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You Can Wash Away Your Troubles, With Soap
“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain,” goes the song. Is there such a thing as soap and water for the psyche? Yes: Metaphor is that powerful, say Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in a literature review appearing in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. Religious rites like baptism make psychological sense, the article suggests. Says Lee: “Cleansing is about the removal of residues.” By washing the hands, taking a shower, or even thinking of doing so, “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision.
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Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
Miller-McCune: A just published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence. “These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.” Read the full story: Miller-McCune
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2011 Minnesota Psychological Association President’s Conference
Theme: Becoming an Empirically Validated Psychotherapist: The Effective Use of Outcome Measures Dates: November 11, 2011 Location: Metropolitan State University, St. Paul Campus For more information visit: https://m360.mnpsych.org/event.aspx?eventID=32428&instance=0
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Kentucky Psychological Association Annual Convention
Theme: Core Competencies in Psychology for the 21st Century Dates: November 10-12, 2011 Location: Lexington, KY For more information visit: http://kpa.org/displayconvention.cfm
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Why Do Some People Learn Faster?
Wired: The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next.
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2012 Missouri Psychological Association Convention
Dates: March 23-24, 2012 Location: Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, 62112 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63112 For more information visit: http://www.mopsych.org/
