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Older and wiser? Some brain functions improve as we age
The Boston Globe: There is hope for aging baby boomers. The ability to recall names and faces with lightning speed may start to fade in one’s 20s, but our capability to perform other functions, such as learning new words, doesn’t peak until decades later, according to a new study by Boston scientists. Increasingly, researchers are discovering that the ability to reason, learn, and recall information ebbs and flows over our lifespan, and if a picture were drawn to depict these changes, the image would not be of a single line with a sharp, steep decline, but of a line with many curves that plateau at different stages.
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Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions
The Atlantic: When Paul Ekman was a grad student in the 1950s, psychologists were mostly ignoring emotions. Most psychology research at the time was focused on behaviorism—classical conditioning and the like. Silvan Tomkins was the one other person Ekman knew of who was studying emotions, and he’d done a little work on facial expressions that Ekman saw as extremely promising. “To me it was obvious,” Ekman says. “There’s gold in those hills; I have to find a way to mine it.” For his first cross-cultural studies in the 1960s, he traveled around the U.S., Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
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Temptation in the Neurons
Lack of self-control is at the root of many personal and social ills, from alcoholism to obesity. Even when we are well aware of the costs, many of us are simply unable to curb our desires and control our impulses. Indeed, so daunting is this psychological challenge that an estimate four in every ten American deaths is attributed to self-control failure of one kind or another. Yet many other people do succeed at self-regulation, all the time and seemingly with ease. Why is that? Why, in the face of everyday temptation, do some individuals fail miserably while others coast by unscathed? Psychological scientists have been puzzling over this problem for years, but the answer remains elusive.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of new research published in Clinical Psychological Science: The Structure of Psychopathology in Adolescence: Replication of a General Psychopathology Factor in the TRAILS Study Odilia M. Laceulle, Wilma A. M. Vollebergh, and Johan Ormel In 2013, Caspi and colleagues found evidence for the existence of a general factor underlying all symptoms of psychopathology. In this study, Laceulle and colleagues attempted to replicate the earlier findings in a large sample of Dutch adolescents who were part of the TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey.
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Does Video Game Driving Translate to Real-World Skills?
Evidence is mounting that playing video games may be one way for people to sharpen a number of cognitive skills. One recent study found that older adults could significantly improve their ability to multi-task after playing a specially designed driving video game called NeuroRacer. Another study from researchers at the University of Rochester found that playing action-packed video games improved people’s ability to make quick decisions and ignore distractions. But can hours spent hunched over a controller translate to real skills on the road?
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Are ‘Learning Styles’ a Symptom of Education’s Ills?
The New York Times: Do you like to learn by seeing, hearing or doing? According to some education researchers, it may not matter. They say the idea of teaching according to students’ “preferred learning styles” — auditory, visual or kinesthetic — has little to no empirical backing. But although criticism may be denting the idea’s popularity, it still persists — which may say something larger about the way teachers today are trained. Students do have preferences when it comes to receiving information visually or verbally, said Mark A.
