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IQ Isn’t Set In Stone, Suggests Study That Finds Big Jumps, Dips In Teens
NPR: For as long as there's been an IQ test, there's been controversy over what it measures. Do IQ scores capture a person's intellectual capacity, which supposedly remains stable over time? Or is the Intelligent Quotient exam really an achievement test — similar to the S.A.T. — that's subject to fluctuations in scores? The findings of a new study add evidence to the latter theory: IQ seems to be a gauge of acquired knowledge that progresses in fits and starts. In this week's journal Nature, researchers at University College London report documenting significant fluctuations in the IQs of a group of British teenagers.
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Wellbeing: When politeness is problematic
National Post: Dr. Aidan Feeney has a few thoughts about politeness. Essentially, he thinks it has the ability to cost lives. “The more serious the situation, the more likely you are to be polite and the more room there is for confusion,” says Feeney, a professor at the school of psychology at Queen’s University, Belfast, and co-author of a new paper entitled The Risk of Polite Misunderstanding, published last week by the Association of Psychological Science.
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As Brain Changes, So Can IQ
The Wall Street Journal: A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests a young person's intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought. The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
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Why Forgetting Is Good For Your Memory
Huffington Post: Forgetting could help you remember. Huh? That's the conclusion of new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. We wouldn't be able to learn new information if we didn't forget some things, researchers said. "Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult," study researcher Ben Storm said in a statement. Memories "could completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory." In the study, Storm and his colleagues gave people a word list, where the words all had a relation to each other (example: a list of birds).
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Surprise! Guys want commitment, women want sex
Today Health: The difference in men's and women's attitudes toward sex are often taken for granted. Men want sex, women want commitment; men look for attractive mates and women go after social status. But not all psychologists are on board with these gender-essentialist statements. In a new review, University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues sift through psychology studies and find gender differences aren't always as black-and-white (or pink-and-blue) as they seem. Here are six gender differences that may not be innate after all. Read the whole story: Today Health
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Why teens are wired for risk
CNN: It was hot at 3 a.m. in a small town in North Carolina, and there wasn't a lot for a group of teenagers to do. So, Hillary Tillotson, her brother and three other guys sneaked under a fence to go swimming at a private pool down the street. Only Tillotson and her then-boyfriend kept their clothes on, she said. Two days later, a cop showed up at Tillotson's house. Some of the teens' accomplices had been bragging about their skinny-dipping adventure, and someone turned them in for trespassing. She and her brother had to go to court; their mother paid the fine. "Sometimes I wonder where their brains are at," Tillotson's mother, Lori Lee, said of her children.
