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Kids’ Altruism Linked with Better Physiological Regulation, Less Family Wealth
Children as young as 4 years old may reap better health from altruistic giving, a behavior that tends to be less common among kids from high-income families.
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Why Do We Love Our Pets So Much?
BBC: When four chimpanzees captured a young blue duiker to play with, you might at first believe they wanted to keep it as a pet. They tumbled about with it but in the end it went badly for the antelope. Their playful behaviour was too rough and ended in its death. The chimpanzees continued to play with the corpse for another 30 minutes. This was a special case. The duiker was not a "pet" in the sense as we know it. Animals do not keep pets; you won't see a chimpanzee taking a dog for a walk or an elephant keeping a tortoise for company. Making an animal part of the family seems to be something only humans do. The question is, why? Read the whole story: BBC
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Does Google Help Students Learn (or Just Think They Do?)
Education Week: There's no question that in the era of the smartphone, the Internet has become a go-to place to find out something in a hurry, but does "outsourcing your memory" actually help students learn new concepts, or does it just make people think they are smarter than they are? A little of both, find researchers at the annual Association for Psychological Science conference here. In a symposium on the effects of students' online searches, several studies looked at how using the Internet affects both the way we remember and the way we think about what we learn. Analyzing about 900 college students' search habits, Adrian F.
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Reducing Prejudice While You Sleep
Pacific Standard: Prejudices tend to lurk in our unconscious minds. Few Americans would admit to holding stereotyped views of blacks or women, but tests designed to measure underlying thought patterns suggest the presence of buried biases that still influence our opinions and behavior. The good news is these harmful assumptions are learned, and they can be unlearned. Newly published research suggests such biases can be diminished with the help of the simplest and most natural process imaginable: Sleep.
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Weakening Memories of Crime through Deliberate Suppression
There are some bad memories — whether of a crime or a painful life event — that we’d rather not recall. New research shows that people can successfully inhibit some incriminating memories, reducing the memories’ impact on automatic behaviors and resulting in brain activity similar to that seen in “innocent” participants. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “In real life, many individuals who take memory detection tests want to distort their results.
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Smarter Every Year? Mystery of the Rising IQs
The Wall Street Journal: Are you smarter than your great-grandmom? If IQ really measures intelligence, the answer is probably a resounding “yes.” IQ tests are “normed”: Your score reflects how you did compared with other people, like being graded on a curve. But the test designers, who set the average in a given year at 100, have to keep “renorming” the tests, adding harder questions. That’s because absolute performance on IQ tests—the actual number of questions people get right—has greatly improved over the last 100 years. It’s called the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, a social scientist at New Zealand’s University of Otago who first noticed it in the 1980s.
