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Your Screen-Time Rules or Mine?
The Wall Street Journal: It can be a sticky situation for parents: Your 8-year-old’s new friend plays videogames for several hours every day, but you set tight limits on your own child’s screen time. Or your 9-year-old’s friends all use Instagram on their cellphones, years before you intend to even let your daughter have a phone. Can you control what happens on a play date? While families’ rules differ in many areas, they often seem especially divergent when it comes to children’s media use. What’s available for children, and what’s popular, changes all the time. And parents have differing levels of comfort and familiarity with new platforms. ...
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Motivating Eco-Friendly Behaviors Depends on Cultural Values
The specific cultural values of a country may determine whether concern about environmental issues actually leads individuals to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.
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White Coat
NPR: Lulu Miller introduces us to a scientist who is trying to figure out if clothes can change us in concrete, measurable ways. In a Northwestern University study by Adam Galinsky and Hajo Adam, the mere act of wearing a doctor's coat made participants perform better on an attention task than participants who wore the same exact coat... but believed it was a painter's coat. Read the whole story: NPR
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When to Let Children Quit
The Wall Street Journal: Your son hates the flute. He says he has and always will hate the flute. You are a strong and resolute parent. You wheedle, cajole, bribe and threaten him into practicing every day. He gets pretty good. He does a recital; he’s in the band. Many years later, on the brink of adolescence, your son comes to you and says: “I want to quit the flute.” What’s a parent to do? Quitting isn’t a notion that sits well with most people. The emphasis on achievement and hard work, not to mention countless hours spent ferrying little ones to expensive practices, has made it particularly loathsome to parents.
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‘Belonging’ can help keep talented female students in STEM classes
National Science Foundation: Many women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) have faced a common experience at some point during their college days -- they walked into a classroom and found that they were among a small handful of women in the class, or even the only one. That kind of experience has the potential to make a talented, motivated student feel out-of-place, and compel her to search for more inclusive academic environments, according to Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Probing the Moist Crevices of Word Aversion
Scientific American: Warning: this article contains a word that you might find offensive. In fact, some readers might find it so deeply unsettling that they might begin to wonder about the cause of their aversion. What is it about this word that generates such a visceral experience of revulsion and discomfort? Is it something about the particular combination of sounds it forces us to utter? Maybe something about the conceptual associations that it evokes? What proportion of the population also feels this way? Is this only true of certain kinds of people and not others?
