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How Hashtags, Texts, and Tweets Are Influencing Digital Language
Science Friday: Have texting and tweeting killed the period? Are hashtags and emoji becoming a new form of online punctuation? It seems digital communication, like all other types of language, has its own evolving rules. Psychologist Celia Klin tells us why a period in a text can convey a different emotion compared to a written messages. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch takes us through the different meanings of this, THIS, and #this, and how punctuation, syntax, and hashtags are being used to create a digital tone of voice. Read the whole story: Science Friday
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Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Steven Pinker is about as close as you can come to being an academic celebrity. The Harvard professor of psychology has written seven books for a general readership in addition to his scholarly work, which is wide-ranging. Pinker frequently writes about language for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic, and also tackles subjects such as education, morality, politics, bioethics, and violence. ... Since many people are under the misconception that you have to write badly in academia to be taken seriously, I’ll just mention some renowned scholars in my own field whom I read as an undergraduate and who were sparkling prose stylists.
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Going the Distance: Babies Reach Farther With Adults Around
Eight-month-old infants are much more likely to reach towards distant toys when an adult is present than when they are by themselves, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds understand when they need another person’s help to accomplish a task and act accordingly.
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Will Sanders Supporters Come Around?
The New York Times: Looming over the Democratic National Convention this week was the threat of party division. Will the rift between Hillary Clinton’s supporters and Bernie Sanders’s supporters be mended? Or will there be a failure to reconcile, imperiling the effort to defeat Donald J. Trump in the presidential election? We are not political analysts. But as psychologists, we believe the science of intergroup dynamics offers Democrats reasons for optimism. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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The Lie That Many People Who Eat Meat Tell Themselves
New York Magazine: If you ask a meat eater, “Which meat is okay to eat, and why?” most people will at least attempt to form a coherent answer couched in moral language. They’ll attempt to defend their own decisions, in other words, on some rational basis. But as we know from piles and piles of research into moral psychology, people hold many moral beliefs not for rational, easy-to-explain reasons, but rather for gut-level, intuitive, hard-to-explain ones. When it comes to our morality, we are frequently post-facto rationalizers. ...
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Baby boomers are taking on ageism — and losing
The Washington Post: By and large, Dale Kleber had a pretty straightforward trip up the economic ladder. He went to law school and worked his way up to general counsel of a major food distributor in Chicago and then chief executive of a dairy trade organization. He is putting his third and fourth kids through private college. “Our generation was pretty spoiled,” says Kleber, 60. “We had it good. The economy was in a huge growth spurt. Some dips here and there, but nothing severe.” But a couple of years ago, Kleber hit a roadblock. He’d left the dairy group and started looking for another job; he and his wife didn’t have quite enough saved to retire comfortably.
