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Monkey See, Monkey Do: Visual Feedback Is Necessary for Imitating Facial Expressions
Research using new technology shows that our ability to imitate facial expressions depends on learning that occurs through visual feedback. Studies of the chameleon effect confirm what salespeople, tricksters, and Lotharios have long known: Imitating another person’s postures and expressions is an important social lubricant. But how do we learn to imitate with any accuracy when we can’t see our own facial expressions and we can’t feel the facial expressions of others?
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Older People Become What They Think, Study Shows
The New York Times: All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older. Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health. When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.
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Advice is given to help kids cope with the Connecticut school shooting
Examiner: The Connecticut school shooting is one of the most horrible tragedies in American history. It is very important to be very careful with how you approach your children in discussing this tragedy in order to avoid setting off serious depressions and other emotional problems. The advice of professionals you feel you can trust in dealing with your kids at this difficult time may be helpful. ABC News has reported this evening on Dec. 14, 2012, Connecticut School Shooting: 4 Tips to Help Kids Cope. Parents across the country trying to come to grips with the wide scope of the tragedy in Connecticut are wondering how to talk to their kids about it.
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How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up
The New York Times: ANNIE HOULE, grandmother of seven, holds up a stack of pink dollar bills. “How many of you know about the wage gap?” she asks a roomful of undergraduates, almost all of them women, at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx. A few hands go up. “Now, how many of you worry about being able to afford New York City when you graduate?” The room laughs. That’s a given. Ms. Houle is the national director of a group called the WAGE Project, which aims to close the gender pay gap. She explains that her dollar bills represent the amounts that women will make relative to men, on average, once they enter the work force.
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What Do Aliens, Climate Change And Princess Di Have In Common?
NPR: HIV does not cause AIDS. Smoking does not cause lung cancer. And burning fossil fuels does not contribute to global warming. What do these three statements have in common? They're all rejections of well-established scientific consensus, and recent findings in psychology suggest that people who believe one or more of them are also more likely to believe a number of conspiracy theories: that the New World Order is planning to take over the planet, that the Apollo moon landing was faked in a Hollywood film studio, that the death of Princess Diana was an organized assassination, that an alien spaceship in New Mexico was covered up by the United States' military, and even more.
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Why you need to gauge your human capital
Reuters: The end of the year is a good time to illuminate your personal financial situation in a different way. Instead of focusing exclusively on financial capital - how much money you have accumulated - look at your human capital. This calculus of human capital, which economists wonkily define as "the net present value of your lifetime earnings," matters as much to your lifelong financial situation as the size of your nest egg. When some people gauge their human capital, they find that they are not making enough money and decide to make some changes. That could mean starting a second or third career. A former chemist I know has become a financial planner.
