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Currently viewing the tag: "learning"
A majority of Americans rate their current financial situation as poor or fair, and nearly half of Americans say they have encountered financial problems in the past year, according to the Pew Research Center. A University of Missouri researcher studied how parents’ financial problems and resulting mental distress affect their relationships with their children. He found that parents who experience financial problems and depression are less likely to feel connected to their children, and their children are less likely to engage in prosocial behaviors, such as volunteering or helping others.
“The study serves as a reminder that children’s behaviors are affected by issues beyond their immediate surroundings,” said Gustavo Carlo, Millsap Professor of Diversity in the MU Department of Human Development and Family Studies. “Families’ economic situations are affected by broader factors in our society, and those financial problems can lead to depression that hurts parent-child relationships.”
Previous research has indicated that parent-child connectedness is an important indicator of prosocial behavior in children. Prosocial behaviors lead to moral development, better outcomes in relationships and enhanced performance at work and school.
Unlike previous research that has focused on high-risk and low-income families, Carlo and his colleagues studied middle- to upper-middle-class families. Parents and children answered questions about economic stress, depression and connectedness between parents and children. A year later, the children reported how often they engaged in prosocial behaviors toward strangers, family members and friends.
“Even middle-class families are having financial difficulties, and it’s affecting their ability to be effective parents,” Carlo said. “When parents are depressed, it affects their relationships with their kids.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a story or scene about a family under financial pressure from the child’s POV.
Journaling Prompt: Write about what you remember about your family’s finances during your childhood OR write about how your family is dealing with the economic pressures today.
Art Prompt: Too Many Bills!
Photo Credit: Claudio Gennari on Flickr
This was shared by Sue Ann Bowling at her Homecoming blog. Thanks Sue!
“Smart is only a polished version of dumb. Try intelligence.” Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals (Discworld)
Writing Prompt: Do a character sketch for one of your characters. Or create a new character. In what ways is your character smart? In what ways are they intelligent? how does your character use these traits in their everyday life? During a crisis?
Journaling Prompt: Are you smart, intelligent, or both? Write about your answer.
Art Prompt: Intelligence
Photo Credit: Meathead Movers on Flickr
Do you have any phobias? Not me. Oh no. I’m just absolutely fine with heights, spiders, and snakes.Oh my!
Fear is a natural mechanism for survival. Some fears — such as of loud noise, sudden movements and heights — appear to be innate. Humans and other mammals also learn from their experiences, which include dangerous or bad situations. This “learned fear” can protect us from dangers.
That fear also can become abnormally enhanced in some cases, sometimes leading to debilitating phobias. About 40 million people in the United States suffer from dysregulated fear and heightened states of anxiety.
“Studies show that light influences learning, memory and anxiety,” Wiltgen said. “We have now shown that light also can modulate conditioned fear responses.” -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: What is your character afraid of? Write a scene that shows when and how your character developed this fear.
Journaling Prompt: What are you afraid of? Why? When did it start? Describe the scene.
Art Prompt: Fear and Light
Photo Credit: angelocesare on Flickr
Before the written word, traditions and teachings were passed on through complicated dance, rituals and reenactments:
…hunt reenactments served a purpose greater than showing off. They were instructive. With expressive pantomime, and a few props, they demonstrated hunting techniques and tactics to youngsters and other clans. It was a way of developing and sharing skills. -Jean Auel, The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth’s Children, Book One)
Writing Prompt: Write a scene where a tradition or skill was passed on via reenactment.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a time when someone taught you something through demonstration.
Art Prompt: Hunt
Photo Credit: M Hillier on Flickr
Kids love dogs. Dogs love kids. I don’t think the results of this study should surprise us at all.
…second-grade students with a range of reading aptitudes and attitudes toward reading were paired with dogs — or people — and asked to read aloud to them once a week for 30 minutes in the summer of 2010.
At the end of the program, students who read to the dogs experienced a slight gain in their reading ability and improvement in their attitudes toward reading, as measured on the Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) and Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (ERAS), respectively — while those who read to people experienced a decrease on both measures.
Another surprising result was the high rate of attrition among students in the control group. Of the original cohort of nine, a third failed to complete the program. No students left the dog-reading group. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write about a dog helping a kid. Doesn’t have to be reading. Could be Lassie getting Timmy out of the well. Just work on that dog / kid relationship.
