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OPRE Grant Announcement: Family Strengthening Scholars
The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services has recently published a discretionary research funding announcement. The full announcement for “Family Strengthening Scholars” is available online at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/grants/open/foa/view/HHS-2015-ACF-OPRE-PD-0977. OPRE intends to award up to three grants to support dissertation research on healthy marriage/responsible fatherhood policy issues (HMRF).
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Students’ Family Income Linked With Brain Anatomy, Academic Achievement
Many years of research have shown that for students from lower-income families, standardized test scores and other measures of academic success tend to lag behind those of wealthier students. A new study led by researchers at MIT and Harvard University offers another dimension to this so-called “achievement gap”: After imaging the brains of high- and low-income students, they found that the higher-income students had thicker brain cortex in areas associated with visual perception and knowledge accumulation. Furthermore, these differences also correlated with one measure of academic achievement — performance on standardized tests.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face Ferran Pons, Laura Bosch, and David J. Lewkowicz Children who grow up in a bilingual environment have the task of learning two languages rather than just one. What processes might help children during the dual-language acquisition process? Four-, 8-, and 12-month-old infants, either Spanish monolingual or Catalan monolingual (Experiment 1) or Spanish-Catalan bilingual (Experiment 2) watched a video of a woman speaking in their dominant native language or in a non-native language.
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Recognizing Without Seeing
Facial expressions and body language are among the most powerful forms of nonverbal communication, and can reveal a great deal about emotion. Beatrice de Gelder investigates the neuroscience of automatic, nonconscious responses we have to the unspoken, emotional cues we observe in others. De Gelder pioneered the neuroscience of body language and has conducted innovative studies in a number of areas, including face recognition and emotional body expressions. In a landmark experiment, she and her colleagues showed that, when exposed to pictures of faces showing strong emotions, people with visual impairment make the same involuntary facial movements as people with normal sight.
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Almost Like Being There: Photos From the Inaugural ICPS
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A Sniff of Happiness: Chemicals in Sweat May Convey Positive Emotion
Humans may communicate positive emotions like happiness through the smell of our sweat.
