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Kids understand the relationship between humans and other animals
Science Centric: Parents, educators and developmental psychologists have long been interested in how children understand the relationship between human and non-human animals. For decades, the consensus was that as children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt only one - markedly 'anthropocentric' - vantage point, favouring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals. A new study from Northwestern University researchers challenges this long-held assumption. In two experiments, with the results to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 17, research by Patricia Herrmann, Sandra R. Waxman and Douglas L.
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The Psychology of Food Cravings
Swimsuit season is almost upon us. For most of us, the countdown has begun to lazy days lounging by the pool and relaxing on the beach. However, for some of us, the focus is not so much on sunglasses and beach balls, but how to quickly shed those final five or ten pounds in order to look good poolside. It is no secret that dieting can be challenging and food cravings can make it even more difficult. Why do we get intense desires to eat certain foods? Although food cravings are a common experience, researchers have only recently begun studying how food cravings emerge.
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The New Phrenology?
Phrenology was the intellectual rage of 19th century America. Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman each incorporated bits of the popular personality theory into his works, and Herman Melville went so far as to make his most famous narrator, Ishmael, an amateur phrenologist. The essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was obsessed with the practice, alternating between enthusiasm and fear about phrenology’s deterministic view of the brain and behavior. For those who need a quick refresher, phrenology was the theory that an individual’s personality could be “read” from the shape of his skull.
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A Woman’s Touch: Physical Contact Increases Financial Risk Taking
A woman's touch is all it takes for people to throw caution to the wind. That's the conclusion of a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. If a female experimenter patted a participant on the back, they'd risk more money than if she just talked to them, or if a man did the patting. The researchers think this comes from the way that mothers use touch to make their babies feel secure. When we are infants, we receive a lot of touch from our mothers. This creates a sense of attachment, which makes a baby feel secure.
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The oil spill, the mapmaker heuristic, and me
It’s easy right now to think that the world is coming undone. The BP oil company has singlehandedly devastated the Louisiana coast. Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano continues to blacken our skies and ground our jets. Terrorists are planting bombs in Times Square. Lacrosse stars are killing other lacrosse stars. Who could blame us for asking: What’s the world coming to? In times like these, I turn to the mapmaker heuristic. That’s just a clever name for the brain’s deep-wired sense of psychological distance. The way we see events in our world depends a lot on how near or far away they are—actually and emotionally.
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Adult’s Gestures May Prompt Wrong Answers from Children During Critical Interviews
People who interview young children for criminal investigations and other inquiries could elicit false information through their own gestures, particularly if the child is inarticulate, research at the University of Chicago shows. The gestures the children make can also reveal important information that lawyers and police investigators may be missing by not paying attention to hand movements, said Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and an expert on gesture.
