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America Goes About Juvenile Crime Sentencing All Wrong
“I helped a so-called friend commit armed robbery and murder back in 1994,” explained Ming Ho, a Michigan prison inmate who first wrote me in 2015 upon spotting a math error in one of my textbooks. Two decades earlier, as a 10th grader, Ho shot someone in an armed robbery and then two weeks later, under the influence of an older peer, brutally shot and killed a 19-year-old Subway restaurant employee. “I experienced great remorse and regret over the tragedy that I ashamedly participated in,” Ho explained. “But I salvage this experience by learning and growing from it. I want my life to mean something to someone. To contribute something, anything of substance and worth.” ...
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People Blame and Judge Parents for Children’s Heavier Weights
The big idea Americans stigmatize parents of heavier children, specifically blaming them for their children’s weights, according to experiments conducted by our team of psychologists. The more a person views parents as responsible for a child’s excess weight, the more likely they are to view such parents as bad parents who are lazy, overindulgent and incompetent. Our findings corroborate what parents of children with higher weights have reported for years: that other people – friends, other parents, strangers or even their pediatricians – might blame them, dislike them and think they are poor parents. ...
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How Creepy Dolls Like M3GAN Became a Horror Phenomenon
... “Most of the early scary doll movies primarily involved ventriloquist dummies,” says James Kendrick, an associate professor of film and digital media at Baylor University who’s an expert on horror. “The whole concept of a ventriloquist dummy is that it seems to have a life of its own. They move, they talk seemingly of their own accord. Although we know it’s all a performance by the ventriloquist, they’re ready-made to break free of that and become their own entity and have their own malevolent agenda.” ...
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Laughter Really Is Contagious — And That’s Good
My three young daughters like to watch pets doing silly things. Almost daily, they ask to see animal video clips on my phone and are quickly entertained. But once my 7-year-old lets out a belly laugh, the laughter floodgates are opened and her two sisters double over as well. This is just what science would predict. “Laughter is a social phenomenon,” says Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London who has studied laughter and other human reactions for more than two decades. Scott co-wrote a study showing how the brain responds to the sound of laughter by preparing one’s facial muscles to join in, laying the foundation for laughs to spread from person to person.
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Events Serve as “Stepping Stones” en Route to Retrieved Memories
Research suggests that people use event boundaries as “stepping stones” to scan their memories when attempting to recall certain facts or bits of information.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on psychosocial predictors of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, early-warning signals in children, adolescents, and adults, bidirectional effects in parent, peer, and romantic relationships, and much more.
