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MacArthur ‘genius’ grant winners ponder a new future: ‘Your life can change in an instant.’
Kristina Olson has always been fascinated by questions of gender. As a psychologist, she’d studied how children behaved in social groups, and five years ago, she decided she wanted to know more about transgender children who were living as their self-identified gender. “At least initially, transgender kids feel they are a part of a gender group that the whole world doesn’t believe they’re in, and that’s a really unique experience, and I wanted to understand what that experience was like,” said Olson, 37, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the director of the Social Cognitive Development Lab there.
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Are You a Visual or an Auditory Learner? It Doesn’t Matter
You must read this article to understand it, but many people feel reading is not how they learn best. They would rather listen to an explanation or view a diagram. Researchers have formalized those intuitions into theories of learning styles. These theories are influential enough that many states (including New York) require future teachers to know them and to know how they might be used in the classroom. But there’s no good scientific evidence that learning styles actually exist. Over the last several decades, researchers have proposed dozens of theories, each suggesting a scheme to categorize learners.
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Opioids and Driving: A Prescription for Crashes
Among those who used prescription pain relievers regularly, 14.4% reported driving after taking opioids.
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How to Meet Autistic People Halfway
One of the most widely held beliefs about autistic people — that they are not interested in other people — is almost certainly wrong. Our understanding of autism has changed quite a bit over the past century, but this particular belief has been remarkably persistent.
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Yes, Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression, but Debate Lingers
Intuitively, it makes sense Splatterhouse and Postal 2 would serve as virtual training sessions for teens, encouraging them to act out in ways that mimic game-related violence. But many studies have failed to find a clear connection between violent game play and belligerent behavior, and the controversy over whether the shoot-‘em-up world transfers to real life has persisted for years. A new study published on October 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to resolve the controversy by weighing the findings of two dozen studies on the topic. The meta-analysis does tie violent video games to a small increase in physical aggression among adolescents and preteens.
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Big Data Gives the “Big 5” Personality Traits a Makeover
From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Hollywood, humans have attempted to understand their fellow man through labeling and categorization. There was Hippocrates’s blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile; the classic dramatic archetypes of hero, ingenue, jester and wise man; and, of course, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda from the famous HBO series More rigorously, psychologists have worked to develop empirical tests that assess core aspects of personality. The “Big Five” traits (extroversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness) emerged in the 1940s through studies of the English language for descriptive terms.
