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What I’m Reading: Article on Improving Students’ Learning
The Chronicle of Higher Education: We have all had the experience of giving a test that a significant number of students did poorly on, and then getting blowback from those students because they had "worked hard." I have never doubted that students do work hard, but lately I’ve started to wonder if their study techniques are actually effective. A 2013 article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, by John Dunlosky and four co-authors, analyzes the effect of both the common study techniques used by students, and techniques that were developed and evaluated through cognitive and educational psychology research. Read the whole story: The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Why Driving Lessons Should Go Green
A promising new study shows that a simple behavioral intervention for bus drivers may go a long way towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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Don’t beat yourself up
aeon: Human beings are the only creatures who can make themselves miserable. Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through self-views, judgments, expectations, regrets and comparisons with others. Because self-thought plays such a central role in human happiness and wellbeing, psychologists have devoted a good deal of attention to understanding how people think about themselves. For many years, the experts have focused on self-esteem.
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How in Touch Are You With America on Gun Control?
TIME: The Senate rejected a handful of gun control measures Monday in the wake of the horrific mass shooting in Orlando that left 49 victims dead and another 53 wounded–joining a reinvigorated debate over access to guns in America. But even as such shootings are happening with increasing regularity, public opinion has remained fairly unchanged on issues such as whether gun ownership increases the owners’ risk of death.
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Even Small Children Are Less Helpful after Touching Money
Scientific American: Merely touching money has the power to alter our behavior. Money makes us more selfish, less helpful, and less generous towards others. One experiment, for example, had a pedestrian drop a bus pass in front of people who had just gotten money out of a cash machine or merely walked past the machine. People who had gotten money out of the cash machine were less likely to alert the woman that she had dropped her pass. While money can hamper helpfulness, it also confers psychological advances in the form of making people more persistent and more successful at solving challenging problems. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Workaholism Tied to Several Psychiatric Disorders
The Oxford English Dictionary credits the psychologist and theologian Wayne E. Oates with coining the term “workaholic.” As Oates outlined in a 1971 book on the subject, “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly” can take on obsessive qualities similar to those of an addiction-related disorder. A large new study provides evidence that workaholism, along with harming wellbeing and health, also frequently co-occurs with clinical disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, and depression.
