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Beyond “Mama” and “Dada”: Why Babies Learn Certain Words
Scientific American Mind: Twila Tardif, a linguist at the University of Michigan, remembers the day she and her Mandarin-speaking babysitter watched as Tardif's 11-month-old daughter crawled over to a pen that had just fallen on the floor and pointed to it. “Pen!” Tardif told her daughter in Mandarin just as her sitter said, “Grab!” also in Mandarin. Then they looked at each other in puzzlement. Tardif realized that caregivers in different cultures might be influencing which words babies learn first.
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White people think racism is getting worse. Against white people.
The Washington Post: How do Americans think about the role of race in our country’s daily life? News reports, social media and uncomfortable dinner conversations often point to one conclusion: They disagree. Many white Americans believe that the United States has entered a post-racial phase; many black Americans believe that race is as salient an issue as ever. Recent polling identifies one area, though, where black and white Americans show remarkable convergence: They believe that race relations have gotten worse.
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Replication Project Investigates Self-Control as Limited Resource
A new research replication project, involving 24 labs and over 2100 participants, failed to reproduce findings from a previous study that suggested that self-control is a depletable resource.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Blunted Reward Processing in Remitted Melancholic Depression Anna Weinberg and Stewart A. Shankman Few reliable markers for vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) have been identified, despite its prevalence. This may be due to the variety of subgroups and symptom clusters subsumed under the MDD diagnosis.
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Why It’s So Hard to Shake a Bad First Impression
A new study demonstrates that shaking a negative first impression is often diabolically difficult, providing just one more reason to make sure that you show up on time for your next job interview. “Moral and immoral behaviors often come in small doses. A person might donate just a few dollars to charity or cheat on just one exam question,” explain University of Chicago psychological scientists Nadav Klein and Ed O’Brien. But how many positive or negative acts must a person undertake before we change our minds about someone?
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Turning Down The Background Noise Could Help Toddlers Learn
NPR: Toddlers make their fair share of noise. But they also have a lot of noise to contend with — a television blaring, siblings squabbling, a car radio blasting, grownups talking. Amid all that clatter, toddlers must somehow piece together the meanings of individual words and start to form their own words and sentences. Loud background noise may make it harder for toddlers to learn language, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Child Development. Many other studies have already found that background noise can limit children's abilities to learn. Television noise, in particular, is ubiquitous in American homes and may negatively affect a child's ability to concentrate.
