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Change in Mother’s Mental State Can Influence Her Baby’s Development Before and After Birth
As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother’s mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it’s born. In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in—the mother’s womb—is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating.
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Curiosity Makes for Better Students
U.S. News & World Report: Curiosity may be dangerous for cats but it's great if you're a student, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed data from some 50,000 students who took part in about 200 studies and found that curiosity was as strong as conscientiousness in influencing academic performance. Together, curiosity and conscientiousness are as important as intelligence in getting good grades, the researchers concluded. The study appears in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science. Read the full story: U.S. News & World Report
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Stress is as contagious as a cold
Marie Claire UK: A new study reveals that it's not just the common cold that does the rounds in the office. You can also catch other people's stress. Professor Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii, claims that if you sit by a whinger at work you are at risk of catching passive or second-hand stress and anxiety, which can quickly circulate the office. 'People seem to be capable of mimicking others facial, vocal and postural expressions with stunning rapidity,' she says. 'As a consequence, they are able to feel themselves into those other emotional lives to a surprising extent.' Read the full story: Marie Claire UK
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Being a beauty has its benefits
New Zealand Herald: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin concludes that beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In the book, Beauty Pays, he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Hamermesh finds beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse. Read the full story: New Zealand Herald
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The King of Human Error
Vanity Fair: We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them.
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Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself
ScienceBlogs: Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, Hübner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings like "149" or "$6#" were even or odd.