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The Night That Lasted A Lifetime: How Psychology Was Misused In Teen’s Murder Case
On an autumn night in 1979, a young cab driver named Jeffrey Boyajian was sitting in his taxi, waiting for his next fare. It was around 4 a.m., and he was parked in downtown Boston's red-light district, known then as the 'Combat Zone.' Three men approached the curb and got into Jeffrey's cab. He drove them across the city to a public housing complex called the Archdale Housing Development. When Jeffrey stopped the cab, the three passengers made their real intentions clear. They pulled Jeffrey out of the car to rob him. After he begged for his life, one of the men raised his left arm and fired several shots into Jeffrey's head.
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Surviving the Trauma of COVID-19
APS Member/Author: Roxane Cohen Silver As a psychological scientist who investigates how individuals and communities respond to collective traumas, I study human resilience in a range of situations—from earthquakes and hurricanes to mass violence and war. Shortly after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, I sat in the White House Office of Homeland Security discussing community resilience. Although the threat to society seemed real and continuing, national leaders were anxious to get people back on airplanes and into high-rise office buildings.
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U.S. Teens Advise Schools on Fall Reopening During COVID-19 Pandemic
When U.S. schools begin the next academic year with the country still fighting the coronavirus pandemic, students should spend half their time in classrooms and half doing online activities that pinpoint their individual learning style such as videos or reading. That advice comes from Nimish Mathur, 17, and his team from DuPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky. The “I’m So Confused Gang” team submitted its idea for re-opening school in the age of COVID-19 to a competition sponsored by Discover Your Genius (DYG), a nonprofit company that challenges young people to solve real-world business problems.
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How To Build Better Virtual Connections
Before Covid-19 became an international pandemic, loneliness was already considered an epidemic in America and other parts of the world. Now people all over the world have been asked to keep to their homes for more than three months now, and it risks those struggling with loneliness going into a severe depression. But how does one make meaningful connections virtually, whether it’s personal or professional?
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The Push to Redefine “Good Design” Amid the Black Lives Matter Movement
In 2015, Nextdoor, the location-based social networking app, gained a reputation as a locus of racial profiling. Users were sending alerts for merely spotting hoodie-wearing Black men walking in their neighborhoods. One damning report described Nextdoor as “a forum for paranoid racialism—the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated community.” In studying the problem, Nextdoor realized that its easy-to-use app was partly to blame. Creating intuitive, easy-to-use products and interfaces is the domain of user experience designers. Don’t Make Me Think is both the title of a core textbook in the field and many designers’ professional mantra.
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Despite Warnings, Social Distancing Does Not Make Us Lonely
For months we’ve been reading warnings that the coronavirus pandemic could make us lonely. But now researchers have good news: people are more resilient than we thought. A new study published in American Psychologist has found that social distancing has not led to more loneliness. For the nationwide study by Florida State University College of Medicine, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 people before and during stay-at-home orders. This was part of a larger study on how we are reacting psychologically to the Covid-19.
