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5 Proven Benefits Of Play
It may be a new school year, yet I come to sing the praises of trampolines and bubble-blowing, pillow forts and peekaboo, Monopoly and Marco Polo. A new paper in the journal Pediatrics summarizes the evidence for letting kids let loose. "Play is not frivolous," the paper insists, twice. "It is brain building." The authors — Michael Yogman, Andrew Garner, Jeffrey Hutchinson, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff — ask pediatricians to take an active role by writing a "prescription for play" for their young patients in the first two years of life.
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Why liars lie: What science tells us about deception
We all do it sometimes, even though we know it’s wrong. But here’s the problem with lying: Research shows that the more you lie, the easier it gets, and the more likely you are to do it again. “The dangerous thing about lying is people don’t understand how the act changes us,” said Dan Ariely, behavioral psychologist at Duke. Lying is in the news this week after President Trump's longtime lawyer testified that Trump had directed him to pay hush money to a porn star named Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. The courtroom admission not only implicated Trump in a crime, it also exposed months of denials by Trump and his aides as lies.
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Replication Project Investigates Effect of Moral Reminders on Cheating Behavior
A large-scale replication effort did not reproduce previous findings showing that people are less likely to cheat on a task after making a list of the Ten Commandments.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest findings publishing in Clinical Psychological Science: The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy Stefan G. Hofmann and Steven C. Hayes The medical illness model, which assumes that symptoms reflect a latent disease that should be targeted with a specific therapy protocol, has been the norm in clinical science, but this seems to be changing. Hoffman and Hayes consider the developments in the field that allow for a move toward process-based therapy (PBT), especially in cognitive-behavioral therapy.
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Why Your Kid Should Be a Rebel
Most parents dread the day their child is labeled “rebellious.” But Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, hopes to change this negative connotation. Rather than regard rebels as troublemakers or outcasts, Gino argues, “effective rebels are people who challenge the status quo and break rules constructively, creating positive change in the process.” That’s why she believes that parents should, in fact, groom their kids to be rebels. In the latest episode of Home School, The Atlantic’s animated video series about parenting, Gino reveals why parents should teach kids to question the rules rather than take them for granted.
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More social science studies just failed to replicate. Here’s why this is good.
One of the cornerstone principles of science is replication. This is the idea that experiments need to be repeated to find out if the results will be consistent. The fact that an experiment can be replicated is how we know its results contain a nugget of truth. Without replication, we can’t be sure. For the past several years, social scientists have been deeply worried about the replicability of their findings. Incredibly influential, textbook findings in psychology — like the “ego depletion” theory of willpower, or the “marshmallow test” — have been bending or breaking under rigorous retests.