Journaling Prompt: What has your pet helped you learn?
Art Prompt: Kids and Dogs
Photo Credit: catnipstudio on Flickr
“autodidact n. a self-taught person. autodidactic adj. mid 18th century: from Greek autodidaktos ‘self-taught’, from autos ‘self’ + didaskein ‘teach’.”
Writing Prompt: Write a scene about an autodidact.
Journaling Prompt: Write about a subject that you have researched and taught yourself OR write about a famous autodidact or someone you know who is an autodidact.
Art Prompt: Learning
Photo Credit: lethaargic on Flickr
What if you could navigate solely by sound? It would mean fewer stubbed toes in the middle of the night for me. As it turns out, if I would just apply myself, I could learn to echolocate.
In the early 1800s, a blind man from England named James Holman journeyed around the world — he may have been the most prolific traveler in history up to that point, Magellan and Marco Polo included — relying on the echoes from the click of his cane. Not until the 1940s, in Karl Dallenbach’s lab at Cornell University, was it irrefutably proven that humans could echolocate.-Michael Finkel, The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See
Writing Prompt: Write a story about a character who has developed one of their senses beyond the everyday usefulness.
Journaling Prompt: Write about how you use your hearing.
Art Prompt: Sound
Photo Credit: Banjo Brown on Flickr
How do you create an evil character? Too often I see in writing, movies, or TV that evil characters feed off their victims’ emotions. Science, however, is telling us that truly evil characters (sociopaths/psychopaths) really don’t recognize emotions on the faces of others, at least when they are children.
Healthy people notice a fearful face faster than they notice a neutral or happy face, but this was not the case in children who scored high on callous unemotionality. In fact, the higher the score, the slower they were to react to a fearful face.
The important point here, Sylvers says, is that the children’s reaction to the face was unconscious. Healthy people are “reacting to a threat even though they’re not aware of it.” That suggests that teaching children to pay attention to faces won’t help solve the underlying problems of psychopathy, because the difference happens before attention comes into play. “I think it’s just going to take a lot more research to figure out what you can do — whether it’s parenting, psychological interventions, or pharmacological therapy. At this point, we just don’t know,” Sylvers says.
The researchers also found that children in the study tended to respond more slowly to faces showing disgust, another threatening emotion — in this case, one that suggests something is toxic or otherwise wrong. Sylvers says psychological scientists should consider that psychopathy may not be related just to fearlessness, but to a more general problem with processing threats. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write a character sketch for an evil character paying attention to the character’s response to others’ emotions over his or her development from childhood on.
Journaling Prompt: Have you ever misread someone? Write about the experience of missing the emotional cues.
Art Prompt: Fear
Photo Credit: Shandi-lee on Flickr
One of my favorite movies is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s fascinating to consider the idea of surgically excising bad memories and moving blithely into the future without them. As the movie shows, however, we need those memories, even though they are unhappy or even traumatic. They are part of who we are. It’s a bit scary, then, to read that science is getting close to making memory erasure a possibility.
Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off — literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write about a character with a memory he or she wants to turn off.
Journaling Prompt: If you could turn off a memory, which would you pick and why?
Art Prompt: Memory
Photo Credit: Cristian V. on Flickr
I grew up among cats. My parents tried dogs, but failed to house train them or break them of chasing cars. Cats are easier. I stuck with cats for years as an adult, but about 8 years ago, a beautiful Catahoula came into my life. Now I have 2, and I’ve never been happier. I like how my dogs care about how I’m feeling and what I’m doing. Here’s a quote from an interesting study on dogs and wolves:
They showed, for the first time that wolves, like domestic dogs, are capable of begging successfully for food by approaching the attentive human. This demonstrates that both species — domesticated and non-domesticated — have the capacity to behave in accordance with a human’s attentional state. In addition, both wolves and pet dogs were able to rapidly improve their performance with practice. -Science Daily
Writing Prompt: Write about a human-wolf or human-dog interaction.
Journaling Prompt: How have pets impacted your life?
Art Prompt: Wolves
Photo Credit: plasticrevolver on Flickr
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I believe that the most important thing about writing is to HAVE FUN! You can worry about things like commas, point of view, tenses, etc., later. Right now, just start writing!
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