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Caring about tomorrow
About 70 percent of Americans believe that the climate is changing, most acknowledge that this change reflects human activity, and more than two-thirds think it will harm future generations. Unless we dramatically alter our way of life, swaths of the planet will become hostile or uninhabitable later this century — spinning out ecological, epidemiological and social disasters like eddies from a current. And yet most Americans would support energy-conserving policies only if they cost households less than $200 per year — woefully short of the investment required to keep warming under catastrophic rates. This inaction is breathtakingly immoral. ...
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A Lack of Background Knowledge Can Hinder Reading Comprehension
Students may find a topic difficult to understand if their background knowledge doesn’t pass a certain threshold, but a quick test can help identify those students who are at risk of falling behind.
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Got Pain? A Virtual Swim With Dolphins May Help Melt It Away
Virtual reality is not new. But, as people search for alternative ways to manage pain — and reduce reliance on pills — VR is attracting renewed attention. Imagine, for a moment you've been transported to a sunlit lagoon. And, suddenly, it's as if you're immersed in the warm water and swimming. That's what Tom Norris experiences when he straps on his VR headset. "It's fantastic, I really feel like I'm there," says Norris, who is 70 years old, retired from the military, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife. As dolphins frolic and swim by in the virtual scene, "I get a strong feeling of pleasure, relaxation and peace," he says. ...
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring: cognitive bias modification to target two behaviors; positive affect as a buffer between chronic stress and emotional disorder symptoms; reward sensitivity and trait disinhibition as predictors of substance use problems; and culture as a mediator between appraisals and PTSD symptoms.
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Suicide attempts are hard to anticipate. A study that tracks teens’ cellphone use aims to change that
Every Wednesday afternoon, an alert flashes on the cellphones of about 50 teenagers in New York and Pennsylvania. Its questions are blunt: "In the past week, how often have you thought of killing yourself?" "Did you make a plan to kill yourself?" "Did you make an attempt to kill yourself?" The 13- to 18-year-olds tap their responses, which are fed to a secure server. They have agreed, with their parents' support, to something that would make many adolescents cringe: an around-the-clock recording of their digital lives.
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Seeing is feeling – How Artificial Intelligence is helping us understand emotions
Recently published research supported by NIMH and NIDA sheds light on how our brains process visual information with emotional features by incorporating machine-learning innovations and human brain-imaging. The researchers started with an existing neural network, AlexNet, which enables computers to recognize objects and adapted it using prior research that identified stereotypical emotional responses to images. This new network, EmoNet, was then asked to categorize 25,000 images into 20 categories such as craving, sexual desire, horror, awe and surprise. EmoNet could accurately and consistently categorize 11 of the emotion types and reliably rate the emotional intensity of the images.
