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Studies Link Students’ Boredom to Stress
Education Week: One glance, and any teacher knows the score: That student, halfway down the row, staring blankly at his tapping pen, fidgeting, sneaking glances at the wall clock roughly every 30 seconds, is practically screaming, "I'm bored!" While boredom is a perennial student complaint, emerging research shows it is more than students' not feeling entertained, but rather a "flavor of stress" that can interfere with their ability to learn and even their health. An international group of researchers argues this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science that the experience of boredom directly connects to a student's inability to focus attention. Read the whole story: Education Week
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The candidates’ message: I might be so-so, but the other guy is terrible
The Washington Post: Four stories are at the heart of any campaign. If you understand them, you know who controls the message — and with it, perhaps the election. These stories make up what campaign strategists call the “message grid,” which has four quadrants. The first two comprise the positive stories the candidates are telling about themselves; the other two feature the negative stories each candidate is telling about the other. In some elections, one quadrant of the grid dominates the conversation — for example, when the economy or a candidate is particularly strong or weak.
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The Good, the Bad, and the Guilty: Anticipating Feelings of Guilt Predicts Ethical Behavior
From politics to finance, government to education, ethics-related scandals seem to crop up with considerable regularity. As whistleblowers and investigative journalists bring these scandals to light, one can’t help but wonder: Are there specific character traits that predispose people to unethical behavior? Converging evidence suggests that the answer could be guilt proneness. In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Taya Cohen and Nazli Turan of Carnegie Mellon University and A.T.
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Scientific Inquiry Among the Preschool Set
The New York Times: When engaged in what looks like child’s play, preschoolers are actually behaving like scientists, according to a new report in the journal Science: forming hypotheses, running experiments, calculating probabilities and deciphering causal relationships about the world. The report’s author, Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says she based it on more than 10 years’ worth of research and studies, including some of her own. In one study, for example, an experimenter performed five different sequences of three actions each, as a 4-year-old looked on. The sequences would either activate a toy or fail to activate it.
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Is Juvenile Delinquency a Failure of Imagination?
The Huffington Post: The 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle was not great filmmaking, but it does endure as a historical curiosity. Even before a word of dialogue is spoken, the movie's scrolling introduction makes clear that this is not just storytelling, but an earnest public service announcement: "Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency," it declares, " -- its causes -- and its effects." And indeed the nation was concerned with juvenile delinquency in the '50s. Obsessed, really. Blackboard Jungle captured society's fear of an entire generation of post-World War II teenagers, who were perceived as disrespectful, alienated, reckless, and most of all dangerous.
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Going With Your Gut
The Wall Street Journal: Eyewitness identification of criminals is often mistaken, but a new, rapid-fire technique for asking people to finger culprits appears to improve accuracy, a study from Australia shows. Subjects saw short films of a crime, or of a more mundane event that, they were later told, involved a suspect in a nearby offense. Then the participants looked at photos for just three seconds each. They were asked to rate their confidence in the guilt of each person portrayed by using an 11-point scale—ranging from absolute certainty that they had fingered the culprit to absolute confidence that it was the wrong person. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
