Psychological Science

October Observer Magazine

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 18:26:40 GMT

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Podcast: COVID-19 and Its Connection to Human Behavior

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:04:01 GMT

As the world approaches the one-year anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers are studying the psychological dimensions of this disease and the impact ongoing protective measures are having on public behavior. To explore how the public has reacted and adapted to the so-called new normal of the pandemic, APS convened a panel of experts for an enlightening roundtable discussion. Panelists discussed the remarkable resilience of many people in the face of this disaster and the challenges that lie ahead if we let our guard down.

Panelists included Robert Roy Britt (science journalist and former editor-in-chief of LiveScience and Space dot com), Wendy Wood (provost professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California), and APS President Shinobu Kitayama (professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition). APS staff member Charles Blue interviewed the panel.

Read Kitayama’s related column in the October Observer.

A few selected highlights from the panel are excerpted below.

Blue: In broad strokes, how do you feel people in the United States have adapted or not to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Britt:

I think people have adapted better than we might perceive from listening to the nightly news and scrolling through Twitter all day long. The vast majority of people have actually taken to wearing masks and practicing social distancing, but we are frustrated by the handful who don’t—the handful who either think this is not a real problem or just don’t want to be inconvenienced for whatever reason. So I think people have adapted, perhaps grudgingly in many cases, but what a sea change in our behavior.

Kitayama:

I completely agree with Rob, so that is the good news. The bad news is that while people can be very careful and do what they have to do—let’s say wearing a mask or being careful using personal hygiene—you can easily let your guard down. That can be a problem.

Wood:

I study habit formation and habit change. For me, it is no surprise that people have been able to adopt these new behaviors. When we do something over and over again, it becomes more automatic, more automated. When you first start wearing a mask, it feels weird and you think about it a lot and it gets in the way. If you do it on a regular basis, it starts to seem like the new normal.

Blue: Even though we have surpassed 200,000 COVID-related deaths in the United States, cancer and heart disease remain the leading causes of death. How do people process risk in these situations?

Britt:

The simple fact is that approximately 600,000 people die in the United States every year from cancer. More than that from heart disease. And I was just thinking about this, I don’t personally know anybody who has died from cancer or heart disease personally in the last year or two. And based on my reporting, most people don’t know somebody who has died from COVID-19. 200,000 is obviously a horrific number. But to some people, it’s just a number. And trying to take that number and all of the news that they hear around it and the warnings and everything else and apply it to our everyday lives is no simple task.

Kitayama:

In April, May, June and July, infection and death rates became statistical abstractions. They are simply numbers as opposed to real human beings. When the numbers become too great then the situation becomes too abstract to comprehend with the kind of vividness that you might need to recognize the severity of the situation.

Blue: What strategies can help us form new health habits that would actually help in this situation?

Wood:

We have certainly seen some that don’t help. If you’re not giving people clear guidance as to what to do, then you confuse people. For example, there has been a lot of disagreement about when you should get tested and when it’s not necessary to be tested. If people don’t know clearly what to do, then it is very hard for people to find ways to change their behavior to keep themselves safe. The first thing is we need is some very consistent, clear messaging. We haven’t had that from leadership in this country so everyone has to make their own decisions. Those decisions should not be based on personal experiences; they should be based on data on what the risk actually is and how we should actually go about protecting ourselves.

Blue: Despite our earlier hopes, it looks like we are in this for the long haul. What does this mean for our mental health and psychological well-being?

Britt:

History suggests that we humans are more resilient than we realize. Not since World War II have Americans been asked to make such significant behavioral changes. And the next year is going to challenge us in many ways, but ultimately we will emerge with a different perspective, a lot of change, and maybe just a little bit stronger.

Kitayama:

I am a big fan of John Lennon. The most famous tune he composed is “Imagine,” and the current pandemic may be a little easier if we imagine alternative realities. I think we must imagine a better, fairer, and more peaceful society during the pandemic and then try to turn some of those ideas into reality afterward.

Wood:

The pandemic has disrupted an awful lot of our daily lives. And notwithstanding the bigger picture, this is a health calamity in the United States. There are ways to look at this as an opportunity to make changes in daily behavior, to try out new things, and see what works better for you than the status quo before the pandemic. So I hope people give themselves that chance to try out new behaviors and see what could work for them that they didn’t know beforehand. I hope everyone figures out ways to stay safe.

Richeson Receives SAGE-CASBS Award for Research on Discrimination and Diversity

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:47:02 GMT

APS Fellow Jennifer Richeson has received the 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award for her broad-ranging and influential explorations of psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity, including original insights into the cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements of intergroup dynamics. A social psychologist at Yale University, Richeson uses a broad range of empirical methods to examine the potential cognitive “costs” and mutual misperceptions associated with intergroup interactions. She served on the APS Board of Directors from 2009 to 2012.

Launched in 2013 by SAGE Publishing (publisher of APS journals) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the SAGE-CASBS Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advance understanding of pressing social issues. In 2018, the award went to APS Fellow Carol Dweck, a recipient of the APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award, the William James Fellow Award, and the APS Mentor Award.

In her 2016 conversation on Inside the Psychologist’s Studio, Richeson spoke with APS Past Board Member Wendy Berry Mendes about her mentors and early influences, her research over the years, her thoughts about the state of race relations, and more. “I was kind of the Kramer of academics,” she joked, “I just kind of fell into things.” This tendency took Richeson from her middle-school observations of students being “tracked” along largely racial lines, to a pivotal class on race, class, and gender as an undergraduate at Brown. Richeson also spoke about the supportive influence of psychologist Nalini Ambady during her time in graduate school at Harvard, who helped Richeson overcome self-doubt and prepare to meet the challenges of being a woman scientist.

