[By: Lisanne Schröer]
Most of us are cautious with our language in front of toddlers and young children. We don’t want to risk that the child will imitate our offensive words. However, there are more reasons to be careful with language around young children. Recently, scientists have found evidence that more subtle characteristics of our language influence how children see themselves and the social world around them.
“Let’s be a scientist!” or “Let’s do science!”
[By: Pinelopi Bounia Mastrogianni]
Our adult, (not always) sophisticated sense of humour might involve laughing at Epic-Cat-Fails videos on the internet or at very bad puns, but do you remember that period when the re-appearance of mum’s face with a “peek-a-boo” was the best joke in the world? Probably not, but it was a fascinating one! Babies start laughing before they start to crawl, walk or talk and, before long, they start producing their very own non-verbal jokes to make people around them laugh. They start smiling at their first month and they laugh for the first time around 4-5 months of age, while they begin a humorous interaction by their 7-8 months. This very early adorable behaviour is proposedly connected to general cognitive development, as well as to the quality of the bond between infants and their caregivers – thus researchers have tried to describe the different ways infants joke and, mainly, what are the things they find amusing.
[By: Umay Șen]
As a part of my PhD program, I am attending a lot of classes besides doing research. Recently, I took the course on Bayesian Statistics and had a lot of chance to compare Bayesian approach to data and statistical analysis to the frequentist approach which is/was more common in the field. This course made me get a critical perspective to the frequentist approach which is one of the most common practices in Psychology when you deal with the data. In this blog post, I would like to share some basic ideas of Bayesian approach and discuss it in relation to the replication crisis in Psychology.
[By: Joanna Rutkowska]
As ESRs in MOTION, funded by the European Union, we have a duty to disseminate our research findings as much as possible. There are several ways of doing so, and different audiences that we can present to. Firstly, one can present the research to the lawmakers and politicians in hopes of influencing future policies and governmental plans. Unfortunately, only few of the scientists are ever invited to do so, and they are definitely not PhD candidates, but rather respectable professors! Secondly, one can present their research to the (wider) public – everyone from parents to children themselves. I believe this is the best way to get everyone interested in research and try to make a change on a societal level bottom-up.