Word: rewarded
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...support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward - a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon - in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates...
...weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. "What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning," he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually...
...what shocked the researchers was that extended-access rats also showed deficits in their "reward threshold." That is, unrestricted exposure to large quantities of high-sugar, high-fat foods changed the functioning of the rats' brain circuitry, making it harder and harder for them to register pleasure - in other words, they developed a type of tolerance often seen in addiction - an effect that got progressively worse as the rats gained more weight. "It was quite profound," says study author Paul Kenny, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute. The reward-response effects seen in the fatty-food...
Kenny's study did not include rats exposed to drugs, making direct comparison tricky, but other studies have found that chronic cocaine or heroin exposure leads to reductions in reward thresholds of 40% to 50%. (See nine kid foods to avoid...
...Monitoring Group on Somalia provided some illuminating details in a report in February. The report describes a corporate system in which pirates may be fined $1,500 for stealing from their ships or $500 for entering their bosses' offices without permission. On the flip side, pirates can win rewards of several thousand dollars for good behavior. "As the saying goes, 'the parents initially love their children equally, but it is the children who make them love some more than the others,' " says a document distributed to pirates by their bosses, according to the U.N. report. "It is up to your...