RefBan

Referral Banners

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

ScienceDaily: Living Well News

ScienceDaily: Living Well News


Children don't give words special power to categorize their world

Posted: 27 Dec 2011 11:25 AM PST

New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them. In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items -- words like "dog" or "pencil" -- don't have the same ability to influence the thinking of children.

Elderly can be as fast as young in some brain tasks, study shows

Posted: 27 Dec 2011 11:25 AM PST

Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings. But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed. In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy -- meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren't so different from younger adults.

Quality of mother-toddler relationship linked to teen obesity

Posted: 26 Dec 2011 06:33 AM PST

The quality of the emotional relationship between a mother and her young child could affect the potential for that child to be obese during adolescence, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed national data detailing relationship characteristics between mothers and their children during their toddler years. The lower the quality of the relationship in terms of the child's emotional security and the mother's sensitivity, the higher the risk that a child would be obese at age 15 years, according to the analysis.

What are emotion expressions for?

Posted: 23 Dec 2011 08:41 AM PST

That cartoon scary face -- wide eyes, ready to run -- may have helped our primate ancestors survive in a dangerous wild, according to a new article. The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person's feelings to the people around him.

Religious beliefs battle hypertension, study of church attendance suggests

Posted: 23 Dec 2011 08:40 AM PST

Does a belief in God confer any health benefits? Researchers have found a clear relationship between time spent in church and lower blood pressure in both women and men.

No comments: