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Texts, Sex, and Media Freakouts
As I spent a few minutes this morning updating my Twitter, I was alarmed to see a post that a friend of mine had retweeted from The Atlantic: What’s that? Texting no longer only represents a way for teens to ignore their parents at the dinner table and run up the phone bill, it now…
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Raising an academically motivated child
Children who are motivated on their own to do well in school is a dream of almost every parent. Fortunately, whether a child is intrinsically motivated to do well academically is not purely genetic or based on socioeconomic factors. This means that parents can purposefully contribute to the development of academic intrinsic motivation, or AIM…
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Family Assistance Activities Makes for a Happy Adolescent?
Some may believe that encouraging adolescents to engage in family assistance activities (e.g. taking care of younger siblings and performing household chores) may be overly demanding and stressful for them and thus create more family conflicts. Although this can be the case some of the time, a study conducted at the University of California, Los…
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Warm and Fuzzy Moms Protect Kids Against Future Health Problems
Lots of research suggests that having less money, a less prestigious job, or fewer years of education is bad for health. A person who makes $30,000 a year will be more likely to develop certain health problems, such as cardiovascular disease or even some types of cancer, than a person who makes $40,000, and on…
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Childhood Sexual Assault: Impacts are broad, but not for all victims?
Psychologists often rely on grouping participants together based on shared characteristics (e.g., are girls better than boy in reading ability). The goal is to broadly understand the relationships between potential causes and effects, and, ideally learn from them. In the first example above, perhaps reading interventions targeting boys may be an effect if the study…
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Who can help reduce suicide among lesbian, gay and bisexual adolescents?
A recent string of suicides by adolescent lesbian, gay and bisexual teens has focused attention on what teachers, parents and peers of these teens can do to help. Psychological research has identified a variety of factors which make a difference for these teens, from supportive school environments to accepting reactions by friends.
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What do kids really do all day?
Do children really spend less time outdoors or doing sports? Have they stopped reading? Do they only stare at screens all day? The best way to answer this question is to look at what kids actually do all day, and a recent study did just that with a large group of kids, age 6-12. …
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What makes us Happy?
According to Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, research indicates that it’s not children. In a recent talk at the APA convention, Dr. Gilbert told the crowd of psychologists and psychiatrists that 20 years of research has shown that people without children are happier than those with children. And people with young children…
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Can Video Games Transform Learning?
A lot of really smart people believe that video games are the key to engaging children in school. The question is can video games really teach useful, transferable subjects? The NY Times magazine just put out an issue discussing this very subject. They profiled a school called Quest to Learn that has a curriculum around…
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The Origins of Mental Disorders
The recent article in the New York Times outlining research on the preschool-age depression has raised public interest in the origins of mental disorders. Many non-scholars and even some psychologists are skeptical about the emergence of psychological problems in very young children. The stability of temperament (personalities traits such as extraversion and introversion) is now…