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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: What's Worth Talking About? Information Theory Reveals How Children Balance Informativeness and Ease of Production Colin Bannard, Marla Rosner, and Danielle Matthews Greenfield's principle of informativeness suggests that children comment on things they find uncommon or uncertain rather than on things that are constant or can be assumed. The researchers quantified this tendency by performing a series of experiments in which 3-year-old children heard an experimenter describe images using noun-adjective combinations (e.g., bumpy road, old woman). The adjectives differed in their informativeness and unexpectedness.
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Believing the Future Will Be Favorable May Prevent Action
Findings from a series of studies show that people tend to believe others will come around to their point of view over time, a trend that holds across various contexts and cultures.
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Turning Up the Heat on Prosocial Behavior
Studies dating back to the 1940s have shown that the temperature can shape emotions and perception.
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Guess What? We’re All Born With Mathematical Abilities
NPR: As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, Kristy vanMarle knew she wanted to go to grad school for psychology, but wasn't sure what lab to join. Then, she saw a flyer: Did you know that babies can count? "I thought, No way. Babies probably can't count, and they certainly don't count the way that we do," she says. But the seed was planted, and vanMarle started down her path of study. The person who made that flyer, Karen Wynn, became her mentor and they have since co-published several studies together. ... We know now that numeracy at the end of high school is a really strong and important predictor of an individual's economic and occupational success.
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The Case for Cursing
The New York Times: You know when you stub your toe and involuntarily utter an expletive? You probably didn’t give it much thought, but you might have been on to something. As children we’re taught that cursing, even when we’re in pain, is inappropriate, betrays a limited vocabulary or is somehow low class in that ambiguous way many cultural lessons suggest. But profanity serves a physiological, emotional and social purpose — and it’s effective only because it’s inappropriate. “The paradox is that it’s that very act of suppression of the language that creates those same taboos for the next generation,” said Benjamin K.
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Women Show Cognitive Advantage in Gender-Equal Countries
Women’s cognitive functioning past middle age may be affected by the degree of gender equality in the country they live in, according to new findings from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
