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Scientific Evidence Proves Capitalist Ideas May be Innate
The New American: Americans have indicated avid opposition to property rights violations throughout the course of U.S. history, whether those violations take the form of taxation, eminent domain, or “open space” laws. According to one psychologist, that sense of being wronged when one’s property rights are violated may be innate, as property ownership may be a natural-born attribute. In an article published in Science News magazine, Bruce Bower contends that young children are predisposed to concepts of possession, ownership, and ultimately, capitalism. Citing evidence produced by psychologist Ori Friedman, Bower asserts that children are natural-born capitalists.
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The Myth of the Queen Bee
U.S. News & World Report: Female bosses sometimes have a reputation for not being very nice. Some display what’s called “queen bee” behavior, distancing themselves from other women and refusing to help other women as they rise through the ranks. Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, concludes that it’s wrong to blame the woman for this behavior; instead, blame the sexist environment. Belle Derks of Leiden University in the Netherlands has done a lot of research on how people respond to sexism.
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Is reading comprehension a hidden disability?
A team of researchers find evidence suggesting that children’s problems with reading comprehension may, at their core, be a spoken language problem.
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What Do We Pay Attention To?
U.S. News & World Report: Once we learn the relationship between a cue and its consequences—say, the sound of a bell and the appearance of the white ice cream truck bearing our favorite chocolate cone—do we turn our attention to that bell whenever we hear it? Or do we tuck the information away and marshal our resources to learning other, novel cues—a recorded jingle, or a blue truck? Psychologists observing “attentional allocation” now agree that the answer is both, and they have arrived at two principles to describe the phenomena. The “predictive” principle says we search for meaningful—important—cues amid the “noise” of our environments.
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FDA’s Graphic Cigarette Images: Will They Work?
Can graphic images persuade people to make lasting changes to their behavior? The answer, according to psychological research, is probably not. Howard Leventhal, the Board of Governors Professor of Health Psychology at Rutgers, agrees that photos are in fact stronger than words, but that images may not lead to long-term behavioral effects. Leventhal states, “You don’t need a lot of threat to get something to happen as long as the threat is associated with a clear, simple plan of action.
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Ovulating women better at spotting straight men: study
CTV Canada: Women can more accurately identify a man's sexual orientation the closer she is to ovulation, according to a study released this month. The study, a joint project by the University of Toronto and Tufts University in Boston, looked at the ability of 40 undergraduate women to judge whether a man is gay or straight based on viewing a photograph of his face. In the first of three experiments, the women looked at 80 images, half of which were gay men, and were told to determine each man's sexual orientation. Read more: CTV Canada
