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Toddler TV Time Not to Blame for Attention Problems
It’s a common belief that exposure to television in toddlerhood causes attention-deficit problems in school-age children—a claim that was born from the results of a 2004 study that seemed to show a link between the two. However, a further look at the evidence suggests this is not true.
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Out of the Box and Into the Lab, Mimes Help Us ‘See’ Objects That Don’t Exist
Our minds can automatically create well-defined representations of objects that are merely implied rather than seen, like the obstacles in a mime’s performance
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Out of the Box and Into the Lab, Mimes Help Us ‘See’ Objects That Don’t Exist
Chaz Firestone (Johns Hopkins University) and Pat Little (New York University) talk with Charles Blue about their Psychological Science paper on mimes and implied surface.
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Ew, Gross! Why Humans Are Hardwired To Feel Disgust.
In the late 1860s, Charles Darwin proposed that being grossed out could have an evolutionary purpose. Disgust, he wrote, was inborn and involuntary, and it evolved to prevent our ancestors from eating spoiled food that might kill them. Darwin hypothesized that the early humans most prone to revulsion survived to pass on their genes, while the more nutritionally daring died off. For many years afterward, though, scientists didn’t pay much attention to disgust. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, a decade when gameshows eagerly slimed contestants, that disgust garnered more attention in psychological and behavioral research.
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World Happiness Report is Out, With a Surprising Picture of Global Resilience
In a conclusion that even surprised its editors, the 2021 World Happiness Report found that, amid global hardship, self-reported life satisfaction across 95 countries on average remained steady in 2020 from the previous year. The United States saw the same trend — despite societal tumult that yielded a national drop in positive emotions and a rise in negative ones. The country fell one spot, to 19th, in the annual rankings of the report, which was released Saturday. The report is good news regarding global resilience, experts say. ...
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Rosalind Cartwright, Psychologist and ‘Queen of Dreams,’ Dies at 98
In 1999, Rosalind D. Cartwright, a renowned sleep researcher, testified for the defense in the murder trial of a man who arose from his bed early one night, gathered up tools to fix his pool’s filter pump, stabbed his beloved wife to death, rolled her into the pool and went back to bed. When he was awakened by the police, he said he had no memory of his actions. His lawyers argued that the man, who had no motive to kill his wife, had been sleepwalking and was therefore in an unconscious state and not responsible for his behavior. Dr. Cartwright, who had successfully served as a witness for the defense in a similar case a decade earlier (working pro bono in both trials), agreed.
