Babies can be a joy—and hard work. Now, they can also be a 50-in-1 science project kit! This fascinating and hands-on guide shows you how to re-create landmark scientific studies on cognitive, motor, language, and behavioral development—using your own bundle of joy as the research subject. Simple, engaging, and fun for both baby and parent, each project sheds light on how your baby is acquiring new skills—everything from recognizing faces, voices, and shapes to understanding new words, learning to walk, and even distinguishing between right and wrong. Whether your little research subject is a newborn, a few months old, or a toddler, these simple, surprising projects will help you see the world through your baby’s eyes—and discover ways to strengthen newly acquired skills during your everyday interactions.
Raising a baby is joyful, amazing . . . and ridiculously difficult. But with some insight into what's actually going on inside your little one's head, your job as a parent can become a little bit easier—and a lot more fun. In Think Like a Baby, coauthors Amber and Andy Ankowski—The Doctor and the Dad—show parents how to re-create classic child development experiments using common household items. These simple step-by-step experiments apply from the third trimester through age seven and beyond and help parents understand their children's physical, cognitive, language, and social development. Amazed parents won't just read about how their kids are behaving, changing, and thinking at various stages, they'll actually see it for themselves while interacting and having fun with them at the same time. Each experiment is followed by a discussion of its practical implications for parents, such as why to always bring more than one toy to a restaurant, which baby gadgets to buy (and which ones to avoid), how to get kids to be perfectly happy eating just half of their dessert, and much more.
When 14-year-old-Johanna learns that her orphanage is experimenting on babies, she kidnaps one of them and sets off for Amsterdam. Johanna is a 14-year-old Jewish girl who lives in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 18th century. She feels stifled by the daily drudgery of her life and dreams of seeing what lies outside the confines of the Jewish quarter. Johanna lies about her identity and gets a job as a caregiver at an orphanage. Until it’s too late, she doesn’t realize a secret experiment is taking place that results in the deaths of babies. Deciding to kidnap one of the orphans, Johanna sets off for Amsterdam. She faces many dangers on her journey, including plague, bandits, storms and, not least of all, anti-Semitism. Johanna has a lot of courage and determination, but will it be enough to save the baby and reach her destination? Will she finally find a place where she can be free?
Argues that for the first time in history we're in a position to end extreme poverty throughout the world, both because of our unprecedented wealth and advances in technology, therefore we can no longer consider ourselves good people unless we give more to the poor. Reprint.
Psychology Classics: The Case of Little Albert Conditioned Emotional Reactions by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner is one of the most influential, infamous and iconic research articles ever published in the history of psychology. Commonly referred to as "The Case of Little Albert" this psychology classic attempted to show how fear could be induced in an infant through classical conditioning. Originally published in 1920, Conditioned Emotional Reactions remains among the most frequently cited journal articles in introductory psychology courses and textbooks. A psychology classic is by definition a must read. However, most seminal texts within the discipline remain unread by a majority of psychology students. A detailed, well written description of a classic study is fine to a point, but there is absolutely no substitute for understanding and engaging with the issues under review than by reading the authors unabridged ideas, thoughts and findings in their entirety. Bonus Material: One of the most dramatic aspects of Watson and Rayner's original study was that they had planned to test a number of methods by which they could remove Little Albert's conditioned fear responses. However, as Watson noted "Unfortunately Albert was taken from the hospital the day the above tests were made. Hence the opportunity of building up an experimental technique by means of which we could remove the conditioned emotional responses was denied us." This unforeseen turn of events was something that obviously stayed with Watson, as under his guidance some three years later, Mary Cover Jones conducted a follow-up study - A Laboratory Study of Fear: The Case of Peter - which illustrated how fear may be removed under laboratory conditions. This additional and highly relevant article is also presented in full. The Case of Little Albert has been produced as part of an initiative by the website All About Psychology to make important psychology publications widely available. www.all-about-psychology.com
A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race. In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies. Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.
In this meticulously researched and masterfully written book, Pulitzer Prize-winner Deborah Blum examines the history of love through the lens of its strangest unsung hero: a brilliant, fearless, alcoholic psychologist named Harry Frederick Harlow. Pursuing the idea that human affection could be understood, studied, even measured, Harlow (1905-1981) arrived at his conclusions by conducting research-sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible-on the primates in his University of Wisconsin laboratory. Paradoxically, his darkest experiments may have the brightest legacy, for by studying "neglect" and its life-altering consequences, Harlow confirmed love's central role in shaping not only how we feel but also how we think. His work sparked a psychological revolution. The more children experience affection, he discovered, the more curious they become about the world: Love makes people smarter. The biography of both a man and an idea, The Measure of Love is a powerful and at times disturbing narrative that will forever alter our understanding of human relationships.
A playful high-contrast board book from the University of Tokyo “Baby Lab”—scientifically proven to hold baby’s attention “Full of delicious colors and . . . real charm.”—The Wall Street Journal What are moimoi? Playful moimoi have bold stripes and big, bright eyes. Babies find them captivating and will even stop crying to look. Parents in Japan swear by moimoi and have purchased over 500,000 books! How do you say it? “Moi” (??) is a fun nonsense word that rhymes with “koi.” You can change how you say it to match what the moimoi are doing—as they dance, grow, and even sing . . . Where do they come from? At the University of Tokyo “Baby Lab,” Dr. Kazuo Hiraki tested many different high-contrast designs. Babies looked at moimoi for twice as long as the competition. Your newborn or toddler will love moimoi, too!
Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism.
