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Autism: Take a Puppet for a Friend
La Stampa: Social cognition is a complex construct that goes far beyond some of the acquired expertise on how to behave in certain situations and adapting to the demands of the environment, but involves the ability, typically human, to engage in interpersonal relationships and to understand the thoughts and emotions of others. This capacity is manifested in very simple form in the early months of a child's life, but at different stages of development, it becomes increasingly complex.
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Happiness Gets Better With Age
Older people tend to be wiser, but did you know they tend to be happier too? A recent paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests this may be because older adults are better at regulating their emotions. Older individuals seem to be better at predicting how a certain situation will make them feel, so they’re good at avoiding unpleasant situations and putting themselves instead in (sounds a little awkward when reading but grammatically correct) enjoyable ones with people they like. Being happier as one gets older also has some health benefits.
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Following the Crowd: Brain Images Offer Clues to How and Why We Conform
What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private. Now three Harvard University psychological scientists have used brain scans to show what happens when we take others’ opinions to heart: We take them “to brain”—specifically, to the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. These regions compute what we value and feel rewarded by, both primitive things like water and food and socially meaningful things like money.
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Are We More—or Less—Moral Than We Think?
If asked whether we’d steal, most of us would say no. Would we try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves. Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? A study by Rimma Teper, Michael Inzlicht, and Elizabeth Page-Gould of the University of Toronto Scarborough tested the difference between moral forecasting and moral action—and the reasons behind any mismatch.
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Why Speaking More than One Language May Delay Alzheimer’s
Time: There are many ways in which speaking another language may contribute to a well-lived life. You can talk to a whole lot more of Earth's inhabitants, for one thing. You can also enjoy books, music and films in their original language, and throw a few more "skills" onto your résumé. Now add to that list the findings of new studies suggesting that speaking multiple languages may also help protect cognitive health over the long term. Read the whole story: Time
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The Stanford Marshmallow Test
The Huffington Post: I've spent my entire life on education, and several years ago while writing a chapter on education for my SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity, I stumbled across Walter Mischel's "Stanford Marshmallow Test" of 4-year-old children. You can read what happened by clicking on that link, but to quickly summarize: 1. Four-year-old children were placed in a test room having a chair, table and plate holding one marshmallow. The child is told by the tester that he would need to leave the room and will be gone for a few minutes, but if that marshmallow was still on that plate when he returned, the reward would be a second marshmallow. 2.
