On the Newsstand

For Lonely Hearts, One Can Be an Unhealthy Number
USA Today
September 26, 2007
“‘There’s evidence that lonely people don’t cope well,’ says Louise Hawkley, a researcher at the University of Chicago. Hawkley and her colleague John Cacioppo, also of the University of Chicago, analyzed data from several studies and put them together in an article that appears in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Their studies show that lonely people tend to react more intensely to life’s problems, such as a financial setback; they’re more likely to feel threatened by a difficult situation and less likely to seek help or solace from a friend or family member.”
— Coverage of “Aging and Loneliness: Downhill Quickly?” in the August 2007 Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Nurture Strikes Back
The Economist
September 6, 2007
“Writing in Psychological Science, a team led by Ian Spence of the University of Toronto describes a test performed on people’s ability to spot unusual objects that appear in their field of vision. They asked some of their volunteers to spend ten hours playing an action-packed, shoot-’em-up video game, called ‘Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault.’ The improvement in the women was greater than the improvement in the men — so much so that there was no longer a significant difference between the two. Moreover, that absence of difference was long-lived.”
— Coverage of “Playing an Action Video Games Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition,” in the October 2007 Psychological Science.

Baby Talk Crosses Cultural Line
The New York Times
August 28, 2007
“The report appears in the August issue of Psychological Science. ‘This is the first empirical demonstration that in a nonliterate, nonindustrialized indigenous culture, people are able to recognize meaning in a language they don’t speak,’ said Gregory A. Bryant, a co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘There is variability across cultures in how much people talk to babies, but when they do, they tend to sound very much alike.’”
—  Coverage of “Recognizing Intentions in Infant-Directed Speech: Evidence for Universals” in the August 2007 Psychological Science.

SAT Exam, Taken at Age 13, Can Predict Career Path of Gifted
Bloomberg.com
September 7, 2007
“The scores that gifted 13-year-olds earn on SAT college admissions tests may predict career paths, according to a Vanderbilt University study that may help shape curriculums for the brightest U.S. students. Exceptional 13-year-olds who did best on the SAT’s math portion tended to excel later in science, engineering and technology, according to the study published online today in the journal Psychological Science. Those strongest on the verbal portion of the test favored art, history and other humanities.”
— Coverage of “Contrasting Intellectual Patterns Predicts Creativity in the Arts and Science” in the November 2007 Psychological Science.