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How Science Can Help Get Out the Vote
Scientific American Mind: Only about half of the people who could vote in the 2012 U.S. presidential election actually did so (53.6 percent of the voting-age population). This puts turnout in the U.S. among the worst in developed countries. By way of contrast, 87.2 percent of Belgians, 80.5 percent of Australians and 73.1 percent of Finns voted in their last elections. In a nation quick to defend democracy both within its borders and beyond, why are more Americans not exercising what is arguably their biggest democratic right? ...
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Research On Tulsa’s Head Start Program Finds Lasting Gains
NPR: In 1998 Oklahoma became one of only two states to offer universal preschool, and it's been one of the most closely watched experiments in the country. Today, the vast majority of these programs are in public schools. The rest are run by child-care centers or Head Start, the federally funded early-childhood education program. ... Deborah Phillips, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University, has spent more than a decade studying and tracking children in these programs. Read the whole story: NPR
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THE DETECTIVES WHO NEVER FORGET A FACE
The New Yorker: A predator was stalking London. He would board a crowded bus at rush hour, carrying a Metronewspaper, and sit next to a young woman. Opening the newspaper to form a curtain, he would reach over and grope her. The man first struck one summer afternoon in 2014, on the No. 253 bus in North London, grabbing the crotch of a fifteen-year-old girl. She fled the bus and called the police, but by that time he had disappeared. ... In 2008, a postdoctoral student at Harvard named Richard Russell began working with a team of perceptual psychologists on a study of prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” a condition in which patients are unable to recognize human faces.
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The One Thing You Can Learn From Ryan Lochte’s Olympic Mistake
TIME: Ryan Lochte is in hot water. After he reported being robbed in Brazil, authorities investigated and learned a very different story. It turns out Lochte and his fellow swimmers had a confrontation with gas station employees after trashing their property. In an attempt to put this episode behind him, Lochte, the second most decorated Olympic swimmer in history and erstwhile reality TV star, apologized: “I want to apologize for my behavior last weekend—for not being more careful and candid.” ... In our research, we have identified three critical elements of an effective apology.
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Neuroscientists scanned Sting’s brain. Here’s what they learned.
The Washington Post: A book with the title “This Is Your Brain on Music” would, presumably, be of great interest to a musician like Sting. His gray matter has been on the stuff for a career that spans four decades. What the once and future Police frontman could not have anticipated is that by reading the book, authored by rocker-turned-McGill University neurologist Daniel Levitin, Sting would end up inside an fMRI machine. As coincidence would have it, in the wake of reading Levitin’s book, Sting was headed to a concert in Montreal. Also located in the city is Levitin’s lab, which Sting decided to visit.
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Tim Duncan, Natalie Portman and 76 other ‘unusual’ authors of psychological research
Minnpost: What do the Academy-Award-winning actor Colin Firth, the conservative radio host Michael Savage, the San Antonio Spurs basketball great Tim Duncan and eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren have in common? They’ve all published papers or studies in psychology journals, according to an intriguing (and sometimes amusing) recent article in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Minnpost
