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Social Feedback Loop Aids Language Development
Verbal interactions between parents and children create a social feedback loop important for language development, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. That loop appears to be experienced less frequently and is diminished in strength in interactions with autistic children. “This loop likely has cascading impacts over the course of a child’s development,” says psychological scientist and study author Anne S. Warlaumont of the University of California, Merced.
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Reducing Anxiety With a Smartphone App
Playing a science-based mobile gaming app for 25 minutes can reduce anxiety in stressed individuals, according to research published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study suggests that “gamifying” a scientifically-supported intervention could offer measurable mental health and behavioral benefits for people with relatively high levels of anxiety. “Millions of people suffering from psychological distress fail to seek or receive mental health services.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Children's Arithmetic Development: It Is Number Knowledge, Not the Approximate Number Sense, That Counts Silke M. Göbel, Sarah E. Watson, Arne Lervåg, and Charles Hulme To examine whether approximate number sense and knowledge of the Arabic numeral system influence future arithmetic ability, children were assessed for nonverbal ability, vocabulary, number-identification skill, letter-comparison ability, magnitude-comparison ability, and arithmetic skill at age 6 and again for magnitude-comparison ability and arithmetic skill 11 months later.
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Gesturing With Hands Is a Powerful Tool for Children’s Math Learning
Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn. This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.
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Young Children Form First Impressions From Faces
Just like adults, children as young as 3 tend to judge an individual’s character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence, simply by looking at the person’s face, new research shows. And they show remarkable consensus in the judgments they make, the findings suggest. The research, led by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, shows that the predisposition to judge others based on physical features starts early in childhood and does not require years of social experience. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking Michael S. Vendetti, Aaron Wu, and Keith J. Holyoak The authors examined whether inducing a general mindset using a verbal-analogy task would promote more abstract thinking on a subsequent unrelated reasoning task. Participants solved analogies with near or far semantic relations, either by indicating whether the analogy was valid or invalid or by generating a valid completion for an incomplete analogy. Participants then completed a picture-mapping task that used unrelated materials.
