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As Brain Changes, So Can IQ
The Wall Street Journal: A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests a young person's intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought. The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
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Why Forgetting Is Good For Your Memory
Huffington Post: Forgetting could help you remember. Huh? That's the conclusion of new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. We wouldn't be able to learn new information if we didn't forget some things, researchers said. "Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult," study researcher Ben Storm said in a statement. Memories "could completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory." In the study, Storm and his colleagues gave people a word list, where the words all had a relation to each other (example: a list of birds).
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Why teens are wired for risk
CNN: It was hot at 3 a.m. in a small town in North Carolina, and there wasn't a lot for a group of teenagers to do. So, Hillary Tillotson, her brother and three other guys sneaked under a fence to go swimming at a private pool down the street. Only Tillotson and her then-boyfriend kept their clothes on, she said. Two days later, a cop showed up at Tillotson's house. Some of the teens' accomplices had been bragging about their skinny-dipping adventure, and someone turned them in for trespassing. She and her brother had to go to court; their mother paid the fine. "Sometimes I wonder where their brains are at," Tillotson's mother, Lori Lee, said of her children.
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Lying Becomes Difficult as We Age
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Janice Murray from the University of Otago, New Zealand present her poster research, “Age, Lies, and Faces: Emotion Recognition Mediates Age-Related Differences.” Murray and her colleagues asked younger and older participants to identify facial emotion expressions and determine whether younger and older speakers’ opinion statements were true or false. The scientists discovered that older adults were less convincing liars and had more difficulty detecting others’ lies.
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A New Discipline Emerges: The Psychology of Science
You’ve heard of the history of science, the philosophy of science, maybe even the sociology of science. But how about the psychology of science? In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, San Jose State University psychologist Gregory J. Feist argues that a field has been quietly taking shape over the past decade, and it holds great promise for both psychology and science. “Science is a cognitive act by definition: It involves personality, creativity, developmental processes,” says Feist—everything about individual psychology. So what is the psychology of science?
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Busted! Gender Myths in the Bedroom & Beyond
msnbc: The difference in men's and women's attitudes toward sex are often taken for granted. Men want sex, women want commitment; men look for attractive mates and women go after social status. But not all psychologists are on board with these gender-essentialist statements. In a new review, University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues sift through psychology studies and find gender differences aren't always as black-and-white (or pink-and-blue) as they seem. Here are six gender differences that may not be innate after all. 1.
