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Obama, Romney debate: Mom and Dad settle whom you support
Toronto Star: The way you were brought up could determine whether you were rooting for Romney or Obama last night. An analysis of the parenting styles and political attitudes of 1,364 U.S. families found that “parents’ attitudes predicted their children’s political orientations at age 18.” Which means, study author Dr. R.
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Where Are the Gifted Minorities?
Scientific American: For more than a quarter century, critics have faulted gifted education programs for catering to kids from advantaged backgrounds. These programs do, after all, typically enroll outsized numbers of European American and Asian American students hailing from relatively well-off homes. Members of other ethnic groups, meanwhile, tend to be underrepresented, as judged by the percentage of these students in a school district relative to that in its gifted program. In a study based on data from the 2006 Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Survey, for example, education researcher Donna Y.
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Why Are States So Red and Blue?
The New York Times: Regardless of who wins the presidential election, we already know now how most of the electoral map will be colored, which will be close to the way it has been colored for decades. Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.
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Want to Influence Support for Redistributive Tax Policies? Choose Your Words Carefully
Income inequality has become a major topic of discussion over the last year and yet consensus on what (if anything) should be done about it seems elusive. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that a simple manipulation of language might be able to influence support for policies aimed at addressing income inequality. Income inequality can be described in two ways: as the rich making more than the poor, or as the poor making less than the rich. The two descriptions convey identical information, but research has shown that the way in which inequalities are framed influences what we think other people ought to have.
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New Research on Perception From Psychological Science
Read about new research on visual and olfactory perception from Psychological Science. A Time-Based Account of the Perception of Odor Objects and Valences Jonas K. Olofsson, Nicholas E. Bowman, Katherine Khatibi, and Jay A. Gottfried There is some debate over how we perceive odor. Object-centered accounts of odor perception suggest that an odor is identified before its valence is determined, whereas valance-centered accounts suggest the opposite. Participants were presented with several categories of odors (floral, fishy, minty, and fuel).
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Music Makes a Brighter Future
Learning to play an instrument might lead us to feel more optimistic and motivated to seek opportunities, Michael M. Roy, Elizabethtown College, reported at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. In the spring of 2009, Roy and his colleagues established a fully functional concert band program in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. They returned in the fall of 2011 to assess the music program’s impact. During their initial and return visits, they measured feelings of self-esteem, optimism, positive affect, negative affect, motivation to avoid losses, and motivation to seek gains.
