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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Structure and Implementation of Novel Task Rules: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study Frederick Verbruggen, Rossy McLaren, Maayan Pereg, and Nachshon Meiran The authors tested how children and adolescents performed in new tasks that required learning instructions and structuring the tasks hierarchically. They presented images of cartoon characters that lived on the left or on the right side of the street on a computer screen.
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Gossiping Is Good
Word on the street is that gossip is the worst. An Ann Landers advice column once characterized it as “the faceless demon that breaks hearts and ruins careers.” The Talmud describes it as a “three-pronged tongue” that kills three people: the teller, the listener, and the person being gossiped about. And Blaise Pascal observed, not unreasonably, that “if people really knew what others said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world.” Convincing as these indictments seem, however, a significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy. It’s a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty pervasive.
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Childhood Adversity Is Linked with Risky Health Behaviors and Negative Life Outcomes
Children often show remarkable resilience, but survey data shows that repeated exposure to adversity in childhood can have a significant impacts on health and well-being later in life.
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One Year of School Comes With an IQ Bump, Meta-Analysis Shows
A year of schooling leaves students with new knowledge, and it also equates with a small but noticeable increase to students’ IQ, according to a systematic meta-analysis published in Psychological Science, a journal of the
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Harlow’s Classic Studies Revealed the Importance of Maternal Contact
Harry Harlow’s empirical work revolutionized the scientific understanding of the influence of social relationships in early development.
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How Mother-Child Separation Causes Neurobiological Vulnerability Into Adulthood
The evidence from psychological research is clear: When children are separated from their parents, it can have traumatic repercussions for kids’ lives down the line.
