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So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help?
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 17, Number 1) Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) People are confronted with a vast amount of text on a daily basis. Between emails, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines – to name a few – is it any wonder that people are interested in learning how to improve their reading speed? This desire has led to the development of speed-reading courses and smartphone applications meant to help readers improve their reading pace. So what does science say about our ability to improve our reading speed? Are people able to vastly increase the number of words they read per minute?
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The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point
Quartz: It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory. Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable. But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.
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Couples’ Quality of Life Linked Even When One Partner Dies
When one spouse passes away, his or her characteristics continue to be linked with the surviving spouse’s well-being, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings also indicate that this link between the deceased spouse and surviving spouse is as strong as that between partners who are both living. “The people we care about continue to influence our quality of life even when we they are gone,” says lead researcher Kyle Bourassa, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
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Fuzzy Thinking Gives Adolescents a Clearer View of Risk
Although many people make risky decisions, one group — adolescents — are the most likely to engage in risky behavior. According to one theory explaining the developmental trajectory of risky decision-making — the imbalance theory — this phenomenon is prevalent in adolescence partly because areas of the brain involved in reward mature before areas of the brain connected with behavioral inhibition and delay of gratification. In a recent article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, APS Fellow Valerie F. Reyna, Rebecca B.
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A New Way to Beat the Market: Invest in Workplace Wellness
In 1979, Jim Burke the chief executive of Johnson & Johnson started a state-of-the-art workplace wellness program in order to improve employee wellbeing and cut healthcare costs. The program’s goal was to make Johnson & Johnson employees “the healthiest in the world.” The expectation was that improving employees’ health and well-being would ultimately have a positive impact on the company's bottom line. It appears that Burke was onto something: A new study finds that companies that prioritize employee health also had significantly higher stock returns.
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Can You Spot a Liar?
The Atlantic: In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just got sucked in,” he told The New York Times later. As it turns out, it’s much easier to fall for these types of cons than many people think.
