emotions

The big idea An essential social skill is understanding emotion. Children learn about emotion even before language by paying attention to a caregiver’s face. Watching people around them provides children with essential facts for survival: Who will love me? Whom should I be scared of? These days everyone’s seen infants and toddlers, and their parents, with screens in their faces. So how could little ones be getting the critical in-person, face-to-face interaction they desperately need in those early years? Yet in today’s world, just about everyone uses devices to communicate with others, even face to face. Toddlers learn from video chatting with their grandparents, and teens devour image-driven social media on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. What if, rather than stunting the em...

On any given day, millions of Americans curl up to watch their favorite crime shows. Whether it is “FBI” on CBS, “Dexter” on Showtime, “Mindhunter” on Netflix, “Killing Eve” on BBC, reruns of “Law & Order,” or any of a myriad of other similar shows, they draw huge audiences with their vivid portrayals of villains whose behaviors are perplexingly cruel. I’ll confess: I am part of that audience. My students even make fun of how much crime television I, a researcher who studies criminal behavior, watch. I justify some of my TV time as work, providing material for my undergraduate lecture course and for my seminars on the nature of the criminal mind. But I am also captivated by the characters in these dramas, despite – or because of – how unrealistic many of them are. One of the most com...

Tag: emotions

Mobile technology may support kids learning to recognize emotions in photos of faces

Don’t Believe What You See On Crime Shows – Psychopaths Can Feel Emotions And Can Be Treated