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Nostalgia for young adulthood? Rethinking the ‘reminiscence bump’
Some years ago, I found myself sitting out a blinding snow storm in a diner on a rural Maryland highway. It was bitterly cold outside, so I ordered soup and coffee and sat on a
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Preschool Promises: Starting Early on a New Educational Agenda for the United States
Two children, both age 3, enroll in publicly funded preschool. But they may have vastly different experiences: One child may attend preschool for 8 hours a day and be taught by a teacher with a
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Young Children Are Especially Trusting of Things They’re Told
Little kids believe the darnedest things. For example, that a fat man in a red suit flies through the air on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. A new study on three-year-olds, published in Psychological Science
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Alienated Youths Are More Likely to Lash Out
When people are rejected by peers, they often lash out. In children, that aggression occasionally takes horrifying directions, leading to school shootings or other deadly acts. Researchers in the Netherlands found that some children are
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Colorblind? Or blind to injustice?
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the cause of racial equality, ruling 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was the law of the land. The lone dissenter
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Child’s ‘Mental Number Line’ Affects Memory for Numbers
As children in Western cultures grow, they learn to place numbers on a mental number line, with smaller numbers to the left and spaced further apart than the larger numbers on the right. Then the