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Music: It’s in your head, changing your brain
CNN: Michael Jackson was on to something when he sang that "A-B-C" is "simple as 'Do Re Mi.'" Music helps kids remember basic facts such as the order of letters in the alphabet, partly because songs tap into fundamental systems in our brains that are sensitive to melody and beat. That's not all: when you play music, you are exercising your brain in a unique way. "I think there's enough evidence to say that musical experience, musical exposure, musical training, all of those things change your brain," says Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University.
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Dreadful Deaths: Cycling Through Fear
Huffington Post: Almost 3,000 people died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That includes the victims in or near the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and all the passengers in the four commandeered jets, including the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania. But it does not include the many hidden victims of lingering terror -- an additional 1,500 whose dread of another attack led, indirectly and much later, to their deaths. This is the gist of the so-called "dread risk effect" -- first hypothesized in 2004 in the journal Psychological Science. The idea is that terrorist acts indeed create terror.
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Understand Uncertainty in Program Effects
Education Week: In education research, there's a drive to cut to the chase: What's the effect on the classroom? How much better will students perform on the state math test using this curriculum? How many months of classroom time can students progress by using that tutoring system? Usually education watchers make that interpretation based on a study's effect size, often called the p-value.
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Seeing black and white makes people more judgmental
msnbc: Black-and-white judgments may be more literal than you might expect. A new study finds that people who view information on a black-and-white background are less likely to see gray areas in moral dilemmas than those who get the information alongside other colors. The background, which participants weren't aware was of interest in the experiment, did not push people to become either more lenient or more severe, researchers reported Friday (May 25) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, it took people's natural tendencies toward leniency or severity and intensified them — in other words, their judgments became more black-and-white.
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Behaviors We Don’t Know We Have – Insights from Psychological Science
Understanding human behavior – why and how people do what they do – is at the very heart of psychological science. New research presented in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science examines the processes that underlie various aspects of human behavior, exploring how we learn patterns in language and vision, why some people are able to overcome significant life stressors, and how humans process reward and fear. Statistical Learning: From Acquiring Specific Items to Forming General Rules Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport Statistical learning is the process by which adults and infants extract patterns embedded in both language and visual input.
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Behavior Through Mathematical Modeling
Understanding behavior through Mathematical Modeling has been used to simulate everything from climate patterns to population growth, but Dirk Helbing uses them to examine something even more complex, namely human behavior. Drawing on his background in physics, Helbing developed the “social force model” to simulate the movement of pedestrians, whose behavior can depend on variables such as desired velocity and the distance between a pedestrian and other people or objects.
