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Nancy E. Adler, Who Linked Wealth to Health, Dies at 77
Nancy E. Adler, a health psychologist whose work helped transform the public understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic status and physical health, died on Jan. 4 at her home in San Francisco. She was 77. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her husband, Arnold Milstein, said. Dr. Adler was instrumental in documenting the powerful role that education, income and self-perceived status in society play in predicting health and longevity. Today, the connection is well known — a truism among public health experts is that life expectancy is determined more by your ZIP code than your genetic code. But it was an obscure notion as recently as 30 years ago.
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Detention Fails to Help Young Lawbreakers Avoid Further Offenses, Report Shows
Youth who are caught committing crimes are far less likely to reoffend when they receive rehabilitative help, such as therapy and life-skills training, rather than a legal punishment. Learn more about the new PSPI report and what bringing systems and science to find solutions could do to help young people.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on learning-induced plasticity, whether risky drinking is also characterized by stimulus generalization, comprehensive social trait judgments, self-esteem, and much more.
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Simine Vazire Hopes to Fix Psychology’s Credibility Crisis
... A movement to try to fix things began more than a decade ago. Now, one of its leading lights has ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the field. On January 1st Simine Vazire took over as editor-in-chief of Psychological Science, the discipline’s most prestigious journal. Dr Vazire is a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who helps run a research group focused on metascience, or the study of science’s processes. She has been a mainstay of the movement to fix psychological science for years.
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Bilingualism Is Reworking This Language’s Rainbow
Like the ancient Greek of Homer's time, the Tsimane' language has no set word for the parts of the color spectrum English speakers call “blue.” Although Tsimane' does name a number of more subjective hues (think “aquamarine” or “mauve” in English), its speakers—the Tsimane' people of Bolivia—reliably agree on just three main color categories: blackish, reddish and whitish. But bilingualism is reworking the Tsimane' tricolor rainbow, researchers recently reported in Psychological Science—offering a rare, real-time glimpse into how learning a second language can change how people think about abstract concepts and fuel language evolution.
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New Year’s Resolutions for the Anxious
The start of the new year often brings lofty ambitions. It’s 2024 — time to exercise and eat better, says a nagging voice, somewhere deep in your brain. What about learning to knit? It’s enough to make anyone feel anxious. For those who already struggle with anxiety, these heightened expectations can be even more distressing. Especially because research suggests that many of us don’t complete our New Year’s resolutions. So we asked several psychologists for resolutions specifically tailored to people with anxious tendencies. And we broke them down into bite-size steps so you can notch your successes along the way. But don’t feel pressure to tackle these tips just because it’s January.
