-
How a Mother’s Love May Counter the Negative Health Effects of Poverty
TIME: Being raised in poverty can have lifelong negative effects on children's health, increasing their risk of chronic disease in adulthood. But new research suggests one factor that may help protect poor kids from later illness: having a nurturing mother. Growing up poor is stressful, and chronic stress is known to impact physical health long term. Research finds that poor kids are more likely to develop metabolic syndrome — a collection of risk factors that may lead to Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and stroke — compared with their wealthier peers, for example. Read the full story: TIME
-
Dan Ariely: How to Pay People
Bloomberg Businessweek: Most of the time, when you hire people you don’t want to specify exactly what they are to do and how much they would get paid—you don’t want to say if you do X you will get this much, and if you do Y you will get that much. That type of contract is what we call a complete contract. Creating one is basically impossible, especially with higher-level jobs. If you try to do it, you cause “crowding out.” People focus on everything you’ve included and exclude everything else. What’s left out of the contract tends to drop out of their motivation as well. You are taking away from their judgment and goodwill and teaching them to be like rats in a maze.
-
Winners of MacArthur Foundation award include 10 people who focus on science
The Washington Post: Nine scientists and a science radio host were among the 22 people who received $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grants last week. Each year the MacArthur Foundation gives the no-strings-attached awards to innovative thinkers “to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.” The 10 science-affiliated winners include: Matthew Nock, a clinical psychologist at Harvard, who studies suicide and self-injury in adults and adolescents and is seeking to disentangle the neurobiological aspects of self-harming behaviors from those that are dependent on cultural context.
-
Let Students Sleep
New York Times: Efforts to improve educational outcomes through extending the school day may have unintended and counterproductive consequences if longer days are implemented by moving the school bell earlier or by pushing more homework later into the night. Young children are biologically primed for "early to bed and early to rise," but as children pass through middle school and into high school, biological processes keep them up later.
-
Teens get smarter as their minds get quicker
Yahoo India: Washington, Sept 28 (ANI): A group of psychologists at University of Texas at San Antonio has found that adolescents become smarter because they become mentally quicker. This is the first time psychologists have been able to confirm this important connection. To find the relationship between these two phenomena, the UTSA psychologists analysed the results of 12 diverse intelligence and mental speed tests administered to 6,969 adolescents (ages 13 to 17) in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Intelligence was measured by performance on cognitive tests of diverse abilities, such as vocabulary knowledge, math facts, and mechanical comprehension.
-
Shocking “prison” study 40 years later: What happened at Stanford?
CBS News: It's considered one of the most notorious psychology experiments ever conducted - and for good reason. The "Stanford prison experiment" - conducted in Palo Alto, Calif. 40 years ago - was conceived by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo as a way to use ordinary college students to explore the often volatile dynamic that exists between prisoners and prison guards - and as a means of encouraging reforms in the way real-life prison guards are trained. But what started out as make-believe quickly devolved into an all-too-real prison situation. Some student "guards" became sadistic overlords who eagerly abused the "prisoners," many of whom began to see themselves as real prisoners.
