News by Subject Social & Behavior

A new study has discovered that US students achieve better results in reading and mathematics tests when they stay in elementary school for grades 6 (age 11-12) and 7 (age 12-13), rather than transfer to middle school. In contrast, students in grade 8 (age 13-14) achieve better results in middle school than high school.

Five-year-olds enforce reciprocal behavior in social interactions. A study by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich psychologists shows that children come to recognize reciprocity as a norm between the ages of 3 and 5.

Emphasizing more play, hands-on learning, and students helping one another in kindergarten improves academic outcomes, self-control and attention regulation, finds new UBC research.

A new study suggests that distractions -- those pesky interruptions that pull us away from our goals -- might change our perception of what's real, making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw. Even more troubling, the study suggests people might not realize their perception has changed - to the contrary, they might feel great confidence in what they think they saw.

A new study from the University of Washington finds that, based on brain activity, people who live in communities where multiple languages are spoken can identify words in yet another language better than those who live in a monolingual environment.

Several studies had already demonstrated that children who have an elder sibling have poorer linguistic performance than those who have none. Now a research team at the CNRS, Hôpital Robert-Debré AP-HP, the EHESS, the ENS and the INSERM has reported a more specific result: this only concerns children who have an elder brother. This work was published on August 14, 2019 in Psychological Science.

A new study from a UT Dallas assistant professor affiliated with the Infant Brain Imaging Study network that included infants later diagnosed with autism suggests that all children benefit from exposure to rich speech environments from their caregivers. Dr. Meghan Swanson's study extends research about the relationship between caregiver speech and infant language development from typically developing children to those with autism.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore have revealed that chimpanzees and bonobos share the contrasting color pattern seen in human eyes, which makes it easy for them to detect the direction of someone's gaze from a distance.