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New Study Suggests we Remember the Bad Times Better than the Good
Do you remember exactly where you were when you learned of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Your answer is probably yes, and researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight. In the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Boston College psychologist, Elizabeth Kensinger and colleagues, explain when emotion is likely to reduce our memory inconsistencies.
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Back to School: Researchers Pinpoint Techniques for Better Learning
People have incredible amounts to learn throughout their lives, whether it be preparing for a test in middle school or training for a new job late in life. Given that time is often at a premium, being able to efficiently learn new information is important. One way people can learn efficiently is to accurately evaluate their learning and decide how to proceed. For example, if you were studying for a final exam, you could most efficiently use your time if you were able to accurately judge between those concepts that you have learned and understood well versus those that you have not learned well. In doing so, you can invest your time on the latter.
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Baby Talk is Universal
A major function of speech is the communication of intentions. In everyday conversation between adults, intentions are conveyed through multiple channels, including the syntax and semantics of the language, but also through nonverbal vocal cues such as pitch, loudness, and rate of speech. The same thing occurs when we talk to infants. Regardless of the language we speak, most adults, for example, raise their voices to elicit the infant’s attention and talk at a much slower rate to communicate effectively. In the scientific community, this baby talk is termed “infant-directed speech.” There are direct relationships between the way we speak and what we wish to convey.
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Loneliness is Bad for Your Health
Psychologica scientists are disentangling social isolation, loneliness, and the physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the cellular level.
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New Study Shows That Infants Have “Mind-Reading” Capability
One of the unique characteristics of humans that distinguish us from the animal kingdom is the ability to represent others’ beliefs in our own minds. This sort of intuitive mind-reading, according to experts, lays the cognitive foundations of interpersonal understanding and communication. Despite its importance, scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how this psychological function develops. Some argue that this complex and flexible ability is acquired at the age of 3-4 years and only after prerequisites such as language grammar are fulfilled. Others suggest specialized developmental mechanisms are in place at birth, allowing infants to refine this ability very early in life.
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Thinking of Things Unseen
One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is probably one you don’t think of very often — the capacity to learn based merely on what someone tells you. Think about it: new information is most often given to us about entities that aren’t present. For instance, if we are told that our neighbors’ son has died his hair purple, we update our mental image of him to accommodate this newly acquired information. What is unknown, however, is when we become capable of revising our mental representations of objects or situations based solely on what someone tells us. To answer this question, Boston University psychologist Patricia Ganea and her colleagues set up a series of experiments.
