IB Psychology: 5th Edition

The 5th edition of IB Psychology is currently under development! One new area of focus compared to previous years will be more time spent on the unconscious! We will explore the final frontier of psychology! It may get a little creepy but that is the fascinating part!

MrCaro.com will be under some new construction next month as well!

And finally, there will be a corresponding interactive web site for the course located at
http://mrcaro.ning.com/

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Stay tuned for more IB Psychology Updates!


Unraveling how children become bilingual so easily
Associated Press - July 21, 2009

WASHINGTON - The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?

New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English - "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out - how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains - or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual - by simply speaking to them in two languages - can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns - nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time - like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba - while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.

While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.

"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process. You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."

Yet a soon-to-be-released survey from the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization that researches language issues, shows U.S. elementary schools cut back on foreign language instruction over the last decade. About a quarter of public elementary schools were teaching foreign languages in 1997, but just 15 percent last year, say preliminary results posted on the center's Web site.

What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language - TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans - a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography - that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.

But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.

"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."

Psychology of thriving: Mental health is not just expelling illness. Now, science explores what it takes to flourish

Jul. 6--Back in 1971, Philip Zimbardo locked students in basements beneath Stanford University to see what would happen.

It's not difficult to imagine his doing this. Zimbardo, with his slicked-back, black hair, sharp nose, and devil T-shirt, looks remarkably like a cartoon villain. And the outcome of his Stanford Prison Experiment was truly dark -- in less than a week, ordinary college students assigned to the role of prison guard had turned viciously sadistic, while those designated as prisoners cowered in terror.

But now, Zimbardo says, he's changed. In his opening lecture last month at the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in Philadelphia, he emphasized this point by blasting Santana's "Evil Ways" through the speakers of the Center City Philadelphia Sheraton. And 1,600 positive psychologists stood up and danced.

For too long, says Zimbardo, psychologists -- including himself -- have spent most of their time trying to understand how and why things go wrong. This work has produced, among other benefits, effective therapies for mental illnesses. But mental health, like physical health, means more than just eliminating sickness. It means actively thriving.

Can science shed light on what it takes to flourish? Zimbardo thinks it can. "We ask big questions and come up with solid answers based on the best experimental data," he explained. Below, we offer a few snapshots from talks presented at the congress, featuring positive psychologists quantifying some of the most personal aspects of the human experience -- things such as passion, love, and our perception of time.

Time out of mind

Facts. Emotions. Logic. If you ask most people what they base their decisions on, this is the type of answer you're likely to get. But Zimbardo thinks it's not the whole story -- or even most of it.

"The main thing that determines your decisions," he said, "is something you're unaware of -- your perspective on time."

Imagine going out to lunch with co-workers and deciding whether to have that second martini. You could approach the decision by considering what happened last time you drank too much at lunch, or by envisioning how it would affect your work performance later in the day. You could focus on how much fun it would be right now. Or you might figure that you never get much done in the afternoon anyway, so why not?

These four responses are typical of distinct time perspectives: past, future, present-hedonistic, and present-fatalistic.

Zimbardo and his colleagues created a time-perspective survey and gave it to thousands of people. Many had a single, strong time orientation, but some were more mixed.

Not surprising, college students scoring high in the present-hedonistic category were more likely to drink, smoke, use drugs, and drive dangerously.

But in older people recovering from heart trouble, a present-hedonistic orientation had the opposite effect. Elderly people who lived for the moment were more likely to take responsibility for their health.

That's because older people can't take good health for granted, the Canadian researchers who conducted the study said. Many simple daily pleasures are only possible if seniors take care of their bodies. And some activities that give immediate gratification -- such as socializing with friends and being physically active -- also have long-term health benefits.

The first step to making better decisions, Zimbardo says, is to understand how your own time perspective biases your thinking. Then you can start nudging it a little closer to the ideal: feeling positive about the past, planning for the future, and savoring the occasional splash of present hedonism. Take the test and see how you measure up at www.thetimeparadox.com.

Talk about the passion

Whether it's a dream set far in the future or a momentary pleasure, most of us are passionate about something. But University of Quebec professor Robert Vallerand is passionate about, well, passion.

He and his research group developed a survey to measure people's passion for their favorite activities. People rate how strongly, on a scale of one to seven, they agree with statements such as, "If I could, I would only do this activity," or "This activity reflects qualities I like about myself." Strong agreement with either statement is a sign of passion.

