. That assumption is wrong, as researchers at Rutgers University continue to prove. Their latest discovery, published in the journal Psychological Science, is that even when babies can’t remember the details of a missing object, they do remember it exists. These littlest study participants can hardly tell anyone this, however. "It’s not easy to study babies and toddlers. They don’t cooperate," says Alan Leslie, director of the university’s Cognitive Development Lab on Busch Campus, Piscataway.
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Kind Words Can Lead to Harsh Consequences
MSNBC: Politeness has a place, but not in high-stakes situations, according to researchers. Whether a pilot is making an emergency flight or a doctor is trying to help a patient make a surgical decision, the sort of vague, evasive responses that help us avoid hurting someone's feelings can have disastrous consequences, according to a team of scientists, including Jean-François Bonnefon and Wim de Neys of the National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse in France, and Aidan Feeney of Queen's University in the United Kingdom. The more sensitive an issue, the more polite we tend to become, according to the researchers.
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Spoiler Alert
American Scientist: Movie critics might do their readers a favor by slipping more plot spoilers into their reviews. Far from wrecking a story, revealing a surprise ending makes fiction more enjoyable. Psychologists picked a dozen short stories—including mysteries and tales with clever plot twists—and wrote a spoiler for each. At least 30 people read the original version of each story alone, while another 30 read the spoiler first. Those who knew a story’s ending consistently ranked it as more pleasureable than did naive readers. The authors speculate that people who already knew the endings felt less anxious and enjoyed anticipating events in the story.
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Steve Jobs and LSD: A Q&A on hallucinogenic drugs
The Star-Ledger: In the cascade of news coverage about Apple founder Steve Jobs following his death on Oct. 5, it was reported that he had taken LSD, the hallucinogenic drug popularized in the 1960s. The Apple innovator, who was 56 at the time of his death from pancreatic cancer, said taking the drug was "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." In another interview, Jobs said Microsoft would have been a better company had founder Bill Gates "dropped acid." That statement is at odds with the anti-drug message most young people hear from parents and teachers.
