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The Surprising Power of Social Outreach
APS Member/Author: Nicholas Epley Among the many pains associated with coronavirus is a feeling of helplessness. Even if you are sheltered in place, you can do more good than you may think by reaching out to others and connecting. But first, you have to overcome the tendency to underestimate how positively others will respond when you try. Beyond the bodily harm that comes from getting sick is the psychological harm that comes from mandated social isolation. The sense of disconnection that follows harms well-being, creates a psychological stressor that impairs our immune systems, decreases cardiovascular health and increases the likelihood of death.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on distress caused by contact with ex-partners, the results of attention-bias modification on anxiety symptoms, risk factors in male sex offenders, and self-esteem and borderline personality disorder.
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Psychological Science and Conspiracy Theories in the Era of COVID-19: Interview with Karen Douglas and Michael Shermer
Podcast interview on conspiracy theories and how they have materialized in the era of COVID-19.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on psychological knowledge, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), happiness across the life span, and the dehumanization hypothesis.
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Why We’ve Been Saying ‘Sorry’ All Wrong
Academics are sorry that apology research is floundering. New discoveries on apologies rarely appear because the studies are challenging to design, not unlike determining whether woodpeckers get headaches, or boiling the ocean. Cindy Frantz, a social and environmental psychologist at Oberlin College in the US state of Ohio, has tried. “I once tried to run a study where someone was wronged in the lab, but the logistics were very complicated for ethical reasons,” she says. “You can’t do a grievous wrong.” This often leaves researchers who want to study apologies scratching their heads: what wrongs can they ethically inflict on study participants that would necessitate dramatic apologies?
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Coping with ‘Death Awareness’ in the COVID-19 Era
... The coronavirus pandemic has brought all of us a lot closer to our impermanence. Faced with news photographs of makeshift morgues and dire headlines reporting body counts, we see that all of us, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson, are vulnerable—a fact that we push out of our minds in less threatening times. But our reactions to this heightened sense of mortality can be dizzyingly inconsistent. We’ve seen amazing examples of people stepping up to help others during the pandemic: from a 99-year-old army veteran who raised $33 million for the U.K.’s National Health Service by walking laps in his garden to a royal milliner who started making face shields for hospital workers.
