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The Psychology of Success: Helping Students Achieve (Op-Ed) –
LiveScience: Timothy Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of "Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change" (Little, Brown and Co., 2011) and he contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Scientific practice is under intense scrutiny these days, including in research psychology. Due to some high-profile cases of scientific fraud, and concern by some about shoddy research practices, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on. This is ironic, because this should be a time for hand clapping, not hand-wringing.
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The Psychology of Exile
When I was in middle school, one of the assigned readings was a story called “The Man Without a Country.” It was written by Edward Everett Hale in 1863, and told the story of a young American army lieutenant, Philip Nolan, who is tried for treason along with Aaron Burr. During the trial, he angrily denounces his country, declaring his wish to never hear mention of the United States again, and the shocked judge complies: He sentences Nolan to spend the rest of his life in exile, aboard U.S. warships, where he will hear no word of life in America. I found this story very sad at the time, and still do.
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Inner Speech Speaks Volumes About the Brain
Whether you’re reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you’re hearing yourself speak even if you’re not saying words out loud. This internal speech -- the monologue you “hear” inside your head -- is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound.
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Homeownership, the Key to Happiness?
The New York Times: If trying to buy an apartment in New York City has been making you miserable, consider this: actually getting that home may not make you happy.
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Hearing What We Read
Psychological scientists have discovered new evidence of what goes on in the brain when people read printed words. The scientists, led by Maria Dimitropoulou of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, in Donostia, Spain, used Greek and Spanish, two languages with common phonemes and partially overlapping graphemes, to investigate how knowledge about the relationship between written language and sound influences our ability to recognize words. The study was published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In two experiments, the scientists used the masked priming paradigm, a method used to study visual word recognition.
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What is talent – and can science spot what we will be best at?
The Guardian: My interest in the science of talent has a personal backstory. By the age of three, I'd had 21 ear infections and after an operation to remove fluid from my ears, it took me an extra step to process speech. To help me catch up with my peers, I was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder. I repeated third grade. I was sent to a special school for children with learning disabilities. I was fed a steady stream of low expectations. One day, when I was 14, everything changed. A new teacher took me aside and asked me why I was still in special education. With no prior expectations – seeing only the child in front of her – she took notice of my boredom and frustration.
