Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Arts-Heavy Preschool Helps Children Grow Emotionally

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Preschooler Painting

How do children learn how to learn? One essential skill is mastering their emotions – learning how to stay positive as much as possible, and how to deal with those inevitable interludes of sadness, anger or fear. Newly published research suggests low-income kids are more likely to develop these all-important abilities if they attend a unique preschool program that integrates education and the arts. The arts-rich curriculum produced more “positive emotions such as interest, happiness and pride, and greater growth in emotion regulation across the school year,” reports West Chester ... Read More

‘Where Soldiers Come From’ Returns

September 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was widely criticized for not mentioning the sacrifices of American troops during his acceptance speech. But the truth is that, barring some major battle that makes the news, few of us pay much thought to these brave young men and women. What drives them to enlist? How are they changed by their experience? What problems do they face upon returning home? Surely we owe them enough to care. One group of such soldiers is the focus of the superb documentary Where Soldiers Come From. First shown on PBS one year ago, it is being rebroadcast on many ... Read More

The Ugly Values of Beautiful People

September 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Beauty Queens

The beautiful are different from you and me. But not in the ways we think. That’s the conclusion of new research from Israel, which confirms the truism that we idealize attractive people, and suggests that—at least as far as women are concerned—the pedestal we place them on is largely unearned. “Despite the widely accepted ‘What is beautiful is good’ stereotype, our findings suggest that the beautiful strive for conformity rather than independence, and for self-promotion rather than tolerance,” writes a research team led by Lihi Segal-Caspi of the Open University of ... Read More

The Creativity of the Wandering Mind

September 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Brick

Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering? Well, congratulations: without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your ... Read More

Soup? Art? The Quandary Thickens.

August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Talk about coming full circle. Beginning Sunday, most Target stores will be selling special-edition cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup featuring colorful labels that evoke the work of Andy Warhol. For Trudy the Bag Lady, the Lily Tomlin character who attempted to define the difference between soup and art, life has just gotten considerably more complicated. Warhol’s now-iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans in the 1960s brought the imagery of mass marketing into museums and art galleries. They were, on one level, a critique of our consumer culture, but a sly one: Warhol wasn’t ... Read More

Tango Your Way to Mental Health

August 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Tango Dancers

Dancing around life’s inevitable difficulties while retaining mental and emotional balance can require some fancy footwork. For those suffering from stress and depression, newly published research finds a promising self-help program involves literally getting out on the dance floor. It’s hard to feel blue while you’re doing the tango. “Preliminary results suggest that tango dance is an innovative and promising approach, as effective as mindfulness meditation in reducing levels of self-reported depression,” writes a team led by psychologist Rosa Pinniger of the University of New ... Read More

Red ‘Facts,’ Blue ‘Facts’: The Psychology of Truthiness

August 28, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous assertion that “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” seems increasingly quaint today, at a time when one person’s self-evident truth is dismissed by another as fabrication or myth. New research provides a sobering reason why we can’t even agree on what we’re arguing about: We align our perception of reality to comfortably coexist with our moral convictions. “In the realm of moral reasoning, at least, a clean separation of opinion and fact may be difficult to achieve,” write psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter ... Read More

The Oy of Cooking

August 27, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Over at Slate, Tracie McMillan writes about the trouble with having a prevailing food ethic that both glamorizes cooking and promotes it as an everyday practice: When the stories we tell about cooking say that it is only ever fun and rewarding—instead of copping to the fact that it can also be annoying, time consuming, and risky—we alienate the people who don’t have the luxury of choice, and we unwittingly reinforce the impression that cooking is a specialty hobby instead of a basic life skill. McMillan, who published an excellent book last year called The American Way of Eating (and ... Read More

The Gibbon of the Opera

August 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Gibbon

What does a soprano have in common with an ape? Sure, it sounds like one of a long line of soprano jokes (presumably with the word “Wagner” in the punch line). But it’s a serious question, with a surprising answer: Their vocal techniques are virtually identical. New research from Japan reveals the same technique it took Renee Fleming years to master comes quite naturally to a gibbon. An ability we thought of as uniquely human is, in fact, something we share with at least one other species. “Our speech was thought to have evolved through specific modifications in our vocal ... Read More

The Tip Jar Shall be the Downfall of this Great Republic, Evidence from 2012 and 1916

August 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Tipping is an aristocratic conceit -- "There you go, my good man, buy your starving family a loaf'' -- best left to an aristocratic age. The practicing democrat would rather be told what he owes right up front. Offensively rich people may delight in peeling off hundred-dollar bills and tossing them out to groveling servants. But no sane, well-adjusted human being cares to sit around and evaluate the performance of some beleaguered coffee vendor. The above happens to have been written by Michael Lewis in 1997. But in its argument and diction, it could pretty well pass for an excerpt from the ... Read More