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‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens
One evening last April, an anxious and free-spirited 13-year-old girl in suburban Minneapolis sprang furious from a chair in the living room and ran from the house — out a sliding door, across the patio, through the backyard and into the woods. Moments earlier, the girl’s mother, Linda, had stolen a look at her daughter’s smartphone. The teenager, incensed by the intrusion, had grabbed the phone and fled. (The adolescent is being identified by an initial, M, and the parents by first name only, to protect the family’s privacy.) Linda was alarmed by photos she had seen on the phone. Some showed blood on M’s ankles from intentional self-harm.
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Trauma and Ukraine: The World Health Organization Leveraged Psychological Science to Help Prepare Us for This Moment
Addressing a crisis like this means looking directly at the problem-solving needs that arise in times of war, danger, or difficulty and empowering ourselves to meet these needs.
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Texas Is About to Execute a Woman for Her Daughter’s Death. But She May Well Be Innocent
The clock is ticking. On April 27, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute by lethal injection 53 year-old Melissa Lucio. In 2008, Ms. Lucio was convicted largely on the basis of a confession for the alleged murder of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah. Now her attorneys have filed a clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. They point to evidence indicating that the child died from injuries resulting from an accident, not murder. I did not work on this case and am not privy to the entire case file, so I am not in a position to argue for Ms. Lucio’s actual innocence.
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False Confessions: A Current Matter of Life and Death
On April 27, Melissa Lucio is scheduled to be executed in Texas for the alleged murder of her 2-year-old daughter. APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Saul Kassin explains how the psychological science on false confessions relates to this life-or-death case.
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Detecting Bullshit
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls. When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans.
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What the Second-Happiest People Get Right
In 2007, a group of researchers began testing a concept that seems, at first blush, as if it would never need testing: whether more happiness is always better than less. The researchers asked college students to rate their feelings on a scale from “unhappy” to “very happy” and compared the results with academic (GPA, missed classes) and social (number of close friends, time spent dating) outcomes. Though the “very happy” participants had the best social lives, they performed worse in school than those who were merely “happy.” ...