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Kids Draw Female Scientists More Often Than They Did Decades Ago
When asked to draw a scientist, children often reproduce common stereotypes about who scientists are and what they do. However, new research, which I led, shows that these stereotypes have changed over time, at least within the United States. My study, which was published March 20 in Child Development, finds that U.S. children now draw female scientists more often than ever before. In the 1960s and 1970s, one landmark study asked nearly 5,000 elementary school children to draw a scientist. Their artwork almost exclusively depicted men, often with lab coats, working indoors with lab equipment. Of those nearly 5,000 drawings, only 28 depicted a female scientist, which were all drawn by girls.
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Mindfulness meditation is huge, but science isn’t sure how, or whether, it works
Meditation: It’s celebrated as a therapeutic tool to help ease stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and chronic pain. It’s come into vogue as a way to enhance human performance, finding its way into classrooms, businesses, locker rooms and smartphones through apps such as Headspace and Calm. Various forms of meditation are now routinely offered to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. In particular, mindfulness meditation, which focuses one’s attention on the present moment, is wildly popular and has ballooned into a billion-dollar business, according to the market research firm IBISWorld.
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Crash Risks May Spike Immediately After a Near Miss
The short period of time after narrowly averting a vehicular accident is a vulnerable one for drivers, especially in city driving.
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People Use Emotion to Persuade, Even When It Could Backfire
People tend toward appeals that aren’t simply more positive or negative but are infused with emotionality, even when they’re trying to sway an audience that may not be receptive to such language.
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What It’s Like To Watch #MeToo When It Is You, Too
On average, more than 300,000 Americans experience rape or sexual assault each year. When the #MeToo movement makes headlines, those survivors are reading. How is that affecting people who have experienced sexual violence, to see stories similar to their own blasted across media outlets every day? Experts aren’t sure, but they’re confident that it’s having some kind of impact. Case in point: In the last three months of 2017, calls to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network — a national crisis hotline for people who have experienced sexual trauma — increased by 23 percent compared with the same period in the previous year.
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John Cacioppo, Who Studied Effects of Loneliness, Is Dead at 66
She was a brain researcher and an authority on the scientific basis of love. He, too, was a neuroscientist, but with an expertise in loneliness. She was in her mid-30s, he in his late 50s. Both were wedded to careers in separate hemispheres — until they happened to be seated beside each other, serendipitously, at dinner on the last night of a neuroscience research symposium in Shanghai. Before going their separate ways, they left the restaurant together. A romantic full moon was rising over the East China Sea. He snapped a photograph. A few weeks later, she emailed him to request a copy (which she later admitted was just a pretext to resume their brief acquaintance).
