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Psychologists Defend The Importance Of General Abilities
“What makes a great violinist, physicist, or crossword puzzle solver? Are experts born or made? The question has intrigued psychologists since psychology was born—and the rest of us, too, who may secretly fantasize playing duets with Yo Yo Ma or winning a Nobel Prize in science. It’s no wonder Malcolm Gladwell stayed atop the bestseller lists by popularizing the “10,000-hour rule” of Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson.
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Why Do Some Athletes Choke Under Pressure?
Athletes know they should just do their thing on the 18th hole, or during the penalty shootout, or when they’re taking a 3-point shot in the last moments of the game. But when that shot
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IQ Isn’t Set In Stone, Suggests Study That Finds Big Jumps, Dips In Teens
NPR: For as long as there's been an IQ test, there's been controversy over what it measures. Do IQ scores capture a person's intellectual capacity, which supposedly remains stable over time? Or is the Intelligent Quotient exam really an achievement test — similar to the S.A.T. — that's subject to fluctuations in scores? The findings of a new study add evidence to the latter theory: IQ seems to be a gauge of acquired knowledge that progresses in fits and starts. In this week's journal Nature, researchers at University College London report documenting significant fluctuations in the IQs of a group of British teenagers.
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Wellbeing: When politeness is problematic
National Post: Dr. Aidan Feeney has a few thoughts about politeness. Essentially, he thinks it has the ability to cost lives. “The more serious the situation, the more likely you are to be polite and the more room there is for confusion,” says Feeney, a professor at the school of psychology at Queen’s University, Belfast, and co-author of a new paper entitled The Risk of Polite Misunderstanding, published last week by the Association of Psychological Science.
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As Brain Changes, So Can IQ
The Wall Street Journal: A teenager's IQ can rise or fall as many as 20 points in just a few years, a brain-scanning team found in a study published Wednesday that suggests a young person's intelligence measure isn't as fixed as once thought. The researchers also found that shifts in IQ scores corresponded to small physical changes in brain areas related to intellectual skills, though they weren't able to show a clear cause and effect.
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Why Forgetting Is Good For Your Memory
Huffington Post: Forgetting could help you remember. Huh? That's the conclusion of new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. We wouldn't be able to learn new information if we didn't forget some things, researchers said. "Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult," study researcher Ben Storm said in a statement. Memories "could completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory." In the study, Storm and his colleagues gave people a word list, where the words all had a relation to each other (example: a list of birds).
