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Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
The New York Times: One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call “summer camp.” For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegant boy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael’s eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study — less summer camp than camp of last resort. Michael’s problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born.
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Daydreamers Could Be the Smart Kids, Says USC Study
LA Weekly: Daydreamers used to get in trouble. They were the underachievers. They were the kids who ended up hanging out under the bleachers and smoking stuff that smelled funny. Right? Wrong. New research co-authored by USC assistant professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that daydreamers ...are the smart ones. A USC paper titled "Rest Is Not Idleness," published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, argues that mental wandering is crucial to healthy brain development. In fact, disciplining daydreamers in classrooms could be a bad thing. USC: ...
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Timing Can Affect Whether Women and Minorities Face Discrimination
Timing can affect whether females and minorities experience discrimination -- says a study published today in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Emails were sent from fictional prospective doctoral students to 6,500 professors across 258 institutions, requesting a meeting either that day or next week. Prospective doctoral students with Caucasian male names were 26% more likely to be granted an appointment with a professor when requesting one for next week than those with names signaling that they were minorities (African American, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese) or females.
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Marketing Is More Effective When Targeted to Personality Profiles
Advertisements can be more effective when they are tailored to the unique personality profiles of potential consumers, research suggests.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about new research published in Psychological Science. Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness Pronobesh Banerjee, Promothesh Chatterjee, and Jayati Sinha Can the recollection of past ethical and unethical acts change a person's perception of brightness? Participants were asked to recall an ethical or an unethical event from their past.They were then asked to rate their preference for a number of items -- a lamp, a cracker, and a candle, for example -- and were asked to judge the brightness of the testing room.
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Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory
Scientific American: I remember my retirement like it was yesterday. As I recall, I am still working, though not as hard as I did when I was younger. My wife and I still live in the city, where we bicycle a fair amount and stay fit. We have a favorite coffee shop where we read the morning papers and say hello to the other regulars. We don’t play golf. In reality, I’m not even close to retirement. This is just a scenario I must have spun out at some point in the past. There are other future scenarios, but the details aren’t all that important. Notably, all of my futures have a peaceful and contented feel to them.
