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Fetus can sense how Mom’s doing psychologically
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Science has learned that a developing fetus receives messages from the mother, everything from hearing mom's heartbeat to the music she might direct toward her belly. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the fetus can pick up on signals and respond to a mother experiencing depression. Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recruited pregnant women and checked them for depression before and after the mothers delivered their babies. They also tested the babies after delivery to see how their development was progressing. Read the whole story: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
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The First Step to Change: Focusing On the Negative
If you want people to change the current system, or status quo, first you have to get them to notice what’s wrong with it. That’s the idea behind a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds that people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe the status quo can change. “Take America’s educational system. You could find some flaws in that system,” says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who did the new study with Professor Kentaro Fujita. “But we have to live with it every day, so people tend to focus on the positive and reinforce the system.
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Wealth inequality: also going up
The Washington Post: Of late, James Pethokoukis, the American Enterprise Institute’s resident economics blogger, has been attempting to “close the case on the inequality myth.” Wednesday’s edition argues that it doesn’t really matter if income inequality has gone up because wealth inequality fell after World War II. I don’t agree with that, but put it aside for a moment.
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Day Old Chickens Prefer The Same Music That You Do
Scientific American: You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that humans tend to find pleasant is called consonant, which are different from from unpleasant sounds, which are called dissonant. Think of the difference between a Mozart sonata and fingernails on a chalkboard, and you’re on the right track. Consonant notes sound – to the untrained ear – as if they were a single tone, while a you can identify multiple tones within a dissonant note.
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Say This, Get Your Way
Men's Health Magazine: f people don’t listen to you, it’s not that they don’t respect you—it could be how you’re phrasing your request, suggests a new study published in Psychological Science. In the study, college students who were told that speed limit laws were about to take effect accepted and agreed with the new regulations. But when the laws were said to be possibly going into effect, more students expressed outrage. What’s going on? If a direction seems final, people just accept it, explains researcher Kristin Laurin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waterloo.
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How ‘Social’ Is Social Networking?
Huffington Post: I like Facebook. I've been signing into the site fairly regularly for a couple years now, and it has become my large extended family's primary form of communication. It also keeps me connected with friends and former colleagues -- people I like a lot but would never stay in touch with otherwise. We share photos, update personal news, comment on politics and pop culture -- nothing serious, but it's still more connection than I would have in a previous era. In that sense, Facebook is certainly a social lubricant for many of its 500 million users, facilitating fast and effortless and widespread connection.
