THEME 1: INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH TASK 1: Identify the following elements in each research report: researchers, topic, time and

place of study, participants, research methods, and major findings. In your opinion, why is each research study below worthwhile? STUDY 1 STUDY FINDS THAT BRAIN EXERCISES HELP MEMORY By David McAlary Washington, 19 December 2006 As we get older, most of us will have more difficulty remembering things, like phone numbers, grocery lists, and most importantly, when to take medications. But a new study shows that mental training for elderly people can help them function better in their daily lives. VOA's David McAlary reports. With the proportion of elderly people growing in the global population, scenes like this might become more common. "The next word is elephant, because the elephant is on the moon, not a man in the moon." This is a trainer teaching a group of elderly women strategies to help them remember things like lists better. Psychologist Sherry Willis says the goal is to help them maintain mental, or cognitive skills. "We focused on three abilities: memory, reasoning and speed of processing." Dr. Willis and her colleagues at Pennsylvania State University and five other U.S. sites studied nearly 3,000 elderly people who lived independently and did not have dementia. Some got 10 one-hour training sessions over six weeks while others got no training at all. "Immediately after training, individuals who were trained on memory or individuals who were trained on reasoning or speed showed significantly higher performance than those who received no training," she said. But even better, much of that benefit held up for five years after the training. Willis' team reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association that people who got the training also felt better about how well they functioned in their daily activities. "Older adults really can continue to exercise mentally and to improve their cognitive abilities. But it does take work. It's just like physical exercise, you have to do it consistently and diligently," he said. Strong mental abilities mean people can take better care of themselves, by remembering their medications, for example. Eighty-year-old Pauline Lopez had trouble remembering phone numbers until she was in the study and had the memory training. "I do remember phone numbers much more readily right now. I don't know what's happened but I see them one time, then I remember them, and I remember directions better than I had before," she said. She took that memory training in 1999 and says it continues to help her. In an editorial accompanying the study, Wake Forest University psychologist Sally Shumaker and colleagues say cognitive training programs may give individuals a greater sense of control over their mental lives and have a beneficial effect on the quality of their lives. They add that such mind exercises provide another type of intervention for people with the form of dementia called Alzheimer's disease who cannot tolerate existing drugs for the condition.

Dr. Sherry Willis at Pennsylvania State University says the best way to exercise your mind is to find activities you like, such as crossword puzzles or crafts, but be sure to keep challenging yourself. "Don't do the same activity over and over in a routinized manner. One must continually seek more challenging tasks so that your mind is exercised," she said. Your ideas:

STUDY 2 WIVES SAY EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT IS KEY TO HAPPY MARRIAGE By Rosanne Skirble Washington, D.C. 10 March 2006 What makes a happy marriage? A new study finds that the most important factor for a woman isn't money or who does the housework, but the emotional engagement of her husband. One newlywed, interviewed on CBS-TV, said she supports her husband in school and at the end of the day she wants affection and attention. "I'll say, I need a hug or I need a kiss. Or don't you want to hear about my day today?" Five thousand couples in the National Survey of Families and Households said much the same thing. Women in the sample ranged between 20 and 60. Half worked either full or part-time. University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox said the findings don't support the common perception that equity is the most important quality in a happy marriage. "We find in the study that women are happier when they are at home and when their husbands are the primary breadwinners," he says. "Women appreciate when their husbands give them the financial security to make choices." Responding to those results one woman told CBS-TV likes being a stay-at-home wife. "The majority of my time is with my children day in and day out doing various activities. [My husband] is busy doing his thing at work and it works well together." But, she says, no husband is perfect. "He doesn't put the toilet seat down, and he doesn't always take the trash out and he never picks up the dry cleaning, but he has a great sense of humor and puts me first above everything." According to the study, fairness does matter. Married women are happier when they feel housework is shared by their spouse but not necessarily divided equally. The study is published in the March issue of the journal Social Forces. Your ideas:

