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Bringing Contexts In, Taking Racism Out: How to Improve Cognitive Psychology
Podcast: How can researchers reshape cognitive psychology to become more aware of the roles of culture and context? Ayanna Thomas joins APS’s Ludmila Nunes to discuss scientific racism in cognitive psychology.
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“The Tribe Has Spoken”: Race and Gender Bias Influence Voting Outcomes in Reality TV Show
Women and BIPOC players in the reality TV show Survivor may be less likely to win due to sexual and racial biases that arise when it comes to voting.
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Collaborative Research, Globalization Efforts Are Priorities for APS President-Elect Randi Martin
Martin (Rice University), Teresa Bajo (University of Granada), and Lila Davachi (Columbia University) joined the APS Board of Directors for three-year terms starting June 1, 2023.
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Embrace the Awkward Silence
At this point, Julie Boland is resigned to awkward silences. She’s a psychology and linguistics professor at the University of Michigan, and like many of us, she’s been spending a lot of time on Zoom calls over the past few years—and seemingly always dealing with internet lags and people fumbling to mute and unmute their mic. When there’s a pause, no one seems to know whose turn it is to speak. It helps, at least somewhat, that Boland knows the reason these breaks tend to feel cringey: They disrupt the conversational volley of call-and-response that usually comes to people naturally. We are alert to the moment rhythm ruptures, like when someone loses the beat in a karaoke performance.
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Loneliness Poses Profound Public Health Threat, Surgeon General Says
Loneliness presents a profound public health threat akin to smoking and obesity, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy warned in an advisory issued Tuesday that aims to rally Americans to spend more time with each other in an increasingly divided and digital society. Murthy said half of U.S. adults experience loneliness, which has consequences for mental and physical health, including a greater risk of depression, anxiety — and, perhaps more surprisingly, heart disease, stroke and dementia.
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The Truth About Teens, Social Media and the Mental Health Crisis
Back in 2017, psychologist Jean Twenge set off a firestorm in the field of psychology. Twenge studies generational trends at San Diego State University. When she looked at mental health metrics for teenagers around 2012, what she saw shocked her. "In all my analyses of generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I had never seen anything like it," Twenge wrote in the Atlantic in 2017. Twenge warned of a mental health crisis on the horizon. Rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness were rising. And she had a hypothesis for the cause: smartphones and all the social media that comes along with them.