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Among People Facing Food Insecurity, Researchers Find a Hidden Health Issue: Eating Disorders
When Carolyn Black Becker, a psychologist who studies eating disorders, used to explain her research to colleagues, she would get blank stares. The field, after all, was disproportionately focused on young girls and women who were underweight, white, and from middle-class families. Becker herself had spent most of her career focused on the prevention of eating disorders among sorority members. In that light, her decision to study eating disorders in people who were facing food insecurity — that is, people without reliable access to sufficient food — seemed unusual, even bizarre to some. “Everybody looked at me like I had two heads,” Becker recalled.
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The Questions That Will Get Me Through the Pandemic
In quarantine, one day smears into the next. To fight that unmoored feeling, psychologists recommend establishing a routine. The former astronaut Scott Kelly says that such a regimen helped him get through his time on the International Space Station, watching multiple sunrises a day as he orbited Earth. For the past 40 years, the historian Robert Caro has written alone in his office, but maintained a daily structure to combat his instinct to procrastinate.* “I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job,” he told NPR's Steve Inskeep. “I keep a schedule.
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The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases
Podcast interview with APS Member Mahzarin Banaji Where do our minds live? A simple, scientific response would be to say our minds live in our brains. But Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji says we should not think of our minds as being solitary. "The individual mind sits in society. And the connection between mind and society is an extremely important one that should not be forgotten." Banaji is one of the creators of the Implicit Association Test, a widely-used tool for measuring a person's implicit biases. She says it's important to acknowledge that problems rooted in prejudice cannot be solved by finger pointing.
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Why Outfitting Police in Military Uniforms Encourages Brutality
APS Member/Author: Adam Galinsky As protests over the systemic brutality by law enforcement against Black Americans continue, an enduring image will be of a blue wall of police, outfitted in helmets and riot gear, prepared to stamp out would-be violence. In cities from Seattle to Boston, officers have been covered head-to-toe in battle-ready gear accessorized with batons, shields, and various firearms, appearing more suited to take on a hostile nation’s insurgents than protestors on U.S. soil. In many cases—and most prominently in Lafayette Square near the White House—initially calm police behavior transformed into aggression.
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Stemming the Spread of Misinformation on Social Media
A simple ‘nudge’ encourages people to share more truthful COVID-19 content online. [July 2, 2020]
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on antisocial disorders, data analysis, a mindfulness model, a model of moral contagion, scientific collaboration, and social neuroscience.
