-
Are We Heading for a Post-Pandemic ‘Roaring 2020s,’ With Parties and Excess?
This has been a year of extreme social deprivation. But the pandemic — like all pandemics before it — eventually will end. Then what? Will we easily transition from isolation back into the real world? For most of us, the answer probably is yes, although it may take time to adapt, according to social scientists who study human behavior. “Social skills are like a muscle,” says Richard Slatcher, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia who studies the effects of relationships on health and well-being. “If we are out of practice, it will take a while to get back on the social bike, if you will, and ride it again. It has now become second nature to keep your guard up.
-
Is Burnout Depression by Another Name?
The feelings of work related exhaustion associated with “burnout” could be a form of depression.
-
Toddler TV Time Not to Blame for Attention Problems
It’s a common belief that exposure to television in toddlerhood causes attention-deficit problems in school-age children—a claim that was born from the results of a 2004 study that seemed to show a link between the two. However, a further look at the evidence suggests this is not true.
-
Out of the Box and Into the Lab, Mimes Help Us ‘See’ Objects That Don’t Exist
Our minds can automatically create well-defined representations of objects that are merely implied rather than seen, like the obstacles in a mime’s performance
-
Out of the Box and Into the Lab, Mimes Help Us ‘See’ Objects That Don’t Exist
Chaz Firestone (Johns Hopkins University) and Pat Little (New York University) talk with Charles Blue about their Psychological Science paper on mimes and implied surface.
-
Ew, Gross! Why Humans Are Hardwired To Feel Disgust.
In the late 1860s, Charles Darwin proposed that being grossed out could have an evolutionary purpose. Disgust, he wrote, was inborn and involuntary, and it evolved to prevent our ancestors from eating spoiled food that might kill them. Darwin hypothesized that the early humans most prone to revulsion survived to pass on their genes, while the more nutritionally daring died off. For many years afterward, though, scientists didn’t pay much attention to disgust. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, a decade when gameshows eagerly slimed contestants, that disgust garnered more attention in psychological and behavioral research.
