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Troubled Family Life Changes Kids’ Brains
Scientific American: Stress and neglect at home take an obvious toll on kids as they grow up. Many decades of research have documented the psychological consequences in adulthood, including struggles with depression and difficulties maintaining relationships. Now studies are finding that a troubled home life has profound effects on neural development. ... “Infants are constantly absorbing and learning things, not just when we think we're teaching them,” says Alice Graham, a doctoral student who led the study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.
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Like Lance Armstrong, we are all liars, experts say
Los Angeles Times: Though we profess to hate it, lying is common, useful and pretty much universal. It is one of the most durable threads in our social fabric and an important bulwark of our self-esteem. We start lying by the age of 4 and we do it at least several times a day, researchers have found. And we get better with practice. In short, whatever you think about Lance Armstrong's admission this week that he took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his illustrious cycling career, the lies he told may be no more persistent or outsized than yours, according to psychologists and others who study deception. They were just more public. And the stakes were bigger.
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Q&A: Willpower Expert Roy Baumeister on Staying in Control
TIME: It’s the third week of the new year, and many of us are realizing that those New Year’s resolutions are getting harder to keep. So TIME asked Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University and co-author of the bestselling book, Willpower for tips, gleaned from the latest scientific research, on how maximize self control, especially when you need it most. What does energy and glucose — the fuel our bodies extract from food — have to do with willpower? Self regulation depends on a limited energy supply.
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What Should We Be Worried About In 2013?
NPR: Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for eluding the end of the world and avoiding the fiscal cliff, the folks at The Edge have let loose a flood of new things to worry about. Every year Edge.org poses an Annual Question to dozens of scholars, scientists, writers, artists and thinkers. The respondents this year include the reasonably famous, such as Arianna Huffington, Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and 13.7's own Stuart Kauffman, as well as the not so famous (like me). The 2013 question is: "What should we be worried about?" Respondents were urged to raise worries that aren't already on the public radar, or to dispel those that are.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception published in Psychological Science. Linguistic Representations of Motion Do Not Depend on the Visual Motion System Andrea Pavan and Giosuè Baggio How is the meaning of a verb phrase describing motion constructed? Some theories say the construction relies on representations of motion in the sensory cortex, but others disagree. Participants were adapted to actual leftward or rightward motion or implied leftward or rightward motion.
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Are parents happier? Dads may be, but not moms, singles
USA Today: Are parents happier than people without kids? The conventional wisdom would say kids bring parental joy, but in past research, childless people have reported greater well-being. Now, new research in the journal Psychological Science find that overall, "parents (and especially fathers) report relatively higher levels of happiness, positive emotion, and meaning in life than do non-parents." Of the three studies, the largest sample comes from 6,906 individuals collected between 1982 and 1999. It found that fathers and parents between ages 26 and 62 were happier, but not mothers, young parents and single parents. Read the whole story: USA Today
