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Blood Test at Birth Could Predict Children’s Psychological Development
Babies born with high levels of bad cholesterol and a certain type of fat may face a heightened risk for social and psychological problems in childhood, scientists have found.
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Do We Really Learn From Our Mistakes?
Contrary to conventional wisdom, people may learn less from their failures than from their successes, a study shows.
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Time Pressure Can Squeeze the Truth
The idea that we have two minds, an authentic inner core and a false outer layer, is as ancient as Plato and as current as the new hit movie “Joker. ” If our real identities are packed away, hidden even from ourselves, we seldom reveal what we really think and instead cultivate appearances—or so many psychologists believe. According to this view, the best way to get people to tell the truth is by eliciting lightning-quick responses, before they can reflect and dissemble. But this may not be so, says a study published last month in the journal Psychological Science. It found that people are more likely to lie about themselves when under time pressure.
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Women-Only Spaces Provide A Recipe For Success: Here Are The Ingredients
“You can’t be what you don’t see,” said Marian Wright Edelman, civil rights activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. This quote speaks volumes to a question I often get asked as president of Barnard College, an institution devoted to educating and empowering young women: “Are women-only institutions the only way to go?” My answer may surprise you, because it’s no.
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Why Intentionally Building Empathy Is More Important Now Than Ever
Many people believe that life is a zero-sum game and that the most ruthless people get the furthest. But Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychologist and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, says there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. “It turns out that nice guys finish first in lots of different ways,” Zaki said on KQED’s Forum program. And, when people are nice, they not only help others, but they help themselves as well. Empathetic people are generally happier, healthier and more effective at work. And, acting from a place of empathy, he argues, could be just what the world needs at this moment, when division has become the norm.
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Babies understand a fundamental aspect of counting long before they can say numbers out loud, according to researchers
When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Jinjing Jenny Wang kept wondering: How do children learn to count? It’s so basic, “but when you think about the problem, it is really difficult,” she said. “There is no number in this world we can see and touch. There’s no ‘three-ness’ in the world that is perceivable.” Linguists, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over this, Wang said. She knew decades of research had established that children typically don’t fully understand numbers until they are preschoolers, but she wondered what they knew before then. “How do they know these words are associated with numbers — or quantities in the world?” she asked.
