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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Maternal Stress and Infant Mortality: The Importance of the Preconception Period Quetzal A. Class, Ali S. Khashan, Paul Lichtenstein, Niklas Långström, and Brian M. D'Onofrio Does exposure to preconception and prenatal stress affect levels of infant mortality? Researchers examined women who had experienced a stressful event (death of a first-degree relative) in the 6 months prior to conception and during pregnancy. They found that preconception stress was associated with an increased risk for infant mortality. No relationship was found between stress during pregnancy and risk of infant mortality.
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Students Can Learn by Explaining, Studies Say
Education Week: Children are quick to ask “why?” and “how?” when it comes to new things, but research suggests elementary and preschool students learn more when teachers turn the questions back on them. In a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science research meeting here this month, panelists discussed how and when asking students for explanations can best enhance their learning. “Often students are able to say facts, but not able to understand the underlying mathematics concept, or transfer a problem in math to a similar problem in chemistry,” said Joseph Jay Williams, a cognitive science and online education researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Smile: You Are About to Lose
Scientific American: The posed stare-down is a staple of the pre-fight ritual. Two fighters, one day removed from attempting to beat the memories from each other, stand impossibly close, raise their clenched fists and fix their gaze on the other’s eyes as cameras click away. This has always seemed little more than a vehicle for media hype, but new research from psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that there may be clues in this bit of theatre that predict the results of the fight to come. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that there’s something about the fighters’ facial expressions in this standoff that reveal the competitive dynamics between them.
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Explain This: The Illusion Of Political Understanding
NPR: Should the United States impose unilateral sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program? Should we raise the retirement age for Social Security? Should we institute a national flat tax? How about implementing merit-based pay for teachers? Or establishing a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions? Plenty of people have strong opinions about complex policy issues like these. But few people have the detailed knowledge of policy or economics that a solid understanding of the issues seems to require. Where do these opinions come from, if not from careful analysis and deep understanding? A variety of uncharitable answers come to mind.
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Una sesión con la psicóloga de los superhéroes (A session with the psychologist of superheroes)
BBC: Durante el día, esta psicóloga clínica trabaja con la Universidad de California atendiendo a familias predominantemente hispanas en el Condado de Los Ángeles, Estados Unidos, asegurándose de que estén recibiendo un buen tratamiento. Pero luego, esta descendiente de ecuatorianos se cambia la bata por una capa y se convierte en la psicóloga de los superhéroes. "Soy profundamente fanática de los cómics, la ciencia ficción y la fantasía, y esto me permite combinar mi profesión y mi hobby", confiesa Letamendi en conversación con BBC Mundo. "El trabajo al que me dedico puede ser muy oscuro y tiene un tono profundo y pesado. ...
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Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That
The New York Times: Linneah sat at a desk at the Center for Sexual Medicine at Sheppard Pratt in the suburbs of Baltimore and filled out a questionnaire. She read briskly, making swift checks beside her selected answers, and when she was finished, she handed the pages across the desk to Martina Miller, who gave her a round of pills. ... But the evidence for an inborn disparity in sexual motivation is debatable. A meta-analysis done by the psychologists Janet Hyde and Jennifer L. Petersen at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, incorporates more than 800 studies conducted between 1993 and 2007.
