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College Costs: Would Tuition Discounts Get More Students to Major in Science?
TIME: How much money would it take to get an English major to switch to engineering? Would a $1,000 discount on tuition every year do the trick? What about $5,000? What if switching majors not only reduced students’ debt load but also made it much more likely that they would find a job after graduation? Would that be enough to change their mind? Cheaper tuition might motivate some students to tough it out, but Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, urges schools and policymakers to proceed with caution.
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Energy Drinks Promise Edge, but Experts Say Proof Is Scant
The New York Times: Energy drinks are the fastest-growing part of the beverage industry, with sales in the United States reaching more than $10 billion in 2012 — more than Americans spent on iced tea or sports beverages like Gatorade. ... Last August, Scottish researchers reported that 1,000 milligrams of taurine taken as a supplement appeared to improve the performance of middle-distance runners. But other taurine studies have been negative or inconclusive. “We found it difficult to make any conclusions about what taurine was doing,” said a graduate researcher at Tufts University, Grace Giles, who headed a study that ran participants through a battery of mental reaction and memory tests.
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Psychological Science Is Important (video)
APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut Psychological science is important, as APS Executive Director Alan G. Kraut reminds us. By itself, psychological science produces a rich understanding of behavior. When paired with behavioral investigation, many other fields of scientific inquiry produce a richer understanding of our world. When he was APS President, John Cacioppo pointed out that an analysis of thousands of scientific journals (and literally millions of scientific articles) had identified psychological science — along with math, physics, and chemistry — as one of seven core disciplines that produces research cited widely by scientists in other fields.
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Babies’ language lessons may start inside the womb
CBC News: Newborn babies respond differently to their mother tongue as compared to foreign languages thanks to all the listening they did while in the womb, a joint study by American and Swedish researchers suggests. ... "This study moves the measurable result of experience with speech sounds from six months of age to before birth," lead author Christine Moon, a psychology professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., said in a statement. Moon described the study as the first to show that fetuses learn about these sounds prenatally.
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The Psychology of Desire Reveals How to Achieve Any New Year’s Resolution
The Huffington Post: Did Oscar Wilde give the best psychological advice on New Year's Resolutions? These usually involve redoubled, yet fruitless, efforts to resist the temptation you succumbed to last year, so in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde declared, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
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How Sherlock Holmes Can Help Bring You Success in Life and Work
The Wall Street Journal: Sherlock Holmes is the world’s most famous detective. And while he may be fictional, in that fictional world of his he also happens to be the greatest: success follows upon success, the biggest scoundrels fall under his careful scrutiny, the world bends to his will. How easy it would be for the master sleuth to rest on his laurels—or at the least, to keep taking those cases that have a familiar air, that would be more likely than not to guarantee a quick, successful outcome. But he doesn’t. In fact, he does the opposite. Consider, for instance, “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” when Holmes chooses to enmesh himself further in a case which he has ostensibly solved.
