With greater wealth comes lesser need to worry about costs like diapers, it seems. Or Western parents don't know how to whistle.

In the western world, babies now need diapers until an average of three years of age, nearly twice as long as 40 years ago. The situation in Vietnam is just the opposite. A study by scholars at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, followed 47 infants and their mothers in Vietnam, where potty training starts at birth and the need for diapers is usually eliminated by nine months of age. 

The secret? Learning to be sensitive to when the baby needs to urinate.

While the cultural debate of nationalized health care is whether or not to let obese people and smokers die(1), a new paper in Spain says males are pressuring women to be thin and it is making females less happy.

The psychologists also contend that women who are not comfortable with their body perceive women with a normal body as a threat. Specifically, when these women see a "normal" body they experience feelings of displeasure and lack of control, since they feel they have not any control on their own body and cannot make it be as they want.

Some people believe in magic. In Science Left Behind, in the process of debunking claims that one American political party is overwhelmingly pro-science and one is anti-science,  we put a handy chart on page 213 itemizing the various anti-science positions of registered voters.  Sure, evolution and climate change was higher on one side but the list of anti-science beliefs by the other side was as long as your arm - astrology, psychics, ghosts, UFOs, homeopathy, you name it and that global-warming-accepting party is more anti-science - they just have better public relations.  

January 10th came and went last week. Did you notice? Perhaps you did if losing weight was part of your New Year's Resolution.

Because chances are that by day 10 you were off the wagon.

What could you give up for the entire year?  New survey results show that Facebook and Twitter are easy to cast off but pizza, potato chips and french fries are far more difficult. Of the 1,000 individuals in the American general population surveyed,  25 percent said the loss of social media would make 2013 difficult while 39 percent said giving up pizza and other favorite foods would be hardest.

People view brown-eyed faces as more trustworthy than those with blue eyes- unless the blue eyes belong to a man with a broad face, according to a new paper in PLOS ONE. 

Doctors and scientists will rightly note that, in every study ever done on weight loss, 100% of participants who consumed fewer calories than they burned lost weight. Exercise helps in multiple ways, but in weight loss it helps burn the calories.

A survey of psychologists finds they believe something additional; they say dieters should pay attention to the role emotions play in weight gain and loss if they hope to succeed in the physical two. The survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center asked 1,328 psychologists how they dealt with clients' weight and weight loss challenges.  306 of the respondents provide weight loss counseling. 

It seems like all human babies go through the exact same intelligence growth program. Like clockwork. A lot of people have assumed that it really is a perfect program which is defined by genetics.

Obviously something happens when a child grows. But surely that consists of minor environmental queues to the genetic program. Or does it?

Consider if the "something happens as a child grows" might in fact be critical. And not just critical, but the major source of information. What exactly is that "nurture" part of nature vs. nurture?

What if the nurturing is in fact the source of all conceptual knowledge, language, sense of self, and sense of reality?

New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think.

In an article published in Psychological Science, psychologists find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking.  "Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets," the authors write.
 

Experiments psychologists from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford say that the color of the cup matters in the flavor of hot chocolate - it tastes better in an orange or cream colored plastic cup than in a white or red one. 

Our senses perceive food in a different way depending on the characteristics of the container from which we eat and drink, they say.  They conducted an experiment in which 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four different types of plastic cup. They were the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside. 

Perhaps you have seen pictures or videos from the 1960s of rhesus monkey babies clinging to inanimate surrogate mothers.



These experiments were by Harry Harlow, who eventually went against the psychology mainstream to demonstrate that love--namely caregiver-baby affection--was required for healthy development.