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Behavioral Strategies More Effective Than Persuasion in Promoting Vaccination
A report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest identifies the most effective ways to increase vaccination rates.
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People Start Caring About Their Reputations In Kindergarten
In today’s social-media-dominated culture, adults spend a lot of time crafting and curating their reputations, virtually and offline. New research suggests that children do the same thing in real life, too — potentially as early as age 5. “Up until pretty recently, the consensus view in psychology was that these kind of social calculations were too complex for young children to engage in,” says Ike Silver, a marketing doctoral student at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored a new review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences with Alex Shaw, an assistant professor of developmental psychology at the University of Chicago.
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Crickets And Cannibals: Unpacking The Complicated Emotion Of Disgust
It's 3 a.m. You wake up abruptly with a bad case of dry mouth. You drag yourself out of bed and begin fumbling in the dark to get a glass of water. You flip on the light switch, and there it is — a brown flash. A cockroach skitters across the counter. Did reading this disgust you? It may seem instinctive to recoil in horror after seeing a roach in your kitchen. But psychologist Rachel Herz argues that it's not. "Disgust is the instinct that has to be learned," she says. "Young children are not very good at recognizing disgust faces.
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Kids Draw Female Scientists More Often Than They Did Decades Ago
When asked to draw a scientist, children often reproduce common stereotypes about who scientists are and what they do. However, new research, which I led, shows that these stereotypes have changed over time, at least within the United States. My study, which was published March 20 in Child Development, finds that U.S. children now draw female scientists more often than ever before. In the 1960s and 1970s, one landmark study asked nearly 5,000 elementary school children to draw a scientist. Their artwork almost exclusively depicted men, often with lab coats, working indoors with lab equipment. Of those nearly 5,000 drawings, only 28 depicted a female scientist, which were all drawn by girls.
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Mindfulness meditation is huge, but science isn’t sure how, or whether, it works
Meditation: It’s celebrated as a therapeutic tool to help ease stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and chronic pain. It’s come into vogue as a way to enhance human performance, finding its way into classrooms, businesses, locker rooms and smartphones through apps such as Headspace and Calm. Various forms of meditation are now routinely offered to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. In particular, mindfulness meditation, which focuses one’s attention on the present moment, is wildly popular and has ballooned into a billion-dollar business, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
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Crash Risks May Spike Immediately After a Near Miss
The short period of time after narrowly averting a vehicular accident is a vulnerable one for drivers, especially in city driving.
