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Music, Multivitamins And Other Modern Intelligence Myths
NPR: Playing Mozart to young children will make them smarter, right? Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence. The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion.
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How Disasters and Trauma Can Affect Children’s Empathy
TIME: Do children become more kind and empathetic after a disaster— or does the experience make them more focus more on self-preservation? The first study to examine the question in an experimental way shows that children’s reactions may depend on their age. ... “Our study demonstrates that a natural disaster affects children’s pro-social tendencies, and [does so] differently depending on their age,” says study co-author Jean Decety of the University of Chicago.
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In Hard Times, an Instinct to Pack on Pounds
The Wall Street Journal: When times are tough, people make like bears getting ready to hibernate: they eat more and prefer higher calorie foods. That’s the implication of a new paper reporting that, in an experiment involving M&Ms, people faced with messages about hard times ate way more than people surrounded by neutral messages. The paper actually describes three experiments exploring how humans adjust their eating when unconsciously “primed” with words such as adversity, struggle and survival. Researchers found that the perception of hard times prompts people to live more for the moment, let tomorrow take care of itself, and stoke up against an uncertain future.
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Lance Armstrong’s lies not so different from our own
The Washington Post: Lance Armstrong may have been branded liar and cheat of the month, but experts say he’s not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to believe. Lying, they say, is part of the human condition, something most people do every day. And that’s reflected in the cavalcade of celebrities cowed into confession after their deceptions were exposed — from Richard Nixon’s denial of the Watergate break-in to Bill Clinton’s denial of an affair with an intern, from drug-abusing baseball players to fraudulent Wall Street executives.
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Diet, Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ
Supplementing children’s diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child’s intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness of each type of intervention.
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When Is it Good to Have a Few Close Friends?
The Huffington Post: Look at your life. Do you have friends? What kind of friends do you have? Have you got a few people in your life that you spend a lot of time with? Have you got a larger number of acquaintances that you see on occasion? Which is better? I often ponder this question when watching movies. In lots of movies, there is a couple at the center of the action. The husband may hang out with his buddies bowling, and later the wife has her weekly lunch with a college friend. These scenes make sense dramatically, and they fit with a cultural belief that the path to happiness lies in having close friends. How important is it for people to have a few close friends?
