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Dangling Millions of Dollars to Coax People to get Vaccinated isn’t the Worst Idea
At first, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 seemed like enough of a reward. You got the satisfaction of protecting your health and that of the people around you, plus the knowledge that soon you would be able to socialize with other vaccinated people without wearing masks. But as demand for the vaccines waned, the prizes began: Fishing licenses in Maine. Crawfish in New Orleans. Baseball tickets in New York. “A shot and a beer” in New Jersey — plus (perhaps less enticing) a chance to have dinner with the governor. Then, in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine launched a lottery, “Vax-a-Million,” with an eye-catching $1 million prize every week.
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Navigating a Virtual World Helped Older Adults’ Memory
Scientists have long sought to prevent sharp memories from dulling with age, but the problem remains stubborn. Now research published in Scientific Reports suggests virtual reality might help older people recall facts and events based on specific details. The study involved 42 healthy older adults from the San Francisco Bay Area. Half spent a dozen hours over four weeks playing a virtual-reality game called Labyrinth; they strapped on headsets and walked in place, roaming virtual neighborhoods while completing errands. The other half, in the control group, used electronic tablets to play games that did not require navigating or recalling details.
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Arthur Staats, child psychologist and father of the ‘timeout,’ dies at 97
Arthur W. Staats, a psychologist who made a science of the “timeout,” a disciplinary technique that gave exasperated parents an alternative to spanking and helped usher in a new era of child-rearing in the second half of the 20th century, died April 26 at his home in Honolulu. He was 97. The cause was heart ailments, said his son, Peter Staats. Dr. Staats was an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Dr. Staats may not have been a household name, at least not beyond the professional circles where he was known for developing a field of study called psychological behaviorism.
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Commentary: Gavin Newsom’s wheel of vaccine fortune: When a game show is as good a metaphor as any
Our perceptions of risk, as many insurance adjusters and sports teams with comfortable leads know, could be better. Academics study this. For a 2013 Assn. for Psychological Science paper, 101 college students, in exchange for extra credit, were placed in a room with a tarantula (American research universities are the envy of the world) and tried to guess how far away the spider was. The students who were afraid thought the spider was much closer. Fear messes with our perceptions.
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Dads Just Want to Help
My late father was a generous and kind man, but often morose. He was troubled about matters large and small, be they the fate of the world or the water in the basement. I remember two times when he seemed genuinely happy. The first was when, unable to meet our family’s needs with his modest teaching salary, he took on a second job driving a bus. The other was a few years later, when he decided to advance his career—once again for the good of our family—by pursuing his Ph.D. During both periods, he was exhausted and overworked. But he smiled and laughed more than usual, and seemed untroubled by the small annoyances and big quandaries that normally brought him down.
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Edward Diener, Psychologist Known as Dr. Happiness, Dies at 74
Edward Diener, a playful social psychologist who was nicknamed Dr. Happiness for his pioneering research into what defined contentment, died on April 27 at his home in Salt Lake City. He was 74. The cause was bladder cancer, his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, said. His death had not been widely reported. Dr. Diener brought legitimacy and scientific rigor to a field that had been largely uncharted when he began his research in the 1980s at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Misery, sadness and fear had long been more fertile subjects of psychological study than happiness. Happiness “sounds flaky, kind of frivolous,” Dr. Diener said in 2017.
