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To Tell Its Story, Red Cross Goes to Those It Helped
The New York Times: The American Red Cross has commissioned a new public service advertising campaign to raise money in the holiday season by showing how the organization helps people facing problems other than major disasters like Hurricane Sandy. Deborah Small, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, expressed similar sentiments. The new campaign, she said, “tugs at our heartstrings. The very best way for an ad to get people to open their wallets is to present them with an identifiable victim. It creates an emotional connection.” Edward Russell, an associate professor of advertising at the S. I.
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How To Talk to Your Kids About the School Shooting
Slate: What do you say to your elementary-school-aged children about the mass slaughter of children at an elementary school? I put this question to Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. He said there are two main principles to keep in mind: comfort and information. People should be ready to respond honestly to their children’s question, but at the level they are asked and with the minimum of detail necessary. If your child has managed to remain oblivious to this horror and has not brought it up, then Kazdin advises that you should not either. You can help keep your child blessedly in the dark by limiting exposure to media coverage.
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Science by the numbers: Researchers ask, ‘How true are our findings?’
WHYY News: Next month, the respected British Medical Journal will no longer publish the results of clinical trials unless drug companies agree to provide detailed study data. They hope to nudge other medical journals to follow suit. The journal Psychological Science is doing something similar, in a voluntary pilot program for now. The journal's editor Eric Eich, also a professor at the University of British Columbia, said other groups are systematically trying to reproduce past experiments to see if they can be replicated. "Most research in psychology, or pretty well any other field, it's all geared toward discovery," said Eich. "People get kudos for discovering new things.
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New Research on Emotion From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on emotion from Psychological Science. The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker: Emotion-Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk Taking Jeremy A. Yip and Stéphane Côté Can understanding the source of your emotions help you make better decisions? Participants were assessed for ability to understand emotions and were then told they would have to give a video-recorded speech (incidental anxiety condition) or prepare a grocery list (neutral condition). Each participant's level of risk taking was then measured.
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Cleverer still
The Economist: SCIENCE has few more controversial topics than human intelligence—in particular, whether variations in it are a result of nature or nurture, and especially whether such variations differ between the sexes. The mines in this field can blow up an entire career, as Larry Summers found out in 2005 when he spoke of the hypothesis that the mathematical aptitude needed for physics and engineering, as well as for maths itself, is innately rarer in women than in men. He resigned as president of Harvard University shortly afterwards.
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On Facebook, Bad With the Good
The New York Times: Like many women these days, Aran Hissam, 35, of Melbourne, Fla., posted the news that she was pregnant on Facebook. On the morning of an ultrasound last year, she debated on the site whether to learn the baby’s sex, musing “to peek or not to peek?” When she failed to post an update later that day, friends started to contact her. Ms. Hissam decided to return to Facebook to share the news that her unborn baby, a girl, had been found to have fetal hydrops and given no chance of survival. “I wanted to communicate the news to get people off my back,” Ms. Hissam said in a telephone interview recently.
