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The Myth of the Harmless Wrong
The New York Times: SOCIAL conservatives who bemoan the immorality of same-sex marriage typically also decry the harm it wreaks on society. The pundit Alan Keyes calls gay marriage a “social weapon of mass destruction,” while the North Carolina pastor Michael Barrett argues that widespread gay marriage would be “equivalent to a nuclear holocaust.” To liberals, the claim that same-sex marriage is socially harmful is uninformed at best (granting gay rights actually appears to improve a country’s gross domestic product) and shameless fear-mongering at worst. Either way, liberals contend that opponents of gay marriage are inventing victims that they don’t actually see. ...
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‘Baby-talk’ might not be easy to understand for kids, study finds
PBS: Parents may be using “baby-talk” when speaking to infants with the goal of making it easier for babies to understand, but a new Japanese study shows this may have the opposite effect. Two research teams, one in Japan and one in Paris, published their findings in Psychological Science to determine if mothers do speak more clearly to infants. Researchers in Tokyo recorded 22 Japanese mothers speaking to their children, all 18-24 months, as well as to an experimenter. Over the next five years, researchers analyzed the speech and found when talking to the experimenter, mothers spoke more clearly than when speaking to their babies. Read the whole story: PBS
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Love Hot Sauce? Your Personality May Be A Good Predictor
NPR: A Myers-Briggs personality test can help you determine whether you're an extrovert. But could your love of hot sauce reveal something about your temperament, too? As we have reported, back in the 1980s, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania named Paul Rozin documented a connection between liking roller coasters and liking spicy food. More recently, a group of researchers at Penn State has shown that personality seems to be a significant player in our lust for heat or spice in our food. One study found that people who were most inclined to enjoy action movies, adventure-seeking and exploration were about six times more likely to enjoy the burn of a spicy meal.
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You Have No Idea What Happened
The New Yorker: R.T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate. R. T. was a student in a class taught by Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist who had begun studying memory in the seventies.
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Closing the Math Gap for Boys
The New York Times: ON a recent afternoon, the banter of boisterous adolescents at Edwin G. Foreman High School, in a poor, racially and ethnically mixed Chicago neighborhood, echoed off the corridor walls. But Room 214 was as silent as a meditation retreat. Inside, 16 ninth- and 10th-grade African-American and Latino boys were working, two-on-one, with a tutor. They’re among 1,326 boys in 12 public schools in this city who are sweating over math for an hour every day. ... A colleague of Mr. Levitt’s, the Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, presents a similar argument on the science of early brain development: “Skill begets skill, and early skill makes later skill acquisition easier.
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To Heighten Creativity, Take a Good Look at Your Selves
Pacific Standard: Having trouble coming up with creative ideas? Well, who do you think you are? That’s not a put-down: It’s a fundamentally important question, and newly published research suggests answering it can help inspire innovative thinking. Specifically, it concludes spending a few minutes pondering the various identities you wear—spouse, parent, employee, sports fan, political partisan, what-have-you—can lead to more creative insights. “A more versatile, integrated, or flexible self-view ... may offer a simple way to boost creativity,” writes a research team led by University of Chicago psychologist Sarah Gaither.
