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Childhood Poverty Linked With Worse Mental Health in Emerging Adulthood
About 1 in 4 children in the United States spend some or even all of their early childhood in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. What does this early exposure to poverty mean for mental health outcomes when these children enter their teens and early 20s? Psychological scientists Gary Evans and Rochelle Cassells set out to explore this question, using data from almost 200 participants involved in a longitudinal study of rural poverty, cumulative risk, and child development. As they predicted, participants who spent more time in poverty in early childhood showed signs of worse mental health in emerging adulthood.
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Liberals Aren’t Like the Rest, or So They Think
Liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their ideology, while conservatives tend to overestimate intra-group agreement, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These findings may help to explain differences in how political groups and movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, gain traction on the national stage: “The Tea Party movement developed a succinct set of goals in its incipient stages and effectively mobilized its members toward large-scale social change quite quickly,” says psychological scientist Chadly Stern of New York University.
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Teens Who Drink Alone More Likely To Develop Alcohol Problems as Young Adults
Most teenagers who drink alcohol do so with their friends in social settings, but a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh reveals that a significant number of adolescents consume alcohol while they are alone. The researchers found that, compared to their peers who drink only in social settings, teens who drink alone have more alcohol problems, are heavier drinkers, and are more likely to drink in response to negative emotions. Furthermore, solitary teenage drinkers are more likely to develop alcohol use disorders in early adulthood.
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Under Stress, We Ignore the Negative Possibilities
When people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides, studies show..
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Perspectives Reviews 25 Years of Science
The journal Perspectives on Psychological Science continues to recognize the 25th anniversary of APS by featuring a series of special sections that take a look at how the field has changed over the last 25 years. The special section in the November issue includes articles that explore a wide range of topics, including the science of well-being, the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, advances in research on autism and dyslexia, integrative approaches to understanding the brain on stress, psychological perspectives on cardiovascular diseases, the challenge of examining health disparities, and the development of parent-training programs.
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Advancing Science Through the Use of “New Statistics”
There are several steps that researchers can take to bolster the integrity of their work, but embracing the use of the “new statistics” of effect sizes, estimation, and meta-analysis is a particularly important one, argues psychological scientist Geoff Cumming of La Trobe University in Australia. As Cumming notes in a new tutorial published online in Psychological Science, the critical flaw of the traditional statistical approach – null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) – is that it disposes scientists to think of their research aims and results in black and white.
