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25th APS Annual Convention
The 25th APS Annual Convention will take place at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, D.C., USA, May 23-26, 2013. The Call for Submissions is open through January 31. For additional information please visit: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/convention
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Scientific Inquiry Among the Preschool Set
The New York Times: When engaged in what looks like child’s play, preschoolers are actually behaving like scientists, according to a new report in the journal Science: forming hypotheses, running experiments, calculating probabilities and deciphering causal relationships about the world. The report’s author, Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says she based it on more than 10 years’ worth of research and studies, including some of her own. In one study, for example, an experimenter performed five different sequences of three actions each, as a 4-year-old looked on. The sequences would either activate a toy or fail to activate it.
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Is Juvenile Delinquency a Failure of Imagination?
The Huffington Post: The 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle was not great filmmaking, but it does endure as a historical curiosity. Even before a word of dialogue is spoken, the movie's scrolling introduction makes clear that this is not just storytelling, but an earnest public service announcement: "Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency," it declares, " -- its causes -- and its effects." And indeed the nation was concerned with juvenile delinquency in the '50s. Obsessed, really. Blackboard Jungle captured society's fear of an entire generation of post-World War II teenagers, who were perceived as disrespectful, alienated, reckless, and most of all dangerous.
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Going With Your Gut
The Wall Street Journal: Eyewitness identification of criminals is often mistaken, but a new, rapid-fire technique for asking people to finger culprits appears to improve accuracy, a study from Australia shows. Subjects saw short films of a crime, or of a more mundane event that, they were later told, involved a suspect in a nearby offense. Then the participants looked at photos for just three seconds each. They were asked to rate their confidence in the guilt of each person portrayed by using an 11-point scale—ranging from absolute certainty that they had fingered the culprit to absolute confidence that it was the wrong person. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Intelligenz und Erbgut (Intelligence and Genes)
Süeddeutsche Zeitung: Die Bedeutung einzelner Genabschnitte für den IQ wird überschätzt Wie erblich ist Intelligenz? Diese Frage treibt Wissenschaftler seit vielen Jahrzehnten um. Zuletzt tauchten oft simple Antworten auf diese komplexe Frage auf. Dieser oder jener Baustein im Genom eines Menschen übe einen starken Einfluss auf dessen generelle Intelligenz aus, heißt es in einzelnen Studien. Ein internationales Team von Psychologen um Christopher Chabris vom New Yorker Union College weist diese Aussagen nun zurück. Die Forscher überprüften die Auswirkungen von zwölf DNA-Bausteinen auf den IQ, die in Studien bislang als relevant galten.
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Investigadores completan una definición precisa sobre el aburrimiento (a precise definition of boredom)
ABC España: Investigadores canadienses han conseguido un nuevo estudio que revela con mayor precisión el proceso mental que produce el aburrimeinto. Según una nota de prensa de la Universidad de Guelph, muchas personas ven el aburrimiento como una cuestión trivial y temporal, pero en realidad está vinculado con problemas psicológicos, sociales y de salud. Esto lo explica el profesor de psicología Mark Fense, uno de los autores principales del estudio Perspectives on Psychological Science publicado por la Asociación para las ciencias de la psicología. El aburrimiento en el trabajo puede conducir a graves accidemtes.
