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Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram. She joined the platform at 13, and eventually was spending three hours a day entranced by the seemingly perfect lives and bodies of the fitness influencers who posted on the app. “When I went on Instagram, all I saw were images of chiseled bodies, perfect abs and women doing 100 burpees in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Vlasova, now 18, who lives in Reston, Va.
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Understanding ‘Scientific Consensus’ May Correct Misperceptions About GMOs, but Not Climate Change
Explaining the meaning of “scientific consensus” may counter false beliefs about the safety of genetically modified foods. This same approach, however, is less effective in convincing skeptics that climate change is real and caused by humans.
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Is Self-Awareness a Mirage?
One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do. You can ask somebody: Why’d you choose that house? Or why’d you marry that person? Or why’d you go to graduate school? People will concoct some plausible story, but often they really have no idea why they chose what they did. We have a conscious self, of course, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion. We know what we’re feeling, just not how and why we got there. ...
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Small Changes May Help Exhausted Health Care Workers Combat Burnout
The pandemic has been a challenge to the mental health of many doctors and nurses. Researchers who study the condition of burnout say it's a workplace issue with often simple workplace solutions. ...
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College Students Don’t Need Protection from the Truth
The collapsing justification for one university fad brings hope that others may follow. Even within the academic establishment, it seems that no one can mount a fact-based defense for the trendy notion that students need to be protected from potentially disturbing ideas. This week’s encouraging news also presents an interesting test case of whether academic institutions can still perform the basic functions for which they were created. ...
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Psychologists Are Learning What Religion Has Known for Years
EVEN THOUGH I was raised Catholic, for most of my adult life, I didn’t pay religion much heed. Like many scientists, I assumed it was built on opinion, conjecture, or even hope, and therefore irrelevant to my work. That work is running a psychology lab focused on finding ways to improve the human condition, using the tools of science to develop techniques that can help people meet the challenges life throws at them.
