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Born to Be a Wild Card
The Atlantic: Pop quiz: When you hear the term “PSA,” what comes to mind? Many people will answer: Public Service Announcement. For men of a certain age, another likely response is more ominous (prostate-specific antigen, to be precise). Only a select few will say “Professional Squash Association,” which refers to the organization that oversees squash, a fiercely competitive racquet sport played in an indoor court with a squishy little black ball that goes up to 170 miles per hour. In the United States, squash remains pretty obscure, but it has a realistic chance of becoming an Olympic sport, and the PSA sponsors a tour, organizing more than 200 tournaments annually all over the world.
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Children Exposed to Multiple Languages May Be Better Natural Communicators
Young children who hear more than one language spoken at home become better communicators, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers discovered that children from multilingual environments are better at interpreting a speaker’s meaning than children who are exposed only to their native tongue. The most novel finding is that the children do not even have to be bilingual themselves; it is the exposure to more than one language that is the key for building effective social communication skills.
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Self-Promoters Tend to Misjudge How Annoying They Are to Others
Bragging to coworkers about a recent promotion, or posting a photo of your brand new car on Facebook, may seem like harmless ways to share good news. But new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that self-promotion or a “humblebrag” often backfires. Researchers Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein, and Joachim Vosgerau wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong. They found that self-promoters overestimate how much their self-promotion elicits positive emotions and underestimate how much it elicits negative emotions.
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Third International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication
The Third International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication will be held June 14–17, 2015, in Linkoping, Sweden. For more information visit www.chscom2015.se.
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Marsh Receives Cozzarelli Prize for Outstanding Research on Altruism
An article by Abigail A. Marsh of Georgetown University has been recognized with the 2014 Cozzarelli Prize for excellent, original work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Marsh coauthored the article “Neural and Cognitive Characteristics of Extraordinary Altruists” with her Georgetown colleagues Sarah A. Stoycos, Kristin M. Brethel-Haurwitz, John VanMeter, and Elise M. Cardinale, along with Paul Robinson of the University of Washington. They received the Cozzarelli Prize in the category Behavioral and Social Sciences.
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4 tips to seeing if an educational app will actually help your child learn
Mashable: Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionize childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as "educational" in the Apple App Store alone. We recently published a large-scale review of more than 200 articles on the question of how we can put the education back in educational apps.
