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Competence vs. Performance
The field of developmental psychology is fraught with some very popularized but misunderstood dichotomies. Nature versus is nurture is probably the most well known, but another important distinction is that between competence and performance. Jeff mentioned a little bit about this distinction a few months ago in his post about desirable difficulties in the classroom…
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Are you more of a conformist during flu season?
Looking back on social psychology’s greatest hits, my mind always drifts first to studies on conformity, largely because they make such good stories. Take Asch, for instance. Who would’ve thought that so many people would willingly follow the crowd in giving a blatantly wrong answer about line length? And then, of course, there’s Milgram. It…
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Career Options for How to Become a Therapist: Multiple Pathways Exist
Many individuals find the idea of helping people for a living to be appealing. There is no one path to this type of career. Clinicians, therapists, coaches, social workers, or psychologist, provide psychotherapy and guidance to people. Below are several popular avenues to becoming a professional therapist. Psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a medical doctor that…
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What are the Areas of Study within Psychology?
The field of psychology had its modern origin just over 100 years ago, and yet interest in the field has grown rapidly. Researchers with broad and varied interests have expanded the field, and as a result there are many different subdisciplines. Highlighted here are several key areas of psychology. Biological psychologists apply biological principles to…
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Emotional Control: Strategies we use for regulating our emotions
Emotions are a central component of the human experience. They facilitate social interactions, allow us to both appreciate and create powerful works in arts and literature, and guide us in achieving personal goals. These are only a few of the myriad ways that demonstrate the important role emotions play in our lives. In a letter…
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The Power of Glasses: Evidence-Based Charitable Giving, Part 2
In the poor, rural Gansu province in China, 10-15% of young students need glasses but only 2% of those kids actually have glasses. To follow up on my previous post on the science of charitable giving, in this post I’ll briefly describe a recent study which found that simply giving these students glasses significantly increased…
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What is Cognitive Science?
This article originally appeared in the Psychology in Action Newsletter (Issue 5, Part B). If you’re in an introductory psychology class, you’ve probably learned about Freud, Skinner, and Piaget, who were profoundly important in the foundations of psychology. But you probably haven’t heard much about Noam Chomsky or Allen Newell, although both of these people…
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Conventional wisdom upset? Persistent action potential firing in distal axons
Here’s some really interesting information that may change our traditional views about information flow in the nervous system. Neuroscience students learn early on about the mechanics of nerve impulses. It’s important because it’s how neurons, the cells of the nervous system, convey information to each other. Feel free to start reading after the figure to…
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Research about teen texting from Society for Research on Child Development
This was first posted on Society for Research on Adolescence’s blog… here is link if you want to read more about news from conference from other bloggers as well. SRCD in Montreal, Day 1! One of the first symposiums I attended, bright and early this morning at 8AM, was about a topic that I am…