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Orphans’ Lonely Beginnings Reveal How Parents Shape A Child’s Brain
NPR: Parents do a lot more than make sure a child has food and shelter, researchers say. They play a critical role in brain development. More than a decade of research on children raised in institutions shows that "neglect is awful for the brain," says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital. Without someone who is a reliable source of attention, affection and stimulation, he says, "the wiring of the brain goes awry." The result can be long-term mental and emotional problems.
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Can You Boost Your Self-Control?
Fast Company: As far as examples of willpower go, one of the most impressive you'll ever find is the "incredible Buddha boy"chronicled in GQ a few years back by George Saunders. The boy had been meditating under a tree for seven months, evidently without food or water. It was a display of self-control so haunting that readers couldn't help but wonder how such a person could exist while the rest of us find it so hard--really, impossible--to rise from the couch and go to the gym, or read a book, or in some cases just reach the remote. The prevailing scientific wisdom says that people operate with a finite supply of self-control.
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Dishonesty Can Foster Creativity
Pacific Standard: Want to be more creative? As we have noted, there are many ways to achieve that laudable goal, ranging from dimming the lights to sitting at a disorderly desk. Or you could just lie and cheat. After Harvard Business School researcher Francesa Gino reported in 2011 that that highly creative people are more likely to engage in unethical activities, she began to wonder whether dishonesty could actually enhance creativity. Her latest paper suggests the answer is yes.
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People Are More Moral in the Morning
Scientific American Mind: Most of us strive to do the right thing when faced with difficult decisions. A new study suggests that our moral compass is more reliable when we face those decisions in the morning rather than later in the day. In a series of studies at Harvard University and at the University of Utah, 327 men and women participated in tasks designed to measure cheating or lying behavior either in the morning or in the afternoon. For instance, in one study the subjects attempted to solve math problems, some of which were impossible, knowing they would be paid five cents for every solved problem.
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Marriage and Poverty
Inside Higher Ed: In today’s Academic Minute, Matthew Johnson of the State University of New York at Binghamton explores the link between poverty and marriage stability. Johnson is a professor of psychology at Binghamton and director of the university's Marriage and Family Studies Laboratory. Read the whole story: Inside Higher Ed
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking Michael S. Vendetti, Aaron Wu, and Keith J. Holyoak The authors examined whether inducing a general mindset using a verbal-analogy task would promote more abstract thinking on a subsequent unrelated reasoning task. Participants solved analogies with near or far semantic relations, either by indicating whether the analogy was valid or invalid or by generating a valid completion for an incomplete analogy. Participants then completed a picture-mapping task that used unrelated materials.
