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You’re Lying to Yourself About How Good Your Future Will Be
Smithsonian Magazine: In the long run, we all can look forward to pretty bleak futures. Whether the final ‘game over’ arrives in the form of a car wreck, a terminal illness, a heart attack or just old age in the end we all meet our end. Yet many of us look forward to happy futures, both on the short and long term. According to new research published in the journal Psychological Science, our ability to remain optimistic despite all the bad things that could and likely will happen to us hinges upon our tendency to assume those calamities will befall others, not ourselves. Read the whole story: Smithsonian Magazine
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To Attract More Girls to STEM, Bring More Storytelling to Science
Scientific American: Women and girls are historically underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields and much has been written lately about why girls in school seem disinterested in these areas. As STEM becomes more important in our increasingly interconnected global society, it becomes even more imperative that educators find ways to encourage girls to participate in these fields. A few weeks ago, researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Michigan released the results of a study that reflected many girls’ antipathy toward all things STEM.
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Green Spaces May Boost Well-Being for City Slickers
People who live in urban areas with more green space tend to report greater well-being than city dwellers who don’t have parks, gardens, or other green space nearby, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Examining data from a national longitudinal survey of households in the United Kingdom, Mathew White and colleagues at the European Centre for Environment & Human Health at the University of Exeter Medical School found that individuals reported less mental distress and higher life satisfaction when they were living in greener areas.
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Survey: Young people who use social media seek fame
USA Today: Tweens and young teens who use social media place a higher value on fame than kids who don't use it or use it infrequently, according to a new survey of media use among those ages 9-15. "Kids who claim they want to be famous use more media," says lead author Yalda Uhls, a researcher at UCLA's Children's Digital Media Center, who will present the study Friday at a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Seattle. Of the 334 young people surveyed online with their parents' permission, almost half say they use social networks; among the under-13 age group, 23% use a social networking site; 26% of the younger group say they have a YouTube account.
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How Exercise And Other Activities Beat Back Dementia
NPR: The numbers are pretty grim: More than half of all 85-year-olds suffer some form of . But here's the good news: Brain researchers say there are ways to boost brain power and stave off problems in memory and thinking. In other words, brain decline is not necessarily an inevitable part of aging. "It's simply not pre-destined for all human beings," Bryan James tells Shots. He's an epidemiologist at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago. "Lots of people live into their 90s and even 100s with no symptoms of dementia." So what can you do to increase the odds?
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Lip Movements Affect Infants' Audiovisual Speech Perception H. Henny Yeung and Janet F. Werker Although research has suggested that audio-visual speech perception is linked to articulatory movements in adults, no studies have examined this link in infants. Infants performed an audiovisual matching procedure while making lip movements similar or different from those seen in the task. Infants' looking patterns were biased away from audiovisually matching faces when they made lip movements similar to those needed to produce the heard vowel.
