-
Is Serena Williams angry or ecstatic? Context is everything in reading facial emotion, say psychologists
The Daily Mail: With her mouth is wide open, teeth bared and eyes pressed tensely shut, tennis star Serena Williams looks a picture of pure anger in this close-up photograph. Has she just lost the final of a Grand Slam? Or perhaps had to withdraw through injury? Or is she, in fact, ecstatically happy? When the image is widened out to include her body language the answer is made more clear. The pumped fist is an indicator of her happiness and, as it happens, this photograph was actually taken at the moment she defeated her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. Open.
-
Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
Miller-McCune: A just published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence. “These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.” Read the full story: Miller-McCune
-
Why Do Some People Learn Faster?
Wired: The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next.
-
Music-based program helps children develop verbal intelligence: Study
Toronto Sun: Preschool children learning to analyze information and solve problems using language-based reasoning thrive when taught using music, a new Canadian study has found. In the study, 48 children between the ages of four and six took part in computer-based, cognitive training programs that were projected onto a classroom wall. The lessons were delivered by colourful, animated cartoon characters. The children were divided into two groups: One received music-based training while the second group was given visual arts training. Both groups received two hour-long training sessions a day for four weeks, led by instructors from The Royal Conservatory in Toronto.
-
Illusory Memories Can Have Salutary Effects
“False memories tend to get a bad rap,” says developmental psychologist Mark L. Howe, of Lancaster University in England. Indeed, remembering events incorrectly or remembering events that didn’t happen can have grave consequences, such as the criminal conviction of an innocent person. “But false memories are a natural outcropping of memory in general. They must have some positive effect, too.” That argument—that memory illusions were evolutionarily adaptive and remain useful for psychological well being and problem-solving—is the subject of an intriguing paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
-
Young Children Show Improved Verbal IQ After 20 Days of Exposure to Music-Based Cognitive Training ‘Cartoons’
Canadian scientists who specialize in learning, memory and language in children have found exciting evidence that pre-schoolers can improve their verbal intelligence after only 20 days of classroom instruction using interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons. The study – conducted at York University by Dr. Sylvain Moreno, who is now with Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) – is posted online today in Psychological Science (a journal of the Association for Psychological Science), ahead of print publication in the October issue of the journal.
