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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.
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So You Had a Bad Day …
It was the tail end of a long day of small, stupid things that in normal times would have been tiny grains of sand to knock out of my shoe. But on that day, another pandemic day in a long string of pandemic days, those small, gritty things — the dog wanted too much attention, work was causing stress, the neighbor’s kid was outside, screaming, again — became boulders. But I set those things aside, I thought, and got ready to do a tele-seminar for a few hundred strangers. And then my recycling blew down the street. “I can’t take it anymore!” I shouted from the middle of the road while chasing boxes and newspapers. It’s not uncommon for the small to become the insurmountable right now.
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Why Your Employees’ Mental Health Should Be Top Priority
On a global scale, more than 264 million people struggle with depression. In the U.S., nearly 50 million adults had experienced some form of mental illness in 2018, and in Canada, 1 in 5 adults suffer from mental stress. I've found that many individuals of all ages across organizations are faced with challenges linked to finding balance and peace in a fast-paced, high-pressure world where they are constantly connected to technology. Exhausted, anxious and often sleep-deprived, many people show up at work despite mental or physical ailments, knowing they could struggle to perform at their peak.
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Young Men Break Social-Distancing Rules Way More Than Young Women
Lockdown has been hard for many, including teens who had flown the nest and suddenly had to fly back home. A new survey by a team from the University of Sheffield and Ulster University in the UK suggests young men are handling it by flouting the rules at twice the rate of young women. Researchers questioned just under 2,000 13- to 24-year-olds, finding half of the men aged 19-24 had met friends or family members they did not live with during lockdown, compared to 25% of women. Younger teens were more compliant than older ones.
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APS Backgrounder Series: Psychological Science and COVID-19: Conspiracy Theories
What does psychological science have to say about conspiracy theories, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic? [May 27, 2020]
