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Do people become more prejudiced as they grow older?
BBC Magazine: Admirers of Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird have been shocked by the transformation of the lawyer Atticus Finch into a racist in the newly published Go Set a Watchman, set 20 years later. But psychologist William von Hippel says it should not necessarily be a surprise - he argues that it's not unusual for people to become more prejudiced as they get older. This article contains language that some readers might find offensive. Atticus may be fictional, but his transition from the lone defender of an unjustly accused African American in To Kill a Mockingbird to a 72-year-old who resists school desegregation in Go Set a Watchman is all too real.
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Teenagers Who Don’t Get Enough Sleep at Higher Risk for Mental Health Problems
Scientific American: Many studies have examined the effects of sufficient versus insufficient sleep on mental health. A new study, published in February in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, takes a more nuanced look, attempting to determine just how much each hour less per night really costs—where teenagers are concerned. ... These correlational findings do not prove that lack of sleep is causing these problems. Certainly the reverse can be true: depression and anxiety can cause insomnia.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Clarifying the Behavioral Economics of Social Anxiety Disorder: Effects of Interpersonal Problems and Symptom Severity on Generosity Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Richard G. Heimberg, Kristin P. Taylor, and Eric J. Lenze Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with lower interpersonal warmth, something previous studies have detected via behavioral economic tasks. In two studies, the researchers attempted to replicate and expand on these findings by having participants with and without an anxiety disorder complete a flexible iterated prisoner's dilemma (FIPD) task.
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Why We Worry About Shark Attacks, Not Car Crashes
Our perceptions of risk don’t always match reality, being swayed by factors beyond logic and numbers.
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Firearm Shooting Errors Could Be Reduced Through Cognitive Training
Shooting a firearm requires coordinating many actions that depend upon core cognitive abilities, including the critical ability to stop just before pulling the trigger. People who have difficulty inhibiting responses are more likely to shoot unarmed civilians in simulated scenarios, but response inhibition training can help to reduce these shooting errors, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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How an Insomnia Therapy Can Help With Other Illnesses
The New York Times: It’s a Catch-22 that even those with a common cold experience: Illness disrupts sleep. Poor sleep makes the symptoms of the illness worse. What’s true for a cold also holds for more serious conditions that co-occur with insomnia. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol dependence, fibromyalgia, cancer and chronic pain often give rise to insomnia, just as sleeplessness exacerbates the symptoms of these diseases. Historically, insomnia was considered a symptom of other diseases. Today it is considered an illness in its own right and recognized as an amplifier of other mental and physical ailments.
