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Some Vowel Sounds Pack a Punch for Brands
When naming a company or a product, marketers may want to pay extra attention to the exact syllables they’re considering. New research demonstrates that specific sounds can convey an impressive amount of symbolic meaning, which can influence the way people perceive a brand. Across five studies, a team led by University of Toronto psychological scientists Cristina Rabaglia and Sam Maglio demonstrated that people intuitively associate front vowel sounds—those produced with the tongue relatively far forward in the mouth, such as the “ee” in feet—with nearby objects. Conversely, vowel sounds produced with the tongue far back in the mouth, such as the “oo” in food, are associated with distance.
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Don’t Treat Young Adults as Teenagers
The New York Times: OVER the past dozen years, the Supreme Court has issued several landmark decisions affirming that adolescents and adults are fundamentally different in ways that justify treating minors less harshly when they violate the criminal law. The court, drawing on psychological and brain science indicating that people under age 18 are not yet fully capable of controlling their behavior, abolished the juvenile death penalty and greatly restricted life without parole sentences for crimes by juveniles. As scientists and legal scholars who specialize in these issues, we have welcomed these changes with enthusiasm. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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How to Get Kids Into a Growth Mindset
Pacific Standard: Like many other things, we develop our beliefs about intelligence—whether it’s fixed or malleable—from our parents. But really, it’s not our parents’ beliefs about intelligence that matter, according to new research—it’s their beliefs about failure that makes the difference. “Researchers, educators, and policymakers agree that parents are key to children’s motivation and success in school and beyond,” Stanford University psychology graduate student Kyla Haimovitz and professor Carol Dweck write in Psychological Science. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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What Science Says—and Doesn’t—about Spanking
Scientific American: To spank or not to spank? This age-old parenting question elicits fierce debate among parents, psychologists and pediatricians. Surveys suggest that nearly half of U.S. parents have spanked their children as a disciplinary tactic, but many experts argue that this form of punishment—hitting a child on the bottom with an open hand—increases the risk that kids will develop emotional and behavioral problems. Other scientists counter that research on the issue is fraught with problems, making it impossible to draw black-and-white conclusions.
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Are Digital Billboards Dangerously Distracting?
Digital ads use bright lights, rotating images, and flashy content to get your attention, but do they take your eyes (and your mind) off the road long enough to create a hazard? Digital billboards — dynamic, electronically illuminated, light emitting diode (LED) advertisements — are a rapidly growing section of the marketing industry. One look around Times Square and you’ll understand why: The billboards are shiny, interesting, and attention-grabbing. We often can’t help but look at them. On the road, these advertising structures stand far above the ground, rotating through ads approximately every 8–10 seconds and marketing various companies, organizations, and products in a single space.
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Better Aging Through Practice, Practice, Practice
The New York Times: SIXTY is not the new 40. Fifty isn’t either. Your lung capacity in late-middle age is in steady decline, as are the fast-twitch muscle fibers that provide power and speed. Your heart capacity has been ebbing for decades. Your sight has been getting worse, your other senses, too, and this, along with a gradually receding ability to integrate information you are absorbing and to then issue motor commands, means your balance is not what it used to be. (Your flattening arches aren’t helping.) Your prefrontal cortex — where the concentrating and deciding gets done — has been shrinking for some time, perhaps since you graduated from college.
