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The case for buying kids audiobooks this holiday season
Giving kids books as presents always feels good. It might not elicit the joy that a new gadget might, but there is comfort to knowing that what you are giving is unambiguously good for them and not potentially addling their brains. What about audiobooks? Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of the 2015 Raising Kids Who Read, says audiobooks are a wonderful way to fill time that might otherwise not have been filled. “Print may be best for lingering over words or ideas, but audiobooks add literacy to moments where there would otherwise be none,” he wrote recently in the New York Times.
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The science of giving gifts your loved ones won’t want to return
Trying to find an ideal gift for a friend or family member, or at least something that won’t end up in the trash, is a perennial source of pre-holiday anxiety. As it happens, behavioral science can help. After all, gift-giving combines economics and psychology (the exchange of goods plus the complicating desire to affirm or celebrate a personal relationship), and those two academic fields have grown ever more entwined in recent years. So before struggling to sort through the likes, dislikes, quirks and wishes of the people on your holiday lists, you may want to consider some recent findings about which gift-giving strategies work — and which don’t. First, should we give gifts at all?
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Unrelated Events Are Linked in Memory When They Happen Close Together
Occurring within a brief window of time links two events in memory, such that calling forth memory of one helps retrieve memory for the other event. Visit Page
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Stanford psychologist Eleanor Maccoby dies at 101
Eleanor Maccoby, the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Psychology, Emerita, at Stanford, recognized for scholarly contributions to gender studies and child and family psychology, died Dec. 11 at age 101 of pneumonia in Palo Alto. Maccoby was the first woman to serve as chair of the Stanford Department of Psychology, a position she held from 1973 to 1976. At Stanford, Maccoby was associated with the Center for the Study of Families, Children and Youth. Through that work, she became known for research on social and intellectual development in children.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how we make and perceive Bayesian judgments, visual attention and objective perception, and pupillary contagion in autism. Visit Page
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The Dark Triad and the Evolution of Jerks
A great deal of recent research on evolution focuses on altruism—the tendency of creatures to help others, often at great cost to themselves. This is especially true of human beings, who help one another for a variety of good evolutionary reasons. For instance, people help kin, which is a way of preserving the genes that they share. People help others who are likely to help them back. But the prevalence of altruism also raises an evolutionary paradox: If evolution has selected humans to be nice and kind, how do we explain the high prevalence of jerks?
