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How does your phone affect your attention span? This article looks at how younger generations have a shorter attention span because of our constant use of phones. Also has a few tips for improving attention and focus.

I liked using this article for my Field Research project because it helped to answer a lot of the "why?" questions I had. For example, I found that gratitude journaling was beneficial for sleep quality and this article explained how gratitude can help us to have better pre-sleep cognitions, which calms the nervous system. It also led me to a lot of other good sources.

This article talks about addiction and mental illness and how many people struggle with these issues. It also highlights the use of language and how the correct language use can and will break stigma and eventually help these poeple get out of their struggles.

This article explains how words we use to describe addiction can actually greatly affect people's willingness to receive treatment. Certain words or phrases continue to stigmatize the illness.

This article gives us an inside look into why we yell, and what parts of our brain react to it.

This article discusses the different uses of metaphor in relation to the ways in which we view mental health. Metaphors like "battling depression" are often used in a conceptual manner to create more empathy when describing mental health.

Great explanation for how to do a one-person experiment on yourself using the n=1 experimental design principles.

This article discusses the issues that the government faces when trying to pass legislation that affects Americans who are not as proficient in English.

This website addresses what sign language is, how ASL compares to sign language in other countries, where ASL came from, how ASL compares with spoken English, how children learn ASL, and what research is being done now.

An article explaining how language develops as a baby.

"'Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they'll be doing throughout infancy and childhood - learning about language,' said the lead author." This reminds me of the study that showed that babies' crying melodies reflect their native languages. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8346058.stm)

A group of anthropologists from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century - close to a billion words in millions of books. Researchers found that the Twenties marked the apex of joy-related words; the overall usage of commonly known emotion words, however, has been in decline over the 20th century. The one exception: "fear", which started to increase just before the 1980s.

Just a few decades ago, many linguists thought the human brain had evolved a special module for language . It seemed plausible that our brains have some unique structure or system. After all, no animal can use language the way people can. However, in the 1990s, scientists began testing the language-module theory using "functional" MRI technology that let them watch the brain respond to words. And what they saw didn't look like a module, says Benjamin Bergen, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book _Louder Than Words_. "They found something totally surprising," Bergen says. "It's not just certain specific little regions in the brain, regions dedicated to language, that were lighting up. It was kind of a whole-brain type of process." The brain appears to be taking words, which are just arbitrary symbols, and translating them into things we can see or hear or do; language processing, rather than being a singular module, is "a highly distributed system" encompassing many areas of the brain. Our sensory experiences can also be applied to imagining novel concepts like "flying pigs". Our sensory capacities, ancestral features shared with our primate relatives, have been co-opted for more recent purposes, namely words and language. Bergen comments, "What evolution has done is to build a new machine, a capacity for language, something that nothing else in the known universe can do," he says. "And it's done so using the spare parts that it had lying around in the old primate brain."

Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, a recent study says. U.S. researchers compared 9-month-old babies who played with toys and trucks to those who practiced banging out a rhythm during a series of play sessions.

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.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience.

A baby's first words usually have to do with their visual experiences. Familiar objects (e.g. shirts, the table, a spoon, bottle, etc.) can predict which words they'll learn first. This could suggest new ways to help treat autism and language deficits. There could be a correlation between visual processing problems and difficulty learning words. For example, children with autism have visual processing problems, which could explain why they have trouble communicating.