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Arthur Staats, child psychologist and father of the ‘timeout,’ dies at 97
Arthur W. Staats, a psychologist who made a science of the “timeout,” a disciplinary technique that gave exasperated parents an alternative to spanking and helped usher in a new era of child-rearing in the second half of the 20th century, died April 26 at his home in Honolulu. He was 97. The cause was heart ailments, said his son, Peter Staats. Dr. Staats was an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Staats may not have been a household name, at least not beyond the professional circles where he was known for developing a field of study called psychological behaviorism.
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Commentary: Gavin Newsom’s wheel of vaccine fortune: When a game show is as good a metaphor as any
Our perceptions of risk, as many insurance adjusters and sports teams with comfortable leads know, could be better. Academics study this. For a 2013 Assn. for Psychological Science paper, 101 college students, in exchange for extra credit, were placed in a room with a tarantula (American research universities are the envy of the world) and tried to guess how far away the spider was. The students who were afraid thought the spider was much closer. Fear messes with our perceptions.
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Dads Just Want to Help
My late father was a generous and kind man, but often morose. He was troubled about matters large and small, be they the fate of the world or the water in the basement. I remember two times when he seemed genuinely happy. The first was when, unable to meet our family’s needs with his modest teaching salary, he took on a second job driving a bus. The other was a few years later, when he decided to advance his career—once again for the good of our family—by pursuing his Ph.D. During both periods, he was exhausted and overworked. But he smiled and laughed more than usual, and seemed untroubled by the small annoyances and big quandaries that normally brought him down.
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Edward Diener, Psychologist Known as Dr. Happiness, Dies at 74
Edward Diener, a playful social psychologist who was nicknamed Dr. Happiness for his pioneering research into what defined contentment, died on April 27 at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 74. The cause was bladder cancer, his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, said. His death had not been widely reported. Dr. Diener brought legitimacy and scientific rigor to a field that had been largely uncharted when he began his research in the 1980s at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Misery, sadness and fear had long been more fertile subjects of psychological study than happiness. Happiness “sounds flaky, kind of frivolous,” Dr. Diener said in 2017.
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Casual Sex, Self Esteem, and the Prejudices Women Face
New research in Psychological Sciecne finds no significant correlation between a woman’s sexual behavior and her self-esteem.
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Lee Ross, Expert in Why We Misunderstand Each Other, Dies at 78
Personal humiliation inspired Lee Ross’s greatest insight. In 1969, when he defended his graduate dissertation at Columbia University, a committee of faculty members let loose a downpour of esoteric questions. Mr. Ross had done a study of how perceptions differed under bright and dim light. What, one inquisitor asked, was the wavelength of the dim light, calculated in the infinitesimal unit of measurement known as angstroms? That’s what it meant to be a real academic, Mr. Ross thought: to know about stuff like angstroms. He felt sure he was unworthy. That same month, he went to Stanford University, where he’d gotten a job as a junior professor.
