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For Word Learning, Size Matters If You’re A Dog
Scientific American: In 1988, a three-year-old child is led into a brightly colored testing room in a psychology department in Bloomington, Indiana. A small toy is brought out and put onto a table in front of the child. The toy was wooden, blue, about two inches square, and U-shaped. “This is a dax.” The researchers picked a word that was easy to pronounce, but was definitely something the children had never heard before. Then, seven other toys were brought out. Some of them were the same shape as the DAX, but larger, or smaller. Some were the same size, but were made of cloth or sponge instead of wood. Some were the same size and texture as the original DAX, but different in shape.
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Helping Parents Score on the Homework Front
The Wall Street Journal: Homework can be as monumental a task for parents as it is for children. So what's the best strategy to get a kid to finish it all? Where's the line between helping with an assignment and doing the assignment? And should a parent nag a procrastinating preteen to focus—or let the child fall behind and learn a hard lesson? As schools pile on more homework as early as preschool, many parents are confused about how to assist, says a 2012 research review at Johns Hopkins University.
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Simple Strategy Helps You Learn from Mistakes
Yahoo: A new study in Psychological Science bears out this benefit of self-affirmation. Volunteers were first asked to rank six values in order of importance to them. Then half spent five minutes writing about why their top value matters—a task designed to boost self-affirmation. The other half spent the time writing about why that value doesn’t actually matter—a task designed to undermine their sense of self-worth. Afterward, all the volunteers moved on to another activity—one that gave them ample opportunity to screw up. Volunteers were asked to press a button when the letter M appear on a screen, but refrain from pressing it when the letter W popped up.
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Psychiatric association approves changes to diagnostic manual
CNN: Starting next year, the process of diagnosing autism may see drastic changes following the revision of the official guide to classifying psychiatric illnesses. After years of reviewing and refining criteria used by psychiatrists and other experts to diagnose mental health disorders, the American Psychiatric Association board of trustees on Saturday approved major changes to the manual, better known as DSM-5. The approval of the changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders came during a meeting in Arlington, Virginia. The DSM is considered the "bible" of psychiatry because it's the criteria mental health professionals use to diagnose their patients. ...
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Feeling Disgust May Enhance Our Ability to Detect Impurities
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not only helps us to avoid impurities, it may also make us better able to see them. If something looks dirty and disgusting, we typically assume it’s contaminated in some way; when something is white, however, we are more likely to assume that it’s clean and pure.
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Babies learn to walk after dozens of falls per day
Asian News International: Infants learn new things and acquire new skills every day and researchers have suggested that the abilities that they demonstrate early on can shape the development of skills later in life, in childhood and beyond. Babies learn to walk after thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day, according to a study. In the study, Karen E. Adolph, Whitney G. Cole, Meghana Komati, Jessie S. Garciaguirre, Daryaneh Badaly, Jesse M. Lingeman, Gladys L. Y. Chan, and Rachel B. Sotsky, recorded 15- to 60-minute videos of spontaneous activity from infants.
