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Does Chess Make You Smarter?
The Wall Street Journal: It’s a popular notion that learning chess can make you smarter. Chess clubs and federations around the world promote the game for inclusion in school curricula, especially at the elementary level. In Armenia, every second-, third- and fourth-grader takes a chess class. American “tiger parents” often see chess lessons in the same light as music and computer classes—a way to give their children a leg up in the quest for better grades and admission to an elite college. The game of kings has long been associated with intelligence, and chess grandmasters are capable of astounding mental feats.
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A Lesson For Preschools: When It’s Done Right, The Benefits Last
NPR: Is preschool worth it? Policymakers, parents, researchers and us, at NPR Ed, have spent a lot of time thinking about this question. We know that most pre-kindergarten programs do a good job of improving ' specific skills like phonics and counting, as well as broader social and emotional behaviors, by the time students enter kindergarten. Just this week, a study looking at more than 20,000 students in a state-funded preschool program in Virginia found that kids made large improvements in their alphabet recognition skills. ...
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HOW TWO TRAILBLAZING PSYCHOLOGISTS TURNED THE WORLD OF DECISION SCIENCE UPSIDE DOWN
Vanity Fair: The dozen or so graduate students in Danny Kahneman’s seminar at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, were all surprised when, in the spring of 1969, Amos Tversky turned up. Danny never had guests: The seminar, called Applications of Psychology, was his show. Amos’s interests were about as far removed from the real-world problems in Applications of Psychology as a psychologist’s could be. Amos himself seemed about as far removed from Danny as he could be. Danny had spent years of his childhood hiding in barns and chicken coops in France, from the Nazis who hunted him.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Vicissitudes of Positive Autobiographical Recollection as an Emotion Regulation Strategy in Depression Aliza Werner-Seidler, Laura Tan, and Tim Dalgleish In this study, the authors examined whether the concordance or discrepancy of a memory with the person's current self impacts the effect of that memory on mood. Depressed and never-depressed British participants rated their mood; never-depressed participants then watched a video designed to induce a sad mood, whereas depressed participants watched a neutral movie.
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Psychologists argue about whether smiling makes cartoons funnier
Nature: A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile. But an author of the original report — published nearly three decades ago — says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown1.
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Grammar school entrance exams undermined by study showing how children learn
Independent: A new psychological study has cast doubt both on the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and claims that entrance exams for selective schools can accurately determine a child’s “true potential”. ... They also found a greater effect of training on older adolescents than on their younger counterparts, according to a paper in the journal Psychological Science.
