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Is reading comprehension a hidden disability?
A team of researchers find evidence suggesting that children’s problems with reading comprehension may, at their core, be a spoken language problem.
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
U.S. News & World Report: Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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FDA’s Graphic Cigarette Images: Will They Work?
Can graphic images persuade people to make lasting changes to their behavior? The answer, according to psychological research, is probably not. Howard Leventhal, the Board of Governors Professor of Health Psychology at Rutgers, agrees that photos are in fact stronger than words, but that images may not lead to long-term behavioral effects. Leventhal states, “You don’t need a lot of threat to get something to happen as long as the threat is associated with a clear, simple plan of action.
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Ovulating women better at spotting straight men: study
CTV Canada: Women can more accurately identify a man's sexual orientation the closer she is to ovulation, according to a study released this month. The study, a joint project by the University of Toronto and Tufts University in Boston, looked at the ability of 40 undergraduate women to judge whether a man is gay or straight based on viewing a photograph of his face. In the first of three experiments, the women looked at 80 images, half of which were gay men, and were told to determine each man's sexual orientation. Read more: CTV Canada
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Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight
The New York Times: HARTFORD — Are you one of us? The patient wanted to know, and her therapist — Marsha M. Linehan of the University of Washington, creator of a treatment used worldwide for severely suicidal people — had a ready answer. It was the one she always used to cut the question short, whether a patient asked it hopefully, accusingly or knowingly, having glimpsed the macramé of faded burns, cuts and welts on Dr. Linehan’s arms: “You mean, have I suffered?” “No, Marsha,” the patient replied, in an encounter last spring. “I mean one of us. Like us. Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope.” “That did it,” said Dr.
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Memory training improves intelligence in some children, report says
Los Angeles Times: Training a child to hold a whole cluster of items in his or her memory for even a short time may feel like trying to hold a wave on the sand. But a study published Monday says it's a drill that can yield lasting benefits. Children who've had such training have better abstract reasoning and solve problems more creatively than kids who haven't, the study found. But here's a warning to parents already grooming their young children for entry into elite universities: Don't automatically rush out to enroll your young genius in brain-training summer camp or invest in DVDs promising to deliver high IQs.
