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Infants Learn Better When Listening to Human Speech—or Lemurs
Pacific Standard: Babies are born knowing very little about the world or what to pay attention to—they’re not blank slates, but they’re not exactly full ones either. A good example is faces: When they’re just out of the womb, infants will pay about equal attention to human faces as they would to other primates’ faces. Over time, babies learn to look more at humans. Why is that? Is there something innate to us that eventually draws our attention to our fellow human beings. ... The new research, from Northwestern University psychologists Danielle Perszyk and Sandra Waxman, builds on a series of experiments in the last few years that’s investigated the role of speech in cognitive development.
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A clever tweak to how apples are sold is making everyone eat more of them
The Washington Post: Three years ago, a group of researchers at Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab had a hunch. They knew that many of apples being served to kids as part of the National School Lunch Program were ending up in the trash, virtually untouched. But unlike others, they wondered if the reason was more complicated than simply that the kids didn't want the fruit. Specifically, they thought the fact that the apples were being served whole, rather than sliced, was doing the fruits no favor. And they were on to something. A pilot study conducted at eight schools found that fruit consumption jumped by more than 60 percent when apples were served sliced.
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Review of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Scientific American: Angela Duckworth's long-awaited book Grit has finally arrived! It's getting great reviews (e.g., NY Times), and it has set off hugely important debates in education and in scientific circles. Make no doubt: Grit is great. It's a lucid, informative, and entertaining review of the research Angela has assiduously conducted over the past decade or so. The book also includes suggestions on how to develop grit, and how we can help support grit in others. There are few people who wouldn't learn something from this book. Angela herself is one of the grittiest individuals I've ever met.
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Are You in Despair? That’s Good
The New York Times: WHEN the world gets you down, do you feel just generally “bad”? Or do you have more precise emotional experiences, such as grief or despair or gloom? In psychology, people with finely tuned feelings are said to exhibit “emotional granularity.” When reading about the abuses of the Islamic State, for example, you might experience creeping horror or fury, rather than general awfulness. When learning about climate change, you could feel alarm tinged with sorrow and regret for species facing extinction.
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‘Like’ it or not, teen brain is primed to join the crowd
The Washington Post: About the easiest action you can take in social media is to "like" a tweet or a photo. If you're a teenager, your brain is particularly primed to "like" what others have "liked," according to researchers from UCLA. Their new study, published in Psychological Science, is thought to be the first to replicate the social media experience while people are inside an fMRI scanner. The findings underscore the importance of both reward-seeking behavior and peer acceptance in adolescence. Thirty-four adolescents, ages 13-18, roughly equal numbers male and female, participated in the experiment.
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Could Thinking Positively About Aging Be The Secret Of Health?
NPR: The dictionary defines ageism as the "tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment." But research indicates that ageism may not just be ill-informed or hurtful. It may also be a matter of life and death. Not that it's literally killing people. Researcher Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, says it depends on how much a given individual takes those negative ideas to heart. Read the whole story: NPR
