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Homeownership, the Key to Happiness?
The New York Times: If trying to buy an apartment in New York City has been making you miserable, consider this: actually getting that home may not make you happy.
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Hearing What We Read
Psychological scientists have discovered new evidence of what goes on in the brain when people read printed words. The scientists, led by Maria Dimitropoulou of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, in Donostia, Spain, used Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes, to investigate how knowledge about the relationship between written language and sound influences our ability to recognize words. The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In two experiments, the scientists used the masked priming paradigm, a method used to study visual word recognition.
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What is talent – and can science spot what we will be best at?
The Guardian: My interest in the science of talent has a personal backstory. By the age of three, I'd had 21 ear infections and after an operation to remove fluid from my ears, it took me an extra step to process speech. To help me catch up with my peers, I was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder. I repeated third grade. I was sent to a special school for children with learning disabilities. I was fed a steady stream of low expectations. One day, when I was 14, everything changed. A new teacher took me aside and asked me why I was still in special education. With no prior expectations – seeing only the child in front of her – she took notice of my boredom and frustration.
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‘Active’ Student Engagement Goes Beyond Class Behavior, Study Finds
Education Week: Some warning signs are easy to spot: It's well-established that the kid goofing off in the back of the classroom, who plays hooky and turns in homework late, is disengaged, and at a higher risk of falling behind and eventually dropping out of school. But where are the red flags for the student who sits quietly, answers when spoken to, and politely zones out? A new study, published online in the journal Learning and Instruction, probes how more subtle facets of student engagement can be harder to flag, but just as critical for their long-term academic success.
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Why You Give Too Much
Prevention: Ahh, a night alone. You could just head home after work, pour yourself a glass of pinot anything, and catch up on this season of Mad Men. But your partner’s suit for tomorrow’s reception is at the dry cleaners and his prescription is still at the pharmacy. If you’re already reaching for your shoes, don’t beat yourself up: a new study in Psychological Science says we’re more likely to make impulsive sacrifices in close relationships. And if you have low self-control, you’re even more likely. Read the whole story: Prevention
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Nice Results, But What Did You Expect?
National Geographic: In 2008, a team of psychologists from the University of Michigan apparently found a simple memory task that could boost intelligence. They asked volunteers to watch a sequence of symbols while listening to a series of letters. Holding both streams of information in their heads, they had to say if the current symbol or letter matched the one from a few cycles back. This memory-based “dual n-back” task seemed to improve the volunteers’ fluid intelligence—a general ability to solve problems that goes well beyond mere memory. The team said that their study opened up “a wide range of applications”.
