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Parents, Wired to Distraction
The New York Times: Every age of parenthood — and parenthood at every age — yields some discouraging metric, some new rating system on which parents can be judged and found wanting. We endlessly jury family dinner rituals, day care and nannies, parents’ readiness to follow schedules, or to ignore the rules and follow their child’s directives. Whatever you are doing is probably wrong. Yes, you, yes, right now. Put down that cellphone and listen to me. In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers observed diners in Boston-area fast food restaurants, looking at the new family configuration of adult, child and mobile device.
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How Actors Create Emotions: A Problematic Psychology
The Atlantic: Early on in her career, Deborah Margolin realized that she was a woman nobody liked, not even herself. She was a “homely person who was pregnant all the time”—not because she enjoyed sex, according to Margolin, but because of a sense of self-loathing that led her toward the same dead end, over and over again. She was married to a man but wished that she were with a woman. Or, rather, she wished that she were a woman—a different one. She wished she were Patience or Sarah, two women whom everyone around her seemed to want. Historical-fiction buffs might recognize the name Patience and Sarah as a novel set in the 19th-century adapted for stage.
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Q&A: Designing Game-Based Assessments That Engage Students
Education Week: Game-based assessments are making it easier for teachers to more quickly evaluate students in a dizzying number of ways. Arthur C. Graesser, a University of Memphis professor of experimental and cognitive psychology and the 2011 winner of the American Psychological Association's award for distinguished contributions of applications of psychology to education and training, spoke with Technology Counts Contributing Writer Robin L. Flanigan in a telephone interview about the current and future role of game-based assessments in the classroom. Read the whole story: Education Week
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Little kid brains vs. college smarts
San Francisco Chronicle: Guess what happened when some researchers gave an unusual gadget to both preschoolers and college students and asked them to figure out how it worked. Most parents already know the answer. Yep. The preschoolers took the college students to school. In short, the 4- and 5-year-old kids were more flexible, more willing to consider unlikely possibilities to make an seemingly unpredictable machine work, according to Alison Gopnik, UC Berkeley developmental psychologist and senior author of the paper released Thursday and published online in the journal, “Cognition.” Read the whole story: San Francisco Chronicle
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There’s a case against diversity in the workplace—but the alternative is even scarier
Quartz: Companies promote diversity in the workplace as a moral imperative with “bottom line benefits.” But research on the value of diversity is mixed. Some studies have found diverse teams—meaning workgroups comprised of employees of different races, genders, and backgrounds—promote creativity, nurture critical thinking, and tend to make better, more thoughtful decisions because they consider a wider range of perspectives. Other studies indicate diverse teams fuel interpersonal conflicts, reduce cohesion, and slow the pace of learning. The trouble with past research is it assumes only diverse settings are capable of changing how people behave, form impressions, and make decisions.
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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.
