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Are Smart Kids Better at Drawing?
New York Magazine: The messy, free-form way that preschool kids draw is adorable. (Sure, kid, people totally have arms and legs growing out of their heads. Looks great.) But can these anatomically questionable pictures tell us anything else about the children who drew them? One team of U.K. psychologists sought to answer that, and in a new paper, they argue that the way a child draws at age 4 can predict intelligence at age 14. The research will appear in an upcoming paper in Psychological Science, and the press release summarizes the findings like so: At the age of 4, children were asked by their parents to complete a ‘Draw-a-Child’ test, i.e. draw a picture of a child.
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Get Tech Out of Schools
Slate: One thousand: That’s approximately the number of instructional hours required of U.S. middle school and high school students each year. Four thousand: That’s approximately the number of hours of digital media content U.S. youths aged 8 to 18 absorb each year.
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Dating and Romance: The Problem With Kindness
Here’s a simple and sad fact. A lot of people who are married, or in long-term relationships, are not very compatible. Partners disagree about very basic stuff, like religion and politics and values, or they simply don’t find each other attractive. Just look at the divorce statistics. This raises a knotty and important question. If choosing a partner is such an important life decision, why do so many of us get it wrong? Why does the reality of a relationship fail so often to match our ideals? Obviously there are a lot of little differences that emerge over time, and people do change, but it seems like we should at least get the fundamental issues straight.
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A History of Stress May Contribute to Anxiety Behind the Wheel
At least once in our lives, nearly all of us will be in some kind of car accident. Statistics from the car insurance industry estimate that the average American driver will file a collision claim about once every 18 years. Over the course of your driving lifetime you’re likely to rack up three or four accidents. For many people, the experience of a car accident can trigger anxiety about driving. Anxious driving behaviors have been shown to impair driving performance, leading to more mistakes on the road and higher odds of another accident. But not everyone who experiences a car accident ends up developing anxiety behind the wheel.
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Everyone Wins When Employees Have More Control at Work
Most workers would love to have more control over their jobs. For some that would mean leaving early to pick up the kids, while for others it could mean taking on more challenging projects. A recent study finds that allowing employees to play a more active role in customizing their jobs may be a win-win for both workers and managers. These kinds of informal agreements between individual employees and their supervisors are known as idiosyncratic deals, or i-deals.
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Stop Asking ‘What Should I Do?’
New York Magazine: You’re stuck. You’ve got a problem — maybe an ethical dilemma, maybe a creative block — and are short a solution. What should you do? As it turns out, you might be asking yourself the wrong question. Or, more specifically, using one wrong word: Asking “What could I do?” instead of “What should I do?” can lead you to better, more creative answers, according to a recent working paper by a team of Harvard Business School professors. Asking yourself, for example, “What should I do with my life?” tacitly implies that there’s a right and a wrong answer to that question.
