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Giving Preschoolers Choice Increases Sharing Behavior
Getting kids to share their toys is a never-ending battle, and compelling them to do so never seems to help. New research suggests that allowing children to make a choice to sacrifice their own toys in order to share with someone else makes them share more in the future. The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These experiments, conducted by psychological scientists Nadia Chernyak and Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University, suggest that sharing when given a difficult choice leads children to see themselves in a new, more beneficent light.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Dorthe Berntsen and David C. Rubin The prevalent view of posttraumatic stress disorder suggests that people have trouble voluntarily recalling autobiographical memories of traumatic events but frequently recall these memories involuntarily. Participants were asked to think about an important event from the past week and rate the memory's valence and the intensity of the emotion they felt when remembering it. Participants also indicated how often they had voluntarily or involuntarily remembered the event.
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Intelligence Means Having More Than Just Raw Brainpower
Business Insider: These situational factors exert their influence in so many ways, but today, inspired by a recent research finding, I want to focus on one in particular: how a mastery of situation can actually make us smarter as we get older. In the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, researchers report that older people (over 65) showedless variability in their cognitive performance across 100 days of testing than did younger people aged 20 to 31. Why?
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Summer fun can build kids’ brains
The Washington Post: Summertime is fun time, when kids can make and sell lemonade, read for fun, catch and release fireflies at twilight, and daydream. These last few weeks of the best time of the year can provide your child with rich opportunities to grow their brains while enjoying the traditional pastimes of the season.
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Impactful Distraction
ScienceNews: “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” The late rock and roll singer Jim Morrison was not a poster boy for public safety — and was no authority on safe driving. After all, later in “Roadhouse Blues,” he has beer for breakfast. But the opening line of that Doors’ song still resonates as sound guidance. ... This distracted state should be familiar to everyone. “That’s why you can drive home and not remember having driven home,” says Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you see it.” Read the whole story: ScienceNews
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Is psychology a “real” science? Does it really matter?
Scientific American: Fellow Scientific American blogger Melanie Tannenbaum is flustered by allegations that psychology is not a science and I can see where she is coming from. In this case the stimulus was a piece by Alex Berezow, a microbiologist, who in a short and provocative piece in the LA times argued the case that psychology is not a real science. I think he’s right. I also think that he misses the point. Berezow’s definition of science is not off the mark, but it’s also incomplete and too narrow.
