How the Infant Brain Tracks Their Mother’s Voice

Woman in a white sun hat lifts a baby against a turquoise beach backdrop.

A recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience caught my attention because it touches on a question that has fascinated me for more than four decades: How can infants understand their mothers and caregivers long before they understand language? This question has been with me since my undergraduate days at the University of Michigan.…

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Detecting Deception or Suspecting Deception?

In a previous blog, we discussed the latest scientific understanding about behavioral indicators of deception. As explained in that blog and the underlying article on which the blog was based, scientific research in the past two decades has made substantial advances in validating a set of behavioral indicators of veracity and deception. This work was…

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Why Every Interaction You Have Is A Negotiation

Every interaction is a negotiation Whether we realize it or not, we’re all salespeople and every interaction is a negotiation in which we persuade and influence others. Some of us do this professionally; sales people sell products and attempt to have people purchase those products; teachers sell knowledge and skills and attempt to persuade students…

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How Studying Behavior Can Be Used To Detect Threats

Another tragic event has occurred at a school in Georgia recently, and the scene unfolds as it has too many times in our recent past. Aside from school incidents, workplace violence, domestic violence, and even seemingly random acts of violence on the streets of our cities and towns, buses, and trains occur all too often…

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