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Headstrong
The Boston Globe: RESEARCH HAS SHOWN that the theoretical benefit of safety equipment can be much lower in reality because users feel more comfortable taking greater risks. In a new experiment, psychologists found that this effect may be even more deeply ingrained than we think. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Traditional Toys May Beat Gadgets in Language Development
The New York Times: Baby laptops, baby cellphones, talking farms — these are the whirring, whiz-bang toys of the moment, many of them marketed as tools to encourage babies’ language skills. But in the midst of the holiday season, a new study raises questions about whether such electronic playthings make it less likely that babies will engage in the verbal give-and-take with their parents that is so crucial to cognitive development. ... “When you put the gadgets and gizmos in, the parents stop talking,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University who was not involved in the new study, but who has found similar effects with e-books and electronic shape-sorters.
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Too Much TV And Chill Could Reduce Brain Power Over Time
NPR: When I kick back to watch a show, I tell myself I'm just going to watch one episode. But 45 minutes later, I'm watching another. And then another. For the rest of the day. There are a lot of things that TV and chilling can lead to, but among the less fun? Maybe more cognitive decline over time. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco checked in with 3,247 people for 25 years, starting when they were young adults. Every five years, they asked participants to estimate how much TV they watched daily. Every two to five years, the researchers looked at how much physical exercise people got.
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Recognition
The New Yorker: One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at second glance the man seemed harmless—not particularly tall or muscular, with gaunt cheeks and bulging eyes. She rolled down the window. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Evolutionary Basis of Honor Cultures Andrzej Nowak, Michele J. Gelfand, Wojciech Borkowski, Dov Cohen, and Ivan Hernandez In honor cultures, people often fight to defend their reputation, even if doing so is personally risky or costly. Under what circumstances is this type of behavior likely to arise?
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Speed Reading Promises Are Too Good to Be True, Scientists Find
There is little scientific evidence to suggest that speed reading offers a shortcut to understanding lots of text.
