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Surviving the Trauma of COVID-19
APS Member/Author: Roxane Cohen Silver As a psychological scientist who investigates how individuals and communities respond to collective traumas, I study human resilience in a range of situations—from earthquakes and hurricanes to mass violence and war. Shortly after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, I sat in the White House Office of Homeland Security discussing community resilience. Although the threat to society seemed real and continuing, national leaders were anxious to get people back on airplanes and into high-rise office buildings.
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U.S. Teens Advise Schools on Fall Reopening During COVID-19 Pandemic
When U.S. schools begin the next academic year with the country still fighting the coronavirus pandemic, students should spend half their time in classrooms and half doing online activities that pinpoint their individual learning style such as videos or reading. That advice comes from Nimish Mathur, 17, and his team from DuPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky. The “I’m So Confused Gang” team submitted its idea for re-opening school in the age of COVID-19 to a competition sponsored by Discover Your Genius (DYG), a nonprofit company that challenges young people to solve real-world business problems.
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How To Build Better Virtual Connections
Before Covid-19 became an international pandemic, loneliness was already considered an epidemic in America and other parts of the world. Now people all over the world have been asked to keep to their homes for more than three months now, and it risks those struggling with loneliness going into a severe depression. But how does one make meaningful connections virtually, whether it’s personal or professional?
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The Push to Redefine “Good Design” Amid the Black Lives Matter Movement
In 2015, Nextdoor, the location-based social networking app, gained a reputation as a locus of racial profiling. Users were sending alerts for merely spotting hoodie-wearing Black men walking in their neighborhoods. One damning report described Nextdoor as “a forum for paranoid racialism—the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated community.” In studying the problem, Nextdoor realized that its easy-to-use app was partly to blame. Creating intuitive, easy-to-use products and interfaces is the domain of user experience designers. Don’t Make Me Think is both the title of a core textbook in the field and many designers’ professional mantra.
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Despite Warnings, Social Distancing Does Not Make Us Lonely
For months we’ve been reading warnings that the coronavirus pandemic could make us lonely. But now researchers have good news: people are more resilient than we thought. A new study published in American Psychologist has found that social distancing has not led to more loneliness. For the nationwide study by Florida State University College of Medicine, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 people before and during stay-at-home orders. This was part of a larger study on how we are reacting psychologically to the Covid-19.
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The Learning Opportunities Hiding in Our Failures
Successes enjoy more attention than failures. We celebrate stories of triumph, and pore over them to extract the reasons why things went so well. Industries package the lessons and share them as tips for ‘best practice’, while after-dinner speakers regale their audiences with the steps they took to glory. By contrast, if they’re not buried completely, failures, and those who perpetrate them, are more often seen as sources of shame or ignominy. Yet it is often the errors, missteps and outright flops that contain more useful practical information on how to do things better, if only we were more willing to share and study them.