Not just the intensity, but also the type of passion matters. Vallerand and his colleagues identified two main kinds of passion: obsessive and harmonious. A person who is obsessively passionate about his favorite activity would agree more with the first statement, while someone whose passion is harmonious would agree more with the second.

When things are going well, it's hard to distinguish between these two types of passion. But when obstacles arise, they can lead to very different behavior.

Obsessively passionate cyclists braved Quebec's frigid winter weather to complete their daily bike rides, while those who were more harmonious spun at home or at the gym. Similarly, obsessively passionate dancers had more trouble taking enough time off to fully heal after an injury, sometimes leading to chronic damage.

Passion matters not only to individuals, but also to society, Vallerand said.

When he compared high-achieving professionals profiled by the Montreal newspaper La Presse with a random sample of people from an evening commuter train, he found that the high achievers were more passionate. They also worked an average of nine hours more per week.

What can you do to cultivate harmonious passion? Vallerand suggests three steps. First, select an activity you like, and set aside enough time to do it regularly. Second, internalize the activity -- make it part of how you see yourself. Finally, focus on enjoying the activity and improving your own performance -- not avoiding failure or doing better than others.

For better or for worse?

Passion can ignite romantic attraction, but the fate of relationships may depend on surprising details -- such as how one spouse responds to the other sharing some good news.

Shelly Gable, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, studies how couples respond to positive events, which could range from winning a casual Frisbee game to getting that long-awaited promotion at work.

Psychologists already knew that if one partner in a relationship provided support after a negative event, this helped the other partner and strengthened the relationship. But no one had looked at positive events.

When Gable did, the results surprised her. Enthusiasm after a positive event strengthened the relationship more than support after a negative event.

"I thought it would be important, but not as important as it was," she said, adding that needing help can make people feel incompetent or indebted.

Another unexpected result was that a passive, supportive response -- like saying, "That's nice, honey," and then turning back to the computer -- was almost as damaging as actually putting down the good event.

Luckily, giving active, constructive responses is a skill anyone can develop. "You don't have to be effervescent," Gable said. All you really have to do is show you care.

A surprising number of teenagers - nearly 15 percent - think they're going to die young, leading many to drug use, suicide attempts and other unsafe behavior, new research suggests.

The study, based on a survey of more than 20,000 kids, challenges conventional wisdom that says teens engage in risky behavior because they think they're invulnerable to harm. Instead, a sizable number of teens may take chances "because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake," said study author Dr. Iris Borowsky, a researcher at the University of Minnesota.

That behavior threatens to turn their fatalism into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over seven years, kids who thought they would die early were seven time more likely than optimistic kids to be subsequently diagnosed with AIDS. They also were more likely to attempt suicide and get in fights resulting in serious injuries.

Borowsky said the magnitude of kids with a negative outlook was eye-opening.

Adolescence is "a time of great opportunity and for such a large minority of youth to feel like they don't have a long life ahead of them was surprising," she said.

The study suggests a new way doctors could detect kids likely to engage in unsafe behavior and potentially help prevent it, said Dr. Jonathan Klein, a University of Rochester adolescent health expert who was not involved in the research.

"Asking about this sense of fatalism is probably a pretty important component of one of the ways we can figure out who those kids at greater risk are," he said.

The study appears in the July issue of Pediatrics, released Monday.

Scientists once widely believed that teenagers take risks because they underestimate bad consequences and figure "it can't happen to me," the study authors say. The new research bolsters evidence refuting that thinking.

Cornell University professor Valerie Reyna said the new study presents "an even stronger case against the invulnerability idea."

"It's extremely important to talk about how perception of risk influences risk-taking behavior," said Reyna, who has done similar research.

Fatalistic kids weren't more likely than others to die during the seven-year study; there were relatively few deaths, 94 out of more than 20,000 teens.

The researchers analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of kids in grades 7 to 12 who were interviewed three times between 1995 and 2002. Of 20,594 teens interviewed in the first round, 14.7 percent said they thought they had a good chance of dying before age 35. Subsequent interviews found these fatalistic kids engaged in more risky behavior than more optimistic kids.

The study suggests some kids overestimate their risks for harm; however, it also provides evidence that some kids may have good reason for being fatalistic.

Native Americans, blacks and low-income teens - kids who are disproportionately exposed to violence and hardship - were much more likely than whites to believe they'd die young.