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Baby’s Gaze May Signal Autism, a Study Finds
The New York Times: When and how long a baby looks at other people’s eyes offers the earliest behavioral sign to date of whether a child is likely to develop autism, scientists are reporting. In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that children who were found to have autism at age 3 looked less at people’s eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism. But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged in the next few months and autism experts said that might suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.
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Could Hunger Make Us More Charitable?
NPR: Hunger can make people emotional, that's for sure. Some people get "hangry" when their blood sugar levels drop and their irritability rises. Others get greedy. But new research suggests that we may have another, innate response to hunger: a desire to encourage others to share what they have. Researchers Lene Aarøe and Michael Bang Petersen, both in the department of political science and government at Aarhus University in Denmark, wanted to explore the possibility that we are evolutionarily wired to want to share food. Their logic?
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‘If You Get Too Cold, I’ll Tax The Heat’
The Huffington Post: Nobody likes the taxman. Even those who in principle believe in spreading the wealth -- even they get a twinge of fear at the mention of the IRS, April 15th and -- worst of all -- the dreaded audit. Don't deny it. That's because the IRS has been pretty heavy-handed over the years, relying on the threat of audits and liens and seizures and harsh fines to scare citizens into compliance. These punitive tactics are based on classical economic theory, which says that we are all essentially self-interested, motivated only by the drive to maximize our own financial interests. Without such deterrents, according to this reasoning, there would be rampant cheating. ...
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Inside the Cheater’s Mind
The New Yorker: A few years ago, acting on a tip, school administrators at Great Neck North High School, a prominent, academically competitive public school in Long Island, took a closer look at students’ standardized test scores. Some of them seemed suspiciously high. What’s more, some of the high scorers had registered to take the test well outside their home district. When the Educational Testing Service conducted a handwriting analysis on the suspect exams, they concluded that the same person had taken multiple tests, registering each time under a different name. In November, 2011, twenty students from schools in Nassau County were arrested and accused of cheating.
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Study: Gun Violence on the Rise in PG-13 Films
The Wall Street Journal: A new study concludes that gun violence in PG-13 movies has more than tripled since 1985, and now exceeds the level found in R-rated films. Study co-author and Ohio State Professor of Psychology Brad Bushman discusses his findings. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Liberals Aren’t Like the Rest, or So They Think
Liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their ideology, while conservatives tend to overestimate intra-group agreement, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These findings may help to explain differences in how political groups and movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, gain traction on the national stage: “The Tea Party movement developed a succinct set of goals in its incipient stages and effectively mobilized its members toward large-scale social change quite quickly,” says psychological scientist Chadly Stern of New York University.
