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Call for Papers: The Society for the Study of Human Development
Society for the Study of Human Development 9th Biennial Meeting Hilton Garden Inn Hotel Austin, Texas October 16–18, 2015 Person, Biology, Culture, and Society: New Directions in Human Development The Society for the Study of Human Development invites proposal submissions for its 9th Biennial Meeting. SSHD is an international society based in the US. Ours is a multidisciplinary organization. The central mission of SSHD is to provide a forum that moves beyond age-segmented scholarly organizations to take an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to theories of, research on, and applications of Developmental Science across the life-span/life course.
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Look who’s swiping now: 6-month-old babies are using smartphones, study says
The Washington Post: Smart phone. Dumb idea. More and more Americans are handing their smartphones to their kids, some as young as 6 months old, according to a new study. Experts warn, however, that the habit could be harmful for a child’s development, despite the promises of cellphone “learning apps.” More than a third of kids under 1 year old are already swiping away on cellphones and tablets, according to a survey by pediatric researchers at the Einstein Healthcare Network. ...
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How to Combat Distrust of Science
Scientific American: Acceptance of science has become increasingly polarized in the United States. Indeed, a recent Pew poll shows that there is a substantial and growing amount of public disagreement about basic scientific facts, including human evolution, the safety of vaccines and whether or not human-caused climate change is real and happening. What is causing this, you might ask? People often interpret the same information very differently. As psychologists, we are more than familiar with the finding that our brains selectively attend to, process and recall information.
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When a Gun Is Not a Gun
The New York Times: THE Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon. Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so. But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings.
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Man with Restored Sight Provides New Insight into How Vision Develops
California man Mike May made international headlines in 2000 when his sight was restored by a pioneering stem cell procedure after 40 years of blindness. A study published three years after the operation found that the then 49-year-old could see colors, motion and some simple two-dimensional shapes, but was incapable of more complex visual processing. Hoping May might eventually regain those visual skills, University of Washington researchers and colleagues retested him a decade later. In an article published in the April 2015 issue of Psychological Science, they report that May — referred to in the study as M.M.
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The Joy of Scents
Slate: Being able to transmit positive emotions may also have a profound social impact, says Gün Semin, a psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead researcher on the study. After all, “the pursuit of happiness is not an individual enterprise,” as he and his fellow researchers write rather eloquently in the new study. So Semin’s team decided to test whether people could communicate happiness via sweat. Read the whole story: Slate
