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Kids Show How Society Thinks
Psychological scientist Margaret Beale Spencer says that children can teach us a lot about the society in which they’re raised. “Our children are always near us because we are a society, and what we put out there, kids report back. You ask the question, they’ll give you the answer.” In 2010, CNN commissioned Spence to lead a pilot study examining children’s attitudes toward race. The test she designed involved 133 black and white children from different economic and regional backgrounds in the United States. The young students in Spencer’s study saw drawings of five children whose skin color ranged from dark to light.
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Do The Funky…Pigeon
You could read Emma Ware’s PhD thesis to find out how social dynamics influence the behavior of pigeons…or, you could watch her dance. Ware was the Social Science winner of the 2011 Dance Your PhD Contest, sponsored by Science and TEDxBrussels. Her dance shows that when confronted when an unresponsive female pigeon on a prerecorded video, the courtship behavior of male pigeons decreased. Courtship behavior also decreased in response to a nine-second delay in the female’s response. In contrast, the male’s courtship behavior didn’t decrease in response to one-second delays, three-second delays, or spatial manipulations.
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Writing Tip: Better “You” Than “I”
You are a sick man…you are a spiteful man. That’s not the first line of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground; Dostoyevsky used the first person: “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.” Do readers respond differently to stories depending upon whether they are narrated from the perspective of ‘‘you’’ or ‘‘I’’? Recent research published in the Journal of Cognitive Psychology offers some tips for writers who want to impact their readers. Tad T. Brunye and coauthors chose eight passages from two novels and created a first- and second-person version of each passage. The researchers asked undergraduate students to read one set of four passages written from either an “I” or “you” perspective.
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Why Relationships End
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Judith Biesen from the University of the Pacific present her poster session research on “Sexual Satisfaction and the Decision to Terminate a Romantic Relationship.” Biesen and her coauthors assessed how two factors — the ascription to certain life roles (i.e. marital role, occupational role, parental role) and topics chosen for a problem-solving discussion) — moderated the relationship between sexual satisfaction and relationship termination.
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A Conversation About Music, Mind, and Health
What effect does music have on the brain, and what can music teach us about the brain? In this video 24th APS Annual Convention Speaker Aniruddh Patel and music therapist Barbara Reuer speak with David Granet of the University of California's Health Matters about music, cognition, and health. Scientists are just beginning to understand music’s implications for language acquisition, emotions, social skills, learning, and memory. Watch the interview to learn more about music and the mind, including research published in Psychological Science showing that music and other synchronized activities encourage cooperation.
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23rd Annual Greater New York Conference on Behavioral Research Thanks APS
Last Fall 140 students and faculty researchers from over 20 institutions as far as California and Moscow converged on Touro College’s Lander College for Women in Manhattan for the 23rd Greater New York Conference on Behavioral Research. This Conference included 41 scientific presentations by 59 researchers, selected by a review committee of faculty from area colleges. The Greater New York Conference was started in 1989 in New York City by a consortium of 8 organizations, including APS, with the aim to involve students in high quality behavioral research.
