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Harry Potter and the well of medical research
The Spec: HARTFORD, CONN. Who knew the world of Harry Potter was such a rich source of material for medical researchers? For more than a decade, the stories of the phenomenally popular series have played a role in studies on everything from genetics to social cognition to autism. PubMed, an online database of medical studies, lists 30 studies that invoke the young wizard. A few examples: Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele, Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist’s (Key)stone, and Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident-Prone Children. This last study found that emergency department visits among children decreased significantly when new Harry Potter books went on sale.
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What the Stanford prison experiment taught us — and didn’t teach us — about evil
Boston Globe: Via Longreads, Stanford Magazine has a fascinating piece on the infamous Stanford prison experiment. For those who never took a psychology class, in August of 1971 a psychologist named Phil Zimbardo and his colleagues took a bunch of male college students, divided them into "guards" and "prisoners," stuck them in a fake prison on the Stanford campus, and observed their subsequent interactions.
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Anti-White Bias On The Rise?
NPR: New research shows that whites in the U.S. believe there are increases in racial bias toward them and public policies that create inequality. Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Abigail Thernstrom deems these claims as 'ridiculous,' and adds that race-based preferences will vanish when all students have leveled playing fields in schools. Host Michel speaks with Thernstrom to learn more of her opinion. Listen here: NPR
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Our Brains Have Multiple Mechanisms For Learning
One of the most important things humans do is learning this kind of pattern: when A happens, B follows. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how people learn, and finds that they use different mental processes in different situations. “There's a long history in the field of psychology of two different approaches to thinking about how we learn,” says James McClelland of Stanford University, who cowrote the paper with graduate student Daniel Sternberg. One is learning by association; Pavlov's dog learned to associate food with the sound of a bell.
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6 centimeters could win a game, or better yet a World Cup?!
Throughout this world cup, we have seen plenty of penalty kicks. After 90 minutes of play and an additional 30 minutes of overtime, the fate of each team comes down to their ability to score a goal from only 12 yards away. The penalty kick generates a variety of strong emotions in soccer (Carroll, Ebrahim, Tilling, Macleod, & Smith, 2002), and places the goalkeeper at such a disadvantage that only approximately 18% of penalty kicks are saved (Kropp & Trapp, 1999).
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Rooney take note! Goalies dive to the RIGHT in penalty shootouts if their team is behind
Daily Mail: It's news that could have proved useful to footballers Stuart Pearce, Gareth Southgate and Jamie Carragher - goalkeepers under pressure are more likely to dive to the right. The England players all missed crucial penalties in international matches trying to slot the ball in the left side of the goal, leading commentators to bemoan the country's poor record in shoot-outs. Now scientists from the University of Amsterdam have made a promising finding after examining every penalty shoot-out in every World Cup from 1982 to 2010. Read the whole story: Daily Mail