STUDY 3 A RECENT STUDY SHOWS GOOD NEWS IS GOOD FOR YOU By Carol Pearson Washington, DC, 28 February 2006 According to a recent survey, good news has a positive impact on our lives and people want more of it. Several people on the street had reactions when ask about hearing good news and how it makes them feel: "You hear a good news story, you hear something nice happening in the world, it makes me feel good. I like it." "When I hear good news, I feel more optimistic, not only about the world as a whole, but also for my own life. When I hear good news, it does make me feel better." The survey shows that bad news: news about war, death and calamity has a negative psychological impact. Bad news increases people's anxiety according to Dorree Lynn, a psychologist who analyzes news. "Anxiety and depression are increasing and part of it is the way media impacts on them and the rapidity of the terror stories in the news. People feel badly. They get scared." The survey concerns Americans' attitudes toward news. It was conducted by Monitor Services, a company that studies trends. Psychologist David Bersoff oversaw the research. "Americans want to see the media report on more good news stories. They not only crave more balance in their news, they need more balance in their news." Dr. Lynn says the same would hold true anywhere. "Of course there has to be a global impact because the world is shrinking and anything that happens one place is instantly available someplace else." The survey shows that good news makes people feel motivated, inspired and more optimistic about the future, and it even increases their productivity at work, while bad news has a negative impact, according to Dr. Bersoff. "For example, in this study alone, we found that 65 percent of people thought that things weren't going very well in the country today." Dr. Lynn says the media must change and present a more balanced account of events. She sometimes tells her clients to turn off the TV. Your ideas:

STUDY 4 STUDY: MEN TALK JUST AS MUCH AS WOMEN by Richard Knox http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12633456 Researchers recorded hundreds of students, capturing 30 seconds of sound for every 12-and-a-half minutes. The chattiest of the subjects, at nearly 47,000 words per day, were men. All Things Considered, July 5, 2007 An article in this week's issue of Science blasts the popular myth that women are more talkative than men. Researchers outfitted 396 college students 345 Americans and 51 Mexicans with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person's daily utterances. The researchers found that women speak a little more than 16,000 words a day. Men speak a little less than 16,000 words. The difference is not statistically significant. Psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona says the three top talkers in the study uttering up to 47,000 words a day were all men. So was the most taciturn subject, who spoke only 700 words a day, on average. Mehl says he and his colleagues were surprised at the outcome. They had tentatively bought into the popular stereotype that women are the more talkative sex. But they were skeptical of the widespread claim that women use three times more words a day then men. The claim got prominent attention with the publication of a 2006 book called The Female Brain. Its author, Louann Brizendine, has been widely quoted claiming that "a woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000." Other sources have claimed an even greater disparity. But until the Science study published this week, its authors say, no one had ever systematically recorded the total daily output, in natural conversations, of a sizable number of people. Mehl says the supposed talkativeness of women is often mentioned in pop-psychology books. "The typical scenario is a man comes home from work at night, has used 6,850 words and with 150 left over just wants to relax and not talk," Mehl says. "And the woman welcomes the husband with about 7,856 words left over. And that's where all the problems start." Mehl guesses that the talkativeness claim "evolved as an explanation for what scientists call the demand/withdrawal pattern." That is, the situation where a woman demands to talk through problems and her male partner withdraws emotionally. "We use our gender magnifying glass and over-generalize from that," Mehl says. "Instead of saying that men tend to talk less and women tend to talk more, we say 'Women always talk and men never talk.'" Even so, the researchers, based at the University of Texas as well as at Arizona, didn't expect the verbal output between the sexes to be virtually equal. Mehl acknowledges that many will have trouble believing the results, since it contradicts their own perceptions.

"This is the way the stereotype has been maintained in the past," he says. "It is fairly easy to see what you want to see to jump on the very chatty woman that you certainly find and say, 'See, women talk a lot' and to overlook the very talkative man." Mehl says the stereotype needs to be debunked. Not only because women are harmed by the "female chatterbox and silent male" stereotype, but because men are disadvantaged by it, too. "It puts men into the gender box, that in order to be a good male, we'd better not talk (that) silence is golden," Mehl says. "The stereotype puts unfortunate constraints on men and women the idea that you can only happily be a woman if you're talkative and you can only be happy as a man if you're reticent. The study relieves those gender constraints." The new report doesn't mention any differences in what men and women talk about. But the researchers have analyzed the content of everyday conversation and will publish that in the future. In general, they found that women tend to talk more about relationships. Their everyday conversation is more studded with pronouns. Men tend to talk more about sports and gadgets, and their utterances include more numbers. No surprise there. Your ideas:

TASK 2: Give comments on the following research questions, basing on the two criteria: worth asking and answerable 1. How much do law students know about critical thinking? 2. How do law lecturers rate the necessity degree of having critical thinking instruction in the tertiary curriculum or in their syllabi? 3. Is the participation level of second-year students at CFL, VNU in group work satisfactory? 4. What recommendations can be made for the employment of humor in the foreign language classroom? 5. Should process approach be applied to teaching writing for second-year students at CFL, VNU?