-
You Have No Idea What Happened
The New Yorker: R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate. R. T. was a student in a class taught by Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist who had begun studying memory in the seventies.
-
Closing the Math Gap for Boys
The New York Times: ON a recent afternoon, the banter of boisterous adolescents at Edwin G. Foreman High School, in a poor, racially and ethnically mixed Chicago neighborhood, echoed off the corridor walls. But Room 214 was as silent as a meditation retreat. Inside, 16 ninth- and 10th-grade African-American and Latino boys were working, two-on-one, with a tutor. They’re among 1,326 boys in 12 public schools in this city who are sweating over math for an hour every day. ... A colleague of Mr. Levitt’s, the Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, presents a similar argument on the science of early brain development: “Skill begets skill, and early skill makes later skill acquisition easier.
-
To Heighten Creativity, Take a Good Look at Your Selves
Pacific Standard: Having trouble coming up with creative ideas? Well, who do you think you are? That’s not a put-down: It’s a fundamentally important question, and newly published research suggests answering it can help inspire innovative thinking. Specifically, it concludes spending a few minutes pondering the various identities you wear—spouse, parent, employee, sports fan, political partisan, what-have-you—can lead to more creative insights. “A more versatile, integrated, or flexible self-view ... may offer a simple way to boost creativity,” writes a research team led by University of Chicago psychologist Sarah Gaither.
-
Can Angry Tweets Predict Heart-Disease Rates?
New York Magazine: Never before in human history have so many people expressed their emotions so publicly. Every day, countless gigabytes of happiness and sadness and frustration and every other conceivable feeling are dumped onto the web, whether in the form of ecstatic Facebook statuses or paranoid blog posts. Gifted with a mother lode of new psychological data, researchers are eagerly lapping up as much of it as possible in an attempt to better understand homo sapiens. Naturally, Twitter is a major nexus for this sort of research.
-
Can hugs make you healthier?
Salon: It’s February. Are you sick? If you are, don’t fret. The Centers for Disease Control tells us that cold and flu season peaks in January and February, so statistically speaking, your sniffles are nothing special. And, believe me, I feel for you. I have a 4-year-old daughter who is the most thoroughgoing germ collector known to humankind. Every day she trots home from her language immersion preschool, an international clearinghouse for viruses. I’ve lost count of how many times she has walked in coughing and sniffling, a little pouty and with her arms outstretched, looking for a consolatory hug.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Targeted Rejection Predicts Decreased Anti-Inflammatory Gene Expression and Increased Symptom Severity in Youth With Asthma Michael L. M. Murphy, George M. Slavich, Edith Chen, and Gregory E. Miller Targeted rejection -- the intentional rejection of a person by an individual or group -- seems to be a uniquely damaging form of interpersonal stress. Participants between the ages of 9 and 18 with diagnosed asthma were assessed every 6 months for 2 years. At each assessment, participants underwent a blood draw and a stress interview and reported their daily asthma symptoms for 2 weeks following each visit.
