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Kindness Vs. Cruelty: Helping Kids Hear The Better Angels Of Their Nature
Are humans born kind? We both assumed, as parents of young children, that kindness is just something our kids would pick up by osmosis, because we love them. It's a common assumption. "We often just expect people to be kind without talking about it," says Jennifer Kotler, vice president of research and evaluation at Sesame Workshop. "We think, 'Oh, you're a good kid. You're gonna be kind.' " ... In fact, this preference for helping shows up even earlier. Kiley Hamlin is an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and she has used puppets to test this preference in babies.
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The High Price of Multitasking
Not only do smartphones provide unprecedented access to information, they provide unprecedented opportunities to multitask. Any activity can be accompanied by music, selfies or social media updates. Of course, some people pick poor times to tweet or text, and lawmakers have stepped in. Forty-eight stateshave banned texting while driving. In Honolulu, it’s illegal to text or even look at your phone while crossing the street, and in the Netherlands they’ve banned texting while biking. But legislation won’t proscribe all situations in which multitasking is unwise; you need to self-regulate.
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Here’s What Your Favorite Music Says About Your Personality
Your taste in music could reveal insights into your personality, according to two studies published in Psychological Science. Researchers from Cambridge and US universities surveyed more than 21,000 people in two separate online surveys to see how five main personality types known collectively as the Big Five – those that are open-minded, extroverted, agreeable, neurotic, and conscientious – matched up with different genres of music.
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Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 20, Number 1)Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Faces offer information that helps us navigate our social world, influencing whom we love, trust, help, and even judge as guilty of a crime. But to what extent does an individual’s face reveal the person’s emotions? And to what extent can we accurately interpret an emotion or intention from a raised eyebrow, a curled lip, or a narrowed eye? Understanding what facial movements might reveal about a person’s emotions has major consequences for how people interact with one another in the living room, the classroom, the courtroom, and even the battlefield.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring the effects of worry in daily life, the role of learning capacity in CBT for depression, and self-injury and suicidal behavior in girls.
