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13 year old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville, IL, is a finalist in Google Science Fair 2014. Prabhu's project focuses on preventing cyber-bullying. Excerpted from her project summary statement: "Cyberbullying may result in depression, low self-esteem and in rare cases suicides in adolescent victims(12-18). Research shows that, over 50% of adolescents and teens have been bullied online and 10 to 20% experience it regularly. Research also shows that adolescents that post mean/hurtful messages may not understand the potential consequences of their actions because the pre-frontal cortex, the area of brain that controls reasoning and decision-making isn't developed until age 25. I hypothesized that if adolescents(ages 12-18) were provided an alert mechanism that suggested them to re-think their decision if they expressed willingness to post a mean/hurtful message on social media, the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents will be willing to post would be lesser than adolescents that are not provided with such an alert mechanism. In order to check if my hypothesis was true, I created two Software systems: 1) Baseline 2) Rethink. "Rethink" system measured number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink, while the "Baseline" system measured the same without the alert. Results proved that adolescents were 93.43% less willing to post mean/hurtful messages using a "Rethink" system compared with "Baseline" system without alert."

Lori Schade, a marriage and family therapist at Brigham Young University, led a study that surveyed 276 young adults from 2009 to 2011. All were in committed relationships; more than half were either engaged or married. Almost all texted their partner multiple times a day. Her findings: Texting terms of endearment seems to shore up relationships. Affectionate affirmations help mitigate hurts and frustrations. Women who texted their partner a lot considered the relationship more stable, yet men who received those texts or texted a lot themselves said they were less satisfied with the relationship. Working things out face-to-face, rather than texting, may be more beneficial when negotiating crucial conversations. With texting, people tend to keep responding, rather than slowing down to gain perspective on the situation. Also, unlike conversations, texts don't fade with time: the archive of messages allows people to review the exchanges and consequently, revive hurt feelings.

"The problem with the dash-as you may have noticed!-is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also-and this might be its worst sin-disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don't you find it annoying-and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt-when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete?"

My problem has always been (and it is shared by others) that when one is thinking (or even just musing), we surround our ideas with parenthetical thoughts (which, to my mind, bracket every moment of waking life) and they become, in their own way (or "in the way", as it were) intrusive. And yet colorful.

this is an article that (eventually) talks about how words, or verbal abuse, affects brain development.

By Sara Guirgis and Kristina Olson Parents are often asking what they can do to prepare their children for the increasingly globally-connected world. Often that answer has involved encouraging children to learn a second language or, for immigrant families, ensuring they pass on their native language to their children.

Kristina Olson, a professor of psychology, analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of being bilingual. There are many benefits such as, enhanced cognitive skills and mental disease immunity. However, there are some minor setbacks, such as weakened vocabulary and verbal skills in both languages. She links several studies done by professionals to back up her information.

The chair squeaked quietly as I fidgeted, swiveling left, right, left. I sat toward the back of a long wooden table flanked by my fellow graduate students, while a pair of eminent biologists led a discussion on how to talk to skeptical non-scientists about evolution.

The author, a specialist and researcher in linguistics and discourse analysis, was interested in communication between individuals from different cultures. The misunderstandings it provokes are often based on unconscious reflexes and reference points which makes them all the more damaging. Communication between humans would be very difficult, if not impossible, without discursive memory. Our memories allow us to understand each other. Gregory Charles says in a tweet after the attack at the Grand Mosque in 2017, "Every nasty word we utter joins sentences, then paragraphs, pages and manifestos and ends up killing the world." This idea is defined by specialists in discourse analysis by theconcent of interdiscoursement. Not being aware of this discursive mechanism can cause many misunderstandings. Understanding it certainly helps to communicate better. Putting yourself in your audience's place is the key to good communication.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

This commercial is promoting "Pepsi Max, with zero calories." It has the unstated premise that anything without calories must be good for you or that anything without calories is the healthy way to go. But the truth of the matter is that not everything without calories is "good." Diet sodas don't actually have any nutritional value and many contain a chemical in them called aspartame which proves to have some negative effects when not taken in moderation.

Having relationship troubles? Your smartphone could be to blame, according to a new study. We all know that navigating texting etiquette can make dating more difficult, but it can also be a major source of frustration and dissatisfaction within long-term, serious relationships.

Children now are now texting at a young age, and are not learning the necessary social skills they were supposed to.

Parents have a long list of concerns about children using technology: Will they be hurt by cyber bullying? Or meet with online predators? Will their homework suffer because they're texting 100 times a day? But what about a more basic question like, Will they be able to hold their own in conversation?

In a 2013 study, Karla Klein Murdock, a professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University, researched college-age texters. She found high-volume texters who were most stressed in their relationships were also most likely to admit to experiencing academic burnout and the lowest emotional well-being. Poorer sleep quality also seemed to plague the frequent texters. Why might heavy texting carry such a costly toll on people who are highly stressed in their relationships? A reasonable possibility that Murdock suggests has to do with the behavior and expectations of the heavy texter. Texting creates its own relational vortex. If the texts are flying fast and furious, things can easily get out of hand. Without the in-person cues that you would get if you were having a face-to-face discussion, misunderstandings and hurt feelings can quickly escalate. Texting also carries a cognitive cost, draining your attentional resources. As your inner reserve is worn down, you become exhausted and burned out. The physiological activation involved in texting erodes your sleep, and the stage is set for you to feel emotionally depleted.

In this study, we address the communication technologies individuals within romantic relationships are using to communicate with one another, the frequency of use, and the association between the use of these technologies and couple's positive and negative communication.Participants consisted of individuals involved in a serious, committed, heterosexual relationship. The Relationship Evaluation Questionnaire instrument was used to assess a variety of relationship variables. The majority of individuals within the study frequently used cell phones and text messaging to communicate with their partner, with ' ' expressing affection ' ' being the most common reason for contact. Younger individuals reported using all forms of media (except for e-mail) more frequently than older participants. Relationship satisfaction did not predict specific use of media but predicted several reasons for media use. Additional analyses revealed that text messaging had the strongest association with individuals ' positive and negative communication within their relationships. Specifically, text messaging to express affection, broach potentially confrontational subjects, and to hurt partners were associated with individuals' view of positive and negative communication within their relationship. Implications of the results are discussed.

Sarcasm is more often than not found to be harmful and conflict inducing. This article touches upon some of the negative outcomes of sarcasm and examines how sarcasm can be beneficial to our creativity. In a study, researchers had their participants engage in simulated conversations containing sarcastic, sincere, and neutral dialogues. Then, they were asked to complete tasks that would test their creativity. Through this study, researchers found that those who participated in sarcastic conversations did better. To create or understand sarcasm takes creative thinking because one must distinguish between the literal and actual meaning.

According to communication experts and marriage counselors, we should stay away from sarcasm because it can hurt others and harm relationships. But in this article it explains how sarcasm can help creative sparks fly.

Article discusses the negative impacts of parent screen time and digital device distraction on parent-child communication, conversational interaction, and language development, especially in young children.