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Mother’s Love May Keep the Doctor Away
Fox News: An extra dose of motherly nurturing insulates children from lifelong health problems associated with poverty, a new study says. The study found that people whose parents did not finish high school were 1.4 times more likely to develop a condition called metabolic syndrome by middle age than children raised by college-educated parents. Metabolic syndrome is a precursor to diabetes and heart disease. However, among people from less-educated households, those who said they had a very nurturing mother were less likely to develop metabolic syndrome, according to the study published Friday (Sept. 23) in the journal Psychological Science.
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Ig Nobel Award Winners: Do Humans Think Less Clearly When They Have To Urinate?
Huffington Post: Can a strong urge to urinate impair your ability to drive? Is yawning contagious? Will motorists stop double-parking if you threaten to flatten their cars with an armored tank? The studies of these subjects might not win you a Nobel Prize. But they might win you an Ig Nobel -- an award given to research that makes you laugh -- and may even somehow benefit society.
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Slimmer door sneller brein
Metro Nieuws: Waarom neemt de intelligentie in onze tienerjaren eigenlijk toe? Wetenschappers komen met een antwoord. In de puberteit krijgt niet alleen ons lichaam een radicale make-over, maar verandert ook ons brein. Zo hebben wetenschappers al eerder aangetoond dat adolescenten intelligenter worden, maar was tot op heden onduidelijk waarom. Het vermoeden was dat het iets te maken heeft met de mentale verwerkingssnelheid, die ook een spurt neemt tijdens de tienerjaren. En jawel: dit blijkt inderdaad te kloppen.
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Easily Embarrassed? Others Trust You More, Study Shows
LiveScience: The next time you blush after tripping over your own feet in public, don't try to hide it — a new study finds that showing your embarrassment actually makes other people view you as more trustworthy. "Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources," study researcher Robb Willer, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
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Doubts raised over dyslexia diagnoses
The Telegraph: Dyslexia is defined as reading achievement "substantially below that expected" for a person's age, intelligence and education level, according to a widely used guide, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Consequently 'dyslexics' - poor readers with an average or high IQ - have tended to be treated differently from those who are consistently bottom of the class. The basis for this approach has been the assumption that something particular impedes the brains of dyslexics, specifically their reading and writing ability.
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Rich less empathetic than poor, study says
Deseret News: Rich people are less empathetic, less altruistic and more selfish than those of the lower classes, according to new research from University of California at Berkeley and at San Francisco. In an article published by the Association for Psychological Science, co-authors Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Dacher Keltner and Paul K. Piff of the UC-Berkely found people from lower classes were better at reading other people's emotions, which is one scientific measure of empathy. If you can't recognize what someone is going through, they argue, it's hard to respond to their needs.
