-
How schooling leads to good health
People who go to school lead healthier, longer lives. That connection is well documented and unsurprising. But as obvious as this link is to us, the fact is we don't really know why that's the case. What is it about formal education that translates -- sometimes way down the road -- into better health choices? What's going on in the mind, at the basic cognitive level, that gives rise to lasting life skills? One possibility is that schooling simply conveys knowledge about illness and disease prevention, and that better informed people make sounder judgments. But there is good reason to doubt this explanation.
-
Text Messages Reveal the Emotional Timeline of September 11, 2001
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have been called the defining moment of our time. Thousands of people died and the attacks had huge individual and collective consequences, including two wars. But less is known about the immediate emotional reactions to the attacks. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed text messages sent on September 11, 2001 for emotional words. They found spiking anxiety and steadily increasing anger through that fateful day. The researchers took advantage of transcripts of more than 500,000 text messages sent to pagers on the day of the attacks.
-
Anger trumped terror on 9/11
If a terrorist attack provokes mostly anger instead of fear, does that mean it has failed? It's an intriguing question in light of a new study, which tracked Americans' negative emotions throughout the day of September 11, 2001. The timeline begins at 6:45 a.m., two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Center, and continues until 12:44 a.m. the following day--covering 20 hours in all. It shows that emotions like hate and wrath were present immediately after the first attack--and increased steadily and strongly the more people learned about the nature of the attacks.
-
Girls’ Early Puberty Linked to Unstable Environment via Insecure Attachment in Infancy
Girls are hitting puberty earlier and earlier. One recent study found that more than 10 percent of American girls have some breast development by age 7. This news has upset many people, but it may make evolutionary sense in some cases for girls to develop faster, according to the authors of a new paper published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Girls who physically mature earlier tend to start dating, have sexual intercourse at a younger age, and have more sexual partners than girls who develop later. That puts them at risk of sexually transmitted diseases and makes them more likely to have a child while they're still teenagers.
-
Eye Movements Reveal Readers’ Wandering Minds
It's not just you…everybody zones out when they're reading. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists recorded eye movements during reading and found that the eyes keep moving when the mind wanders—but they don't move in the same way as they do when you're paying attention. Erik Reichle, a psychological scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, is interested in how the brain controls eye movements. "The goal is to understand how things like word comprehension and visual attention control eye movements," he says.
-
Naming Tools Is a Hands-On Task
You don't just need your eyes to think of the name of a tool; your hands get involved, too. A new study finds that people are slower to identify a picture of a tool if its handle is pointed toward a hand that is busy squeezing a ball. Brain imaging studies have shown that when you identify a tool by name, the part of your brain that's involved in manipulating the tool also turns on. Jessica K. Witt, of Purdue University, heard about some of this research and wanted to know whether it's possible to slow down the process of coming up with the name by making the hands busy.
