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Does a Pie Chart Change Who You Are?
23andMe’s senior director of research, Joanna Mountain, says she’s long wondered how recreational DNA testing affects our thinking about genetic differences. This is more than a mere academic concern. More than than 30 million people have spit into vials or swabbed their cheeks in an ongoing search for family, history, and identity that has transformed America into a nation of seekers in recent years, and 23andMe’s database contains about a third of them. We test to find genetic relatives and to get those little ethnicity pie charts that promise to tell us how Irish, Korean, or Nigerian we are.
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Best Way to Stop Cheating in Online Courses? ‘Teach Better’
Students cheat more in online courses -- right? Most professors certainly think so. Sixty percent of the nearly 2,000 respondents to Inside Higher Ed's 2019 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology last fall said they believed academic fraud occurs more frequently in online than in face-to-face courses (remember those?). And 93 percent of respondents to a recent survey by Wiley said they believed students were significantly more likely (62 percent) or more likely to cheat in an online course than in a face-to-face course.
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Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress
APS Member/Author: Jennifer Richeson For two days in early June, as America was erupting in sustained protests over the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, the most watched movie on Netflix was The Help. The 2011 film—which depicts Black servants working in affluent white households in 1960s Mississippi, and centers on a white female journalist—won acclaim in some quarters. But it has also been criticized as a sentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism—and redemption—amid the cruelties of Jim Crow. To ask what was going on here—why people started watching The Help at a moment of deep racial trauma—is to risk tumbling down a rabbit hole.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on sexual-trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), pornography use, eating disorders, clinical practice guidelines, and acute stress and cortisol.
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Health and Happiness Depend on Each Other, Psychological Science Says
New research adds to the growing body of evidence that happiness not only feels good, it is good for your physical health. [July 22, 2020]
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We’re Trying To Get People To Wear Masks The Wrong Way
The words “please wear a face mask” is on almost every sign that’s posted in the windows of grocery stores, hair salons, and shops. In many places it’s now mandatory to wear a mask and while the a lot people have embraced the new norm, in some parts of the U.S., the requirement to put on a mask has brought about political protests, arrests and violence. In fact, a security guard in Michigan was killed after telling a customer to put on a mask. And a lot of it comes down to how things are communicated. There’s been plenty of critique on the inconsistencies of messaging from public health officials and how that’s made it harder to get people to start wearing a mask.