Drinking Coffee With Sugar Boosts Brain Power, Memory

Author: Deborah Huso

Publication name: Aol Health

Date of publication: November 29, 2010

Summary: Can that cup of coffee increase your attention span and memory? Yes, according to researchers at the University of Barcelona who recently conducted a study to confirm “if caffeine and glucose can have beneficial effects on cognitive performance.” Participants in this study were all similar: healthy, right handed and low caffeine consuming subjects. The test: each of these participants received one of the following beverages: (1) plain water, (2) water plus 75 grams of glucose or natural sugar (sugar produced from plants, not in labs), (3) water plus 75 milligrams of caffeine, and (4) water plus both 75 milligrams of caffeine and sugar. How they tested the claim: two MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) once before and thirty minutes after consuming the beverage. In addition to the MRIs, a continuous performance test was used to evaluate the attention span of each participant. The results: a combination of glucose and caffeine could increase a person’s attention span. Dr. Richard Lipton, professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine said, “Imagine a circuit with a light bulb, a battery and a switch. In a sense, caffeine acts as a molecular switch and glucose acts as the battery. If you throw the switch without the battery, the light will not go on.”

LINKS TO STUDY: N/A

ARTICLE: http://www.aolhealth.com/2010/11/29/coffee-and-sugar-are-a-good-mix-for-brain-power/

SUBMITTED BY: Lovedeep Uppal

Plagiarism and Its Effect on Creative Work

AUTHOR: Shelley Carson

PUBLICATION NAME: Psychology Today

DATE OF PUBLICATION: October 16, 2010

SUMMARY: Why do students choose to plagiarize work? I’m sure educators have been asking that question, ever since there has been formal education. According to Shelley Carson, not only is it happening consistently at the college level, but it’s actually increasing. Plagiarism, just in general, is considered to be dishonest morally, and in many cases be illegal, legally. Especially at the College/University level of education, they take plagiarism very seriously, ranging punishments from receiving a failing grade to getting expelled from the school. (I find it worthy to note, that many students that I’ve known through personal experience, have gone through plagiarizing, usually on more than one occasion, so that they can get a good grade, so that they can get into a good college. These people range across the academic scale, that is, smart as well as not so smart people are guilty of this. Its rather ironic that the thing that, at least they think, is helping them get in to a good college, is the thing that might get them kicked out.)

So, if the punishments are so high, why do students do it? Well, Mrs. Carson asked this question to her students, and received a variety of answers. Many of them, she explains, “…tell me that they just got overwhelmed with their coursework and that the capability of reducing their stress by lifting material from an article or essay on the internet was just too tempting.” I think everyone who has ever been a student in the “Internet Age” can offer this excuse, and I must admit, I have been guilty of the ctrl+c ctrl+v once or twice in my life time. Others claim that they have been doing this for their entire academic career, and were never caught before, so why stop, right? Still others believe that there is nothing wrong with plagiarism. She tells us "Everybody does it," is a typical response.” The classic bandwagon effect, it’s okay if others are doing it. Carson states that it is “hard to argue against the "everybody does it" argument.” This is because, truthfully, everybody seems to be doing it, Science Blogs, the President, even William Shakespeare (According to the article).

However, Carson strongly discourages people from plagiarizing work. She states that “stealing” other people’s property decreases motivation to actually be creative and put time and effort in to work. Also, from an author’s perspective, it de-motivates you from wanting to produce anything else, because what’s the point if someone is just going to take credit for your hard work?

Why does this matter? Carson believes “rampant plagiarism will contribute to the "dumbing down" of our culture rather than the rise of a Golden Age…” Which, I can say from personal experience, is happening slowly, but there is definitely evidence of it happening. She suggests to all writers that they credit their sources and that Parents/Educators not turn a blind eye towards plagiarism.

LINKS TO STUDY: N/A

ARTICLE: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-art/201010/plagiarism-and-its-effect-creative-work

SUBMITTED BY: Brendan Soper (Not Jack...)

The Only Child : Not a Loner?

AUTHOR: Pamela Paul

PUBLICATION NAME: The New york Times

DATE OF PUBLICATION: September 10,2010

SUMMARY: Being the only child does not affect their interpersonal skills. In fact, they are as skillful as children with sibling according to Dr. Downey and Dr. Bobbitt-Zeher. They did some research in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolesent Health on 13,466 students from 7th grade all the way to 12th grade. By finding out the total average nuber of friends each individual students have and found out that the total number of friends the children with sibling are the same as the children without sibling.

The only child would start out from kindergarten and appear to lack a little of interpersonal skills, self-control, and behavior problems started by the teacher that was asked to evaluate the students. Due to the fact that they don't have interaction with other students would give them these types of problems and skills. Later on, the behaviors of children without sibling will catch up the those children who have sibling by the time they reach middle school. Dr. Downey concludes that the children who doen't have siblings improve over time because of the continuation of teachers that provide group projects and school clubs. The activities five the students a change to spend time and interact with others their own age.

