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To Spot Kids Who Will Overcome Poverty, Look At Babies
NPR: Why do some children who grow up in poverty do well, while others struggle? To understand more about this, a group of psychologists recently did a study. It began in a small spare room where a series of very poor mothers and their 5-month-old babies came to watch a soothing video. Soothing the baby was the point, says Elisabeth Conradt, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University's Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk. The researchers needed to take measurements of the babies when they were calm.
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We Aren’t the World
Pacific Standard: IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups. ... So instead of toeing the line, he switched teams.
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How Stress Gets Under the Skin: Q&A With Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen
TIME: A professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University, Bruce McEwen investigates how stress affects the mind and brain. What are some common misconceptions about stress?I’ll start with several pet peeves: that all stress is bad for you and that cortisol [a stress hormone] is bad for you because it’s easy to measure as a marker of stress. These stress systems were put there to help the body adapt and survive. They have a good side and a bad side.That’s the essence of [what I have labeled] allostatic load: these systems, which help us adapt and survive can also cause problems when they are overused.
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Finding the Just-Right Level of Self-Esteem for a Child
The Wall Street Journal: A wave of recent research has pointed to the risks of overpraising a child. But for parents, drawing the line between too little praise and too much has become a high-pressure balancing act. Cara Greene, a mother of three children ages 1 to 8, is wary of deliberately pumping up her kids' egos, for fear of instilling the sense of entitlement she sees in young adults "who have been told they're wonderful and they can do anything." But she also wants them to have healthy self-esteem. ...
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Primed for Controversy
The New York Times: In 2005, the writer Malcolm Gladwell introduced readers to the phenomenon of “thinking without thinking” — the mental work we all do automatically — in his blockbuster book “Blink.” Since then, the unconscious has been on a roll. Scores of popular books and articles have chronicled the power of subtle cues to influence our attitudes and actions. Typical of the genre is a reliance on the “goal-priming effect,” in which study subjects automatically and unintentionally alter their thoughts or behavior when prompted by various kinds of information. ...
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How to Be a Better Driver
Scientific American Mind: When we think about the things we do every day—driving, working, parenting—we realize that even with tasks we are generally good at, there is always room for improvement. Luckily, scientists are on the case. Visit this column in every issue to find tips for acing life. You already know texting while driving is deadly, but chances are you feel pretty safe using a hands-free cell to chat. After all, it's legal. But those policies are misguided and deceptive, says Paul Atchley, a psychologist in the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Kansas.
