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Study Examines What Aspects of Mental Health Are Tied to Doing Well in Math, English
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: One ongoing question in child psychology is what can help kids do better in school? For a long time, researchers have focused on happiness. The thinking goes, when kids feel happier, they tend to get better grades. But now a new study suggests that parents and schools should focus on another aspect of mental health. NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff has this report. MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE: Two years ago, Tania Clarke and her colleagues sent out a survey to teenagers asking about their well-being. She's a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. TANIA CLARKE: Our study was conducted with just over 600 adolescents aged 14 to 15 across seven schools in England.
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Tap Into the Wisdom of Your ‘Inner Crowd’
Take your best guess for the questions below. Without looking up the answers, jot down your guess in your notes app or on a piece of paper. What is the weight of the Liberty Bell? Saudi Arabia consumes what percentage of the oil it produces? What percent of the world’s population lives in China, India, and the European Union combined? Next, we want you to take a second guess at these questions. But here’s the catch, this time try answering from the perspective a friend whom you often disagree with. (For us, it’s the colleague with whom we shared an office in grad school, ever the contrarian.) How would your friend answer these questions?
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How Culture Affects the ‘Marshmallow Test’
In 2017 my family and I moved from Boulder, Colo., to live in Kyoto, Japan. My kids immediately noticed many cultural differences. Japanese homes typically do not have central heating, for one. We arrived during an unusually cold February, so my older child would curl up under the kotatsu—a low dining table with a heater affixed underneath—to get warm. After enrolling in the neighborhood elementary school, my kids saw how their peers cleaned classrooms and served food, unlike in the U.S., where specialized workers handle each task. One of their most memorable lessons occurred during their first school lunch.
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Nobody’s Fool: How to Avoid Getting Taken In
Podcast: How can our habits of thinking make us vulnerable to deception? How can we spot deception before it’s too late? Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris answer these questions and more, drawing from their new book: Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.
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Do We Actually ‘Hear’ Silence?
At a concert hall near Woodstock, N.Y., in August 1952, the pianist David Tudor played John Cage’s three-movement composition 4'33″. Doing so did not require enormous jumps with the right hand. Most people could play the piece with equal skill. Tudor set a stopwatch for 33 seconds and sat in front of the piano without touching the keys. He opened and shut the lid before sitting for another two minutes and 40 seconds and then did so again for a final interval of one minute and 20 seconds. Then he bowed and left the stage. As Cage put it, 4'33″ was a “silent piece.” The composer wanted to push the audience members to listen to the other sounds that surrounded them.
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How Money Helps to Build Brain Power
We know that children who grow up poor are much more at risk for problems later on, from mental and physical health issues to lower education levels and less income as adults. It’s one of the clearest and most worrying results in psychology. Among other things, children from low-income families are more likely to develop anxiety and depression. More recently, we’ve also discovered that low income is associated with physical changes in brain development. For example, children from low-income families tend to develop a smaller hippocampus—a part of the brain that is important for learning and memory. The big question is how we could fix this.
