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You Can Wash Away Your Troubles, With Soap
“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain,” goes the song. Is there such a thing as soap and water for the psyche? Yes: Metaphor is that powerful, say Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in a literature review appearing in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. Religious rites like baptism make psychological sense, the article suggests. Says Lee: “Cleansing is about the removal of residues.” By washing the hands, taking a shower, or even thinking of doing so, “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision.
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Is Serena Williams angry or ecstatic? Context is everything in reading facial emotion, say psychologists
The Daily Mail: With her mouth is wide open, teeth bared and eyes pressed tensely shut, tennis star Serena Williams looks a picture of pure anger in this close-up photograph. Has she just lost the final of a Grand Slam? Or perhaps had to withdraw through injury? Or is she, in fact, ecstatically happy? When the image is widened out to include her body language the answer is made more clear. The pumped fist is an indicator of her happiness and, as it happens, this photograph was actually taken at the moment she defeated her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. Open.
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Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence
Miller-McCune: A just published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence. “These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.” Read the full story: Miller-McCune
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Why Do Some People Learn Faster?
Wired: The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next.
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Music-based program helps children develop verbal intelligence: Study
Toronto Sun: Preschool children learning to analyze information and solve problems using language-based reasoning thrive when taught using music, a new Canadian study has found. In the study, 48 children between the ages of four and six took part in computer-based, cognitive training programs that were projected onto a classroom wall. The lessons were delivered by colourful, animated cartoon characters. The children were divided into two groups: One received music-based training while the second group was given visual arts training. Both groups received two hour-long training sessions a day for four weeks, led by instructors from The Royal Conservatory in Toronto.
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Illusory Memories Can Have Salutary Effects
“False memories tend to get a bad rap,” says developmental psychologist Mark L. Howe, of Lancaster University in England. Indeed, remembering events incorrectly or remembering events that didn’t happen can have grave consequences, such as the criminal conviction of an innocent person. “But false memories are a natural outcropping of memory in general. They must have some positive effect, too.” That argument—that memory illusions were evolutionarily adaptive and remain useful for psychological well being and problem-solving—is the subject of an intriguing paper in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
