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Memory Makes It Hard to Fight Pandemics. But We Can Always Strive to Remember Lessons Learned
A multidisciplinary panel explored how psychological science might contribute to understanding digital contact tracing, maximizing its capabilities in the future and otherwise improving preparedness for future pandemics.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on personality across the world and face impressions, perceptual and cognitive judgments, cognitive control in lemurs, attitude change, fear, social touch, and much more.
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Don’t Teach Your Kids to Fear the World
If you are a parent, your greatest fear in life is likely something happening to one of your kids. According to one 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this), parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children; the No. 1 back-to-school concern is about their safety. And this makes sense, if you believe that safety is a foundation that has to be established before dealing with other concerns. You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior.
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Educators Can Help Make Stem Fields Diverse – Over 25 Years, I’ve Identified Nudges That Can Encourage Students to Stay
Jen, a student I taught early in my career, stood head-and-shoulders above her peers academically. I learned she had started off as an engineering major but switched over to psychology. I was surprised and curious. Was she struggling with difficult classes? No. In fact, Jen’s aptitude for math was so strong, she had been recruited as an engineering prospect. In her first year, her engineering classes were filled with faces of other women. But as she advanced, there were fewer and fewer women in her classes – until one day, she realized she was the only woman in a large lecture class of men. Jen began to question if she belonged.
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Go Ahead, Ask For Help. People Are Happy to Give It.
Many things can get in the way of asking others for help: Fear of rejection. Fear of imposing. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology so ingrained in American culture. But new research suggests many of us underestimate how willing — even happy! — others are to lend a helping hand. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science this month, included six small experiments involving more than 2,000 participants — all designed to compare the perspectives of those asking for help with the perspectives of helpers.
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Attitudes Improve for Sex and Race. Disability and Age? Not So Much
How did attitudes about race, sexuality, age, or disability change in the last decade or so? Researchers examined more than 7 million implicit and explicit tests for an article published in Psychological Science. In this conversation, APS’s Ludmila Nunes speaks with APS member Tessa Charlesworth (Harvard University), the article’s lead author.