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The psychology of poverty
Marketplace: Imagine this: You’re at your child’s baseball game. You’ve got a deadline coming up tomorrow and its been a hard day. You want to focus on your child’s game, but you can’t. To some, you may seem like a bad parent, but you can’t shake the fact that you have things to do. This is something we can all relate to. Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan claims that poverty has a similar effect on people’s minds. “When faced with financial scarcity, people’s minds keep coming back to concerns such as -- how will I pay rent this month,” Mullainathan said. But doesn’t this apply to everyone?
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Take Student Complaints With Caution
Education Week: How much weight should be given to student complaints about their teachers? I ask that question because the evaluation of teachers in the years ahead is expected to include input from students in addition to input from principals, peers and parents ("Seeking Aid, School Districts Change Teacher Evaluations," The New York Times, Oct. 16). I welcome the change. But I have reservations about placing inordinate reliance on student comments. Although students spend considerable face time with teachers, that doesn't necessarily mean they are able to judge their teachers fairly. Take the most familiar complaint that a teacher is boring.
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How to Raise a Little Liberal (or Conservative)
Pacific Standard: Parents: Do you find yourselves arguing with your adult children over who deserves to win the upcoming election? Does it confuse and frustrate you to realize your political viewpoints are so different? Newly published research suggests you may only have yourself to blame. Providing the best evidence yet to back up a decades-old theory, researchers writing in the journal Psychological Science report a link between a mother’s attitude toward parenting and the political ideology her child eventually adopts. In short, authoritarian parents are more prone to produce conservatives, while those who gave their kids more latitude are more likely to produce liberals.
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But How Do You Really Feel? Someday the Computer May Know
The New York Times: In a Cairo school basement, two dozen women analyze facial expressions on laptops, training the computers to recognize anger, sadness and frustration. At Cambridge University, an eerily realistic robotic head named Charles sits in a driving simulator, furrowing its brows, looking interested or confused. And in a handful of American middle school classrooms this fall, computers will monitor students’ emotions in an effort to track when they are losing interest and when they are getting excited about lessons.
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Some parents don’t know how to handle kids’ deceit
USA Today: Though children may not think they're doing anything wrong, more than one-third of 3-year-olds lie. And by the time they are 4 to 7, half of the tykes tell "non-truths." Those findings are based on research led by Victoria Talwar, an associate professor of developmental psychology at McGill University in Montreal. Truth is that lying is part of childhood development since children are learning to think independently, local experts say. But some parents don't know how to detect deceit in their children or correct it, these experts say. Read the whole story: USA Today
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Do sweeteners boost self-control?
The Boston Globe: Self-control is generally thought to be a limited resource; studies have shown that it’s depleted by exertion, like muscle power. But a team of researchers is challenging the “energy model” of self-control: In new research, they found no evidence that depletion of self-control corresponded to blood sugar levels. Even more surprising, they found that simply rinsing one’s mouth with a sugar solution negated the depletion of self-control on both physical and cognitive tasks compared to rinsing one’s mouth with an artificial-sweetener solution. This was true even though subjects didn’t actually ingest the solution and couldn’t tell exactly what was in it.
