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Shoham Honored Posthumously for Contributions to Family Research
Late APS Board Member Varda Shoham was recognized posthumously as a recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Family Systems Research Award at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). Her husband Michael Rohrbaugh, a clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at George Washington University, shared the award with Shoham.
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Cognitive Costs of Crossing the Street Increase with Age
On average, a pedestrian in the US is killed in a car-related accident every 2 hours and injured every 7 minutes, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But children aren’t the ones at greatest risk of a deadly collision with a car– seniors are. A CDC analysis of pedestrian traffic deaths from 2001-2010 concluded that the risk of death actually increases with age. Children under age 15 had the lowest risk of dying as the result of a collision with a vehicle; people over the age of 75 were more than twice as likely to be killed by a car compared to pedestrians overall.
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Why Do Former High-School Athletes Make More Money?
The Atlantic: This project was a slam dunk, that one was a home run, and it’s just the way the ball bounces—the last thing the business world needs to catalogue its accomplishments is another facile sports metaphor. But it’s not just athletic metaphors that proliferate in the business world—it’s also athletes themselves. A recent study documented just how much the labor market smiles upon people who played sports as children: Former high-school athletes generally go on to have higher-status careers than those who didn’t play a sport. On top of that, former athletes’ wages are between 5 and 15 percent higher than those of the poor trombonists and Yearbook Club presidents.
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Who Are You? Identity and Dementia
The Huffington Post: Phineas Gage is arguably the most famous case study in the history of neuroscience. Gage was a railroad worker who in the autumn of 1848 was helping to prepare a new roadbed near Cavendish, Vermont, when an accidental explosion sent a three-foot tamping iron through his head. The missile entered the left side of his face, passed behind his left eye, and exited through the top of his skull. Gage, remarkably, lived to tell about the mishap. But friends said he had changed -- that he was "no longer Gage" -- and this is what has intrigued psychological scientists.
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How Did Humans Learn to Count? Baboons May Offer Clues
Learning to count comes early in life for humans. Most kids know how to count before they enter formal schooling and the ability to understand basic quantities is fundamental to everyday life. Researchers at the University of Rochester wanted to know whether the cognitive underpinnings for this important ability might be found in some of our close cousins: baboons. "Nonhuman animals do not use words like one, two, and three, or numerals like 1, 2, and 3, to “count” in the way that humans do. Nonetheless, it is well established that monkeys and other animals can approximate quantities without these symbolic labels," researcher Jessica Cantlon and colleagues write.
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Pride and Prejudice: Reducing LGBT Discrimination at Work
Employers are likely to abide by laws barring discrimination against gay workers not because they are necessarily afraid of being punished for violating the law, but because these laws send a clear message about acceptable moral behavior in the community, a study suggests.
