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Why Older People Managed to Stay Happier Through the Pandemic
For all its challenges to mental health, this year of the plague also put psychological science to the test, and in particular one of its most consoling truths: that age and emotional well-being tend to increase together, as a rule, even as mental acuity and physical health taper off. The finding itself is solid. Compared with young adults, people aged 50 and over score consistently higher, or more positively, on a wide variety of daily emotions. They tend to experience more positive emotions in a given day and fewer negative ones, independent of income or education, in national samples (work remains to be done in impoverished, rural and immigrant communities).
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How to Promote Equity at Home as Moms are being Forced from the Workforce
Just one year ago, dads were as likely as moms to crowd the halls of my kids’ elementary school at morning drop-off and wash burp cloths at the laundromat, babies strapped to their chests. I loved that my kids — along with a whole neighborhood of kids — were growing up witness to men and women sharing in caretaking and breadwinning. Then came the pandemic. With schools moved online and child-care programs closing, women all over the country began exiting the workforce at alarming rates. My neighborhood was no exception. As school sputtered back to a start, several local moms confided that they, like me, had cut back on work to help with remote learning.
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The U.S. Needs Tolerance More Than Unity
The 2020 United States election and the ensuing riot are further evidence—as if we needed more—of how deeply divided the country is today. The divisions are regional, ideological, cultural, moral and, some say, intractable. A team of prominent scientists recently warned of the dangers of a new foundational threat to the republic: political sectarianism, or the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with a political group and against another. ...
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Missing the Crowd for the Faces: The Crowd-Emotion-Amplification Effect
How good are we at reading crowds’ emotions? Research indicates that individuals tend to focus their attention on the faces that exhibit the most extreme emotions, leading them to overestimate the crowd’s actual emotional state. These findings have implications for public speaking as well as for controlling crowd demonstrations.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on anxiety and preference for immediate rewards, the role of social processes in delusions, machine learning and suicide research, thought conditioning, dissemination of best practices by clinicians, emotion regulation flexibility, racial discrimination and metal health, and memory in PTSD.
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Behind The Pandemic Purchases We Won’t Use Until Later
What's the point of buying something now that you can't even use during the pandemic? Social scientists say there is value in anticipation — in giving yourself a concrete way to look forward. ...