However, Dalton Conley has a different conclusion, "it's plausible these only kids have trouble relating to fellow 5-year-olds," He added, "as they age, they are better able to relate to kids who are more adult like." Therefore, the children without sibling tend to make friends and have better relationships with other students that are more adult like rather than those who have child like personalities.

LINK TO STUDY: N/A

ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/fasion/12Studied.html?_r=1&ref=sociology

SUBMITTED BY: Hue Ly

Girls are More Intelligent than Boys, but Men are More Intelligent than Women

AUTHOR: Satoshi Kanazawa

PUBLICATION NAME: Psychology Today

DATE OF PUBLICATION: October 3, 2010

SUMMARY: Girls mature faster than boys, so the “male advantage” in intelligence does not seem to appear until after puberty. Due to a large difference in maturity level, comparing two boys at age 10 is considered the equivalent to comparing two girls at the age of 12. Older and more mature children have a greater cognitive capacity than those children younger and less mature.

Britain’s National Child Development Study took a group of about 17,000 newborns in March of 1958 and followed them for more than fifty years, measuring their IQs at set dates. Using data from this interesting study, it is apparent that at ages seven and eleven (before puberty), girls have a higher IQ than boys. This indicates that prepubescent girls are more generally intelligent than prepubescent boys.

At age 16, however, measuring the IQs of the same group of children, it is evident that the roles have been reversed: males at this age have a slightly higher IQ than females.

Kanazawa claims that the later male advantage in intelligence is attributed to both maturity as well as height. This height theory connects to a previous post by Kanazawa and study, which can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women

The notion that young girls are more intelligent than young boys is widely accepted and is no surprise. Boys are much less mature than girls. However, the theory about teenage boys and men being more intelligent than teenage girls and women is somewhat controversial. It is an interesting concept, one that I believe will take many more years and many more studies to actually prove, if it ever can be proved.

LINKS TO STUDY: none

ARTICLE: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201010/girls-are-more-intelligent-boys-men-are-more-intelligent-w

SUBMITTED BY: Courtney Caglia-Hilty

Study: Jealousy Is (Literally) Blinding

AUTHOR: Jessica Bennett

PUBLICATION NAME: Newsweek

DATE OF PUBLICATION: April 13th, 2010

SUMMARY: David Buss, a psychologist from the University of Texas, wrote a book called The Dangerous Passion in which he explained how jealously could actually expose partners in relationships to "extreme dangers".

In a research at the University of Delaware with twenty-five different couples that was published in the April issue of the American Psychological Association journal Emotion, the women became so overcome with jealously with their partners that they could not concentrate on the targets that were appearing on their computer screen. The study consisted of the men and women sitting next to each other on two different computer screens. The men were told to look at graphic pictures of women while rating their attractiveness. The women were told to look at a series of rapid images and asked to point on the images of landscapes. The women that became so jealous could only concentrate on what their partners were looking at and how they rated each picture and not on finding the targets on their own computer. So in this way "jealousy was blinding". The two authors of the journal Emotion, Steven Most and Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, said “the influence of social emotions—known to affect moods, behaviors and physical health—appears to permeate so deeply as to affect processes involved in visual awareness.”

This experiment was not tested on men. Meaning, they did not have the men and women switch roles. Researchers suggest that if this same study were to be done on males, the results would be very similar.

LINKS TO STUDY: No links to original study were available.

ARTICLE: http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2010/04/13/study-jealousy-is-literally-blinding.html

SUBMITTED BY: Meera Narayanan

The Creativity Crisis

AUTHORS: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

PUBLICATION NAME: Newsweek

PUBLICATION DATE: July 10, 2010

SUMMARY: Research shows that creativity in America is declining. In 1958, professor E. Paul Torrance developed several tasks with which to measure creativity, which is defined as "the production of something that is original and useful". Creativity requires an individual to come up with original ideas and merge those ideas together into a result. Using Torrance's tasks, Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered that the creativity scores has been rising up until 1990, at which point they declined. The decline is reported to be most serious for children from kindergarten to sixth grade.

It is likely that the lack of creativity is due to children spending more hours in front of the TV and playing video games, rather than with creative activities. Other culprits could be the lack of creativity in schools and the fact that many children stop asking as many questions as they used to.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gary G. Gute, while studying the childhoods of highly creative people, found that they tend to have grown up in families that give stability, yet also encourage uniqueness, which resulted in adaptability. Clear rules kept the kids stay in control during times of stress, but the kids were also able to flourish in creativity during times of boredom. These highly creative adults also frequently grew up with hardships, which doesn't necessarily have a direct link to creation, but forces them to become more flexible, which in turn, helps with creativity.

American teachers say that "there’s no room in the day for a creativity class", but Rex Jung, a neuroscientist at the University of Mexico claims that creativity can be improved with practice. According to him, habitual practice and consistency gradually changes the patterns in the brain to gear toward creativity. New research also says that creativity is part of the brain's normal function. However, the researchers conclude that very little is being done to spur the rates of creativity in America, although creativity is highly prized in our society.

LINKS TO STUDY: none

ARTICLE: The Creativity Crisis

SUBMITTED BY: Kimberly Truong