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Mentoring Works Best When Adults, Kids Share Common Interests
MSN Health & Fitness: Although mentoring programs intended to help children socially, emotionally or academically do offer a number of benefits, these advantages are generally limited and may not be enough for kids facing serious problems, a new report says. The authors of the report, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest reviewed more than 70 existing evaluations of mentoring programs.
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On the brink of a mental health revolution
BBC: One in four of us will suffer some form of mental illness during our lifetimes.Historically, many of these conditions have been beyond our understanding, but now scientists believe we are on the verge of a revolution in how mental health problems are approached. Professor Tom Insel, director of the $1.5bn National Institute of Mental Health in the United States, told Newsnight there is a profound change taking place, and science and technology is key to that change: "We are really facing a tipping point here with research in mental illness. We have gone through a revolution in how we can look at the brain.
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APS Fellows Lead in Taste Research
Which part of your tongue tastes sweet flavor most intensely? You may be familiar with the “tongue map” that supposedly showed which regions of our tongues sense bitter, sour, sweet, and salty tastes most intensely. The existence of taste bud maps was disproved by APS Past President Linda Bartoshuk, a leading taste researcher from the University of Florida who also discovered why “supertasters” experience taste so intensely.
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Which Way You Lean—Physically—Affects Your Decision-Making
We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. “Decision making, like other cognitive processes, is an integration of multiple sources of information—memory, visual imagery, and bodily information, like posture,” says Anita Eerland, a psychologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages.
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Birth of Cognitive Neuroscience
Michael Gazzaniga, a Past President of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the field of cognitive neuroscience, founding the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and serving as Editor-in-Chief of The Cognitive Neurosciences – considered to be the sourcebook for that field. He is credited with being the first researcher to examine split brain patients in order to understand whether some cognitive functions are predominantly performed in one brain hemisphere or the other.
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2012 Society of Experimental Social Psychology Conference
The 2012 SESP Conference will be held October 25-27 in Austin, Texas. For more information visit: http://www.sesp.org/confer.htm