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Social-Class Discrimination Contributes to Poorer Health
Discrimination felt by teenagers based on their social class background can contribute to physiological changes associated with poorer health, according to a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Lead author Thomas Fuller-Rowell, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, says that while the link between poverty and poor health has long been known, this is one of the first studies to consider the impact of class discrimination.
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Knowledge of Fractions and Long Division Predicts Long-Term Math Success
From factory workers to Wall Street bankers, a reasonable proficiency in math is a crucial requirement for most well-paying jobs in a modern economy. Yet, over the past 30 years, mathematics achievement of U.S. high school students has remained stagnant — and significantly behind many other countries, including China, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada. A research team led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robert Siegler has identified a major source of the gap — U. S. students’ inadequate knowledge of fractions and division. Although fractions and division are taught in elementary school, even many college students have poor knowledge of them.
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New Research From Current Directions in Psychological Science
Yuko Munakata, Hannah R. Snyder, and Christopher H. Chatham When children are young, they can get stuck in routine ways of thinking and behaving. As children grow, they develop the ability to break out of routines and think more flexibly. In this article, the authors discuss how the development of abstract goal representations supports three key transitions that lead to more flexible behavior. They conclude by discussing the current and future direction of this research. The Brain's Learning and Control Architecture Jason M.
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Training People to Inhibit Movements Can Reduce Risk-Taking
New research from psychological scientists at the Universities of Exeter and Cardiff shows that people can be trained to become less impulsive, resulting in less risk-taking during gambling. The research could pave the way for new treatments for people with addictions to gambling, drugs or alcohol as well as impulse-control disorders, such as ADHD. Recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study assessed whether asking people to stop making simple movements while in a simulated gambling situation affected how risky or cautious they were when betting.
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Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters, What Works
Each year in the United States about $135 billion is spent in training employees -- but those billions do not always improve the workplace because the skills often do not transfer to the actual job. “Learning is a way of life in organizations,” says Eduardo Salas, a psychological scientist from the University of Central Florida. “Everyone gets training. But what matters? What works?
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From Karen to Katie —Using Baby Names to Understand Cultural Evolution
From Top 40 hits to baby names, styles change and fashions evolve over time. While the latest fad may seem arbitrary, new research suggests that basic psychological processes can explain why some things become popular. In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Jonah Berger, from the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues investigated whether trends in baby names could help us to understand how and why things become popular over time. “We were interested in understanding cultural evolution or whether it is possible to predict what things will become popular next,” said Berger.