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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on distress caused by contact with ex-partners, the results of attention-bias modification on anxiety symptoms, risk factors in male sex offenders, and self-esteem and borderline personality disorder.
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Psychological Science and Conspiracy Theories in the Era of COVID-19: Interview with Karen Douglas and Michael Shermer
Podcast interview on conspiracy theories and how they have materialized in the era of COVID-19.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on psychological knowledge, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), happiness across the life span, and the dehumanization hypothesis.
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Why We’ve Been Saying ‘Sorry’ All Wrong
Academics are sorry that apology research is floundering. New discoveries on apologies rarely appear because the studies are challenging to design, not unlike determining whether woodpeckers get headaches, or boiling the ocean. Cindy Frantz, a social and environmental psychologist at Oberlin College in the US state of Ohio, has tried. “I once tried to run a study where someone was wronged in the lab, but the logistics were very complicated for ethical reasons,” she says. “You can’t do a grievous wrong.” This often leaves researchers who want to study apologies scratching their heads: what wrongs can they ethically inflict on study participants that would necessitate dramatic apologies?
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Coping with ‘Death Awareness’ in the COVID-19 Era
... The coronavirus pandemic has brought all of us a lot closer to our impermanence. Faced with news photographs of makeshift morgues and dire headlines reporting body counts, we see that all of us, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson, are vulnerable—a fact that we push out of our minds in less threatening times. But our reactions to this heightened sense of mortality can be dizzyingly inconsistent. We’ve seen amazing examples of people stepping up to help others during the pandemic: from a 99-year-old army veteran who raised $33 million for the U.K.’s National Health Service by walking laps in his garden to a royal milliner who started making face shields for hospital workers.
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So You Had a Bad Day …
It was the tail end of a long day of small, stupid things that in normal times would have been tiny grains of sand to knock out of my shoe. But on that day, another pandemic day in a long string of pandemic days, those small, gritty things — the dog wanted too much attention, work was causing stress, the neighbor’s kid was outside, screaming, again — became boulders. But I set those things aside, I thought, and got ready to do a tele-seminar for a few hundred strangers. And then my recycling blew down the street. “I can’t take it anymore!” I shouted from the middle of the road while chasing boxes and newspapers. It’s not uncommon for the small to become the insurmountable right now.
