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Driving Home the Point
When Haneen Saqer, Ewart de Visser, and Jonathan Strohl arrived at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia to talk about the perils of distracted driving, they thought they would be addressing a group of 100 students. Instead, they faced an auditorium of 700 students along with reporters from ABC News and NPR. After all, the trio — who are members of the George Mason University student group Distractions n' Driving (DnD) — had just come to share their graduate research in Human Factors and Applied Cognition. Watch coverage of the program from this ABC 7 News Clip: “We were a bit overwhelmed, but we were prepared,” de Visser says. “The kids really liked it because it was very engaging.
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How to Love Your Body
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Kaitlin K. Meyer from Northwestern University present her poster session research on “What You Love About Your Body: Evolution of an Antifat Talk Intervention.” Some people — even people with normal body mass indexes — are just a little too preoccupied by their desire to lose a few pounds. “Fat talk” occurs when people make negative comments about their own bodies (e.g., “My thighs are soooo big!”). Meyer says that college women are particularly susceptible.
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An Unconventional Solution to Social Ills
Social scientists have hard job, and it’s possible they have a harder job than engineers and physicists. At the very least, Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich in Switzerland thinks that they’re further behind. “Today we are understanding a lot about our physical world and about our universe; also, we have invested a lot in understanding our environment,” says Helbing, who is Scientific Coordinator of FuturITC. “But so far, there’s a lack of understanding of social economic systems.” Social systems are hard to understand because they’re immensely complicated.
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Comfort or Food? This Harlow Love Song Has the Answer
Harry Harlow conducted his famous experiments on maternal separation and social isolation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1950s and 1960s. Decades later, Brad Wray and his independent study students from Arundel High School in Maryland have set one of those experiments to music. Harlow took baby monkeys from their mothers and placed them with two “surrogate” mothers: one made of wire that dispensed milk and one made of terry cloth that didn’t dispense milk. The song, set to the tune of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” tells how the baby monkeys had to make a choice.
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Agreement of Alcohol Use Among Roommates
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Grace Jackson from New York University present her poster session research on “Agreement of Alcohol Use: A Year-Long Study of College Roommates.” Grace Jackson is interested in researching how relationships progress over time. Jackson and coauthors Sean P. Lane (New York University), Gertraud Stadler (Columbia University),Niall Bolger (Columbia University), andPatrick E. Shrout (New York University) studied 293 pairs of undergraduate roommates (N = 586). They found that roommates are generally pretty good at reporting trait-level, a.k.a.
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In the Mood for Some Pi(e)?
Thanks to computer-driven calculations, we know the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter goes on past one trillion digits. But since the 18th century, we’ve just called this behemoth number, Pi (π). And since 1988, people have been celebrating Pi Day on March 14th (3/14). Daily Observations has a few suggestions for celebrating Pi Day the psychological-science way: Don’t use your high school geometry skills very often? They might be helping you out anyway. A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests that “numeracy” — like literacy, but for numbers instead of letters — actually helps you make more informed decisions.
