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Study: Children Internalize Stereotypes About Abilities
Education Week: Have you ever heard a girl say she hates math because she's "no good" at it? I've heard it plenty of times, even from my own daughter who actually has an aptitude for the subject. Research has shown that children believe their ability to do certain things depends on how much natural ability they have for the task. These so-called "entity theories" can affect their performance. And now a recent study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that involved 4- to 7-year-olds suggests that children can adopt these beliefs from information they hear about their gender or certain social groups.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about new research using electrophysiological recording methods recently published in Psychological Science. Electrophysiological Examination of Embodiment in Vision and Action Jeremy Goslin, Thomas Dixon, Martin H. Fischer, Angelo Cangelosi, and Rob Ellis This study examined the link between the visual properties of objects and the motor actions associated with those objects. Participants viewed objects with handles facing leftward or rightward and answered questions about the objects by pressing buttons with their left or right hand. In some cases, the button push corresponded with the direction of the handle (congruent), and in other cases it did not (incongruent).
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This column will change your life: the mind-body connection
The Guardian: In the 1988 comedy Big, you may recall, a 12-year-old boy is transported into the body of Tom Hanks – a nightmarish twist on Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist gets off comparatively lightly by being transported into the body of a giant beetle. Neither story's believable, of course, but as the psychologist Paul Bloom points out, what's interesting is that they don't strike us as meaningless, either: on some level, we can imagine how it might feel to wake up in another body. That's because most of us are what philosophers call "dualists": intuitively, we think of mind and body as two different entities, neither reducible to the other.
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Erst abschalten, dann aufdrehen (Turn off first, then turn on)
Suddeutsche Zeitung: Alles ist zu viel. Immer. Die Stapel auf dem Schreibtisch wachsen stetig in die Höhe, werden umsortiert, hin und her geschoben und erinnern den Büromenschen doch nur ans tägliche Scheitern. Wieder die eigenen Ansprüche verfehlt, wieder nicht alle Mails beantwortet. Nach Dienstschluss fällt dann zwar die Bürotür ins Schloss, doch die Arbeit begleitet viele Menschen nach Hause und ins Privatleben. Das E-Mail-Postfach lässt sich auch auf dem Smartphone checken, während die Kinder die Zähne putzen. Am Projekt lässt sich auch am Wochenende feilen.
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If We Feel Too Busy, It’s Probably Due to Having Too Much Free Time
Scientific American: Objectively time is constant. A minute is a minute. But when we have a lot to do, it usually feels like we have less time. Now a study finds an interesting wrinkle in time: when we busy ourselves with selfless tasks, time seems to expand. The work will be published the journal Psychological Science. Researchers interrupted more than 200 students in class and asked them to complete different five-minute tasks. Some had to cross out the letter “e” in pages of text. Others wrote a letter to a sick child. When surveyed afterward, the group that wrote letters perceived themselves to have more time in general than those who did the crossing out.
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Hitting Your Kids Increases Their Risk of Mental Illness
TIME: What if we, as a society, could cut down on the incidence of mental illness by backing away from hitting, grabbing or pushing our children? That’s a prospect raised by a new study in Pediatrics, which finds that harsh physical punishment increases the risk of mental disorders — even when the punishment doesn’t stoop to the level of actual abuse. What qualifies as appropriate punishment is a hot-button topic among parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes corporal punishment, but studies have shown that up to 80% of parents report that they rely on it to some extent.