Richeson has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and received numerous awards and honors, including a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2007), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), the Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award from Columbia University (2019), the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (2019), and a Carnegie Foundation Senior Fellowship (2020).

In addition to a cash prize for the SAGE-CASBS Award, Richeson will deliver a public lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences on a date to be announced.

Podcast: Violent Video Games and Aggression: The Connection is Dubious, at Best

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 15:53:01 GMT

A new study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reanalyzed the data potentially linking video games to aggression in children and found little if any correlation between the two. Lead author Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University talks with APS’s Charles Blue on the history and plausibility of connecting violent video games with aggressive outcomes in children.

See related news release.

Violent Video Games and Aggression: The Connection Is Dubious, at Best

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:40:13 GMT

Summary: If you are worried about violent video games triggering aggressive behavior in children, new research may help to alleviate your concerns.

The coronavirus pandemic put a damper on many traditional summertime activities for kids, like trips to the pool and youth camps. This gave more opportunity for children to socialize with friends virtually through online gaming. But many hours of extra screen time may have worried parents, especially in light of a highly publicized 2015 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) linking violent video games with aggressive behavior in children.

However, a recent reanalysis of these findings published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science came to a very different conclusion, finding no clear link between video game violence and aggression in children. Both the 2015 and the 2020 studies were meta-analyses, statistical methods of finding significant patterns in a large group of independent studies.

“Our new meta-analysis found that the evidence base was not sufficient to make the conclusions outlined in the 2015 report,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, lead author on the new paper and a professor of psychology at Stetson University. “We found that violent video games do not appear to be linked to aggression.”

When Ferguson and his colleagues reexamined the data used in the earlier meta-analysis, they found that it did not include most of the existing studies of video games and violence and failed to take quality issues into consideration.

“Studies that are well designed, such as those using standardized and well-validated aggression measures, almost never find evidence for negative, violent effects,” said Ferguson. “Our new meta-analysis also illustrates the need to focus on well-designed studies when researching the impact of violent media.”

“Games are now more important than ever for socialization, feeling autonomy and control during an uncertain time, and just de-stressing,” said Ferguson.

Additional research on the potential connection between video games and violent behavior is featured in the APS Research Topic Video Games and Violence.

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Reference: Ferguson, C. J., Coperhaver, A., & Marley, P. (2020). Reexamining the Findings of the American Psychological Association’s 2015 Task Force on Violent Media: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620927666

Perspectives on Psychological Science is a bimonthly journal publishing an eclectic mix of provocative reports and articles, including broad integrative reviews, overviews of research programs, meta-analyses, theoretical statements, and articles on topics such as the philosophy of science, opinion pieces about major issues in the field, autobiographical reflections of senior members of the field, and even occasional humorous essays and sketches.

I Had to Teach My NYU Psych Class to 360 Students From a Cell Phone While Trapped In an ...

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:18:59 GMT

On September 23, I had to teach my afternoon Introduction to Psychology class today to over 300 students from my cell phone while I was trapped in my apartment building elevator with my two young kids. Even by the standards of 2020, this has to go down as the most stressful — and surreal — teaching experience of my life.

I’m currently teaching a huge Intro to Psychology class this fall. But given the risks of the pandemic as well as public health guidelines, I was forced to teach the class virtually. For whatever reason, the class was massively over-enrolled, with over 360 students from around the world joining me every few days to learn about the science of the mind.

Moving such a massive course online has been a challenge. But others have it worse, and the students are smart and engaged, so the class has truly been a blast to teach. At least, it was a blast until this week.

The first problem is that the local schools in New York are closed, and I have limited child care.

I have to get my kids from the local daycare at 3 p.m. and race back to my apartment by 3:30 p.m. to teach the class. My 10-year-old son loves to crash my course and share his thoughts on the brain and perceptual illusions, but the students find it funny so I don’t mind.

This past Wednesday, I set up my computer, walked through the city to pick up my kids, and then we arrived back at my apartment building at 3:20 p.m. We hopped in the elevator, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I was going to make it to my class on time. Class was scheduled to start in 10 minutes.

The elevator closed and started moving up. Then it quickly lurched to a halt and started dropping. I got that feeling in my stomach that happens when you’re in a roller coaster and it starts falling. I realize we are suddenly trapped on the 3rd floor.

But I used the call button in the elevator to contact the staff. They promised to contact a repairman from the elevator company to help us escape. OK, no need to panic.

I started texting people to figure out what to do. My 8-year-old daughter started getting scared, which led my son to tease her about overreacting. He’s normally a cool cucumber in any situation. But this led her to start crying.

Things were melting down pretty good at that point. But we rallied and calmed down. I gave them a hug. Things would be alright.

It dawned on me that my students would be worried if I didn’t show up for class.

But my internet reception was horrible (you know when it only has one bar of reception), and I wasn’t high enough to access my WiFi either.

After fumbling with my iPhone, I managed to login into my NYU Classes website to contact my students. Thankfully, I managed to login and send out an email announcement to the class by 3:28 p.m.

The subject line was: “Trapped in my elevator, will start class as soon as I’m rescued.”

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The Trump Administration Says Diversity Training Can Be Harmful. What Does the Research Say?

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 14:09:18 GMT

With an executive order this month, the Trump administration took aim at the anti-racism training that is becoming commonplace at colleges and other workplaces. The directive bars federal departments and agencies, government contractors, and any recipients of federal grants from holding such training for employees.

President Trump’s order criticizes training that “perpetuates racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint.” The text then states: “Research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

While it’s unclear whether colleges — many of which receive federal grants — would face consequences under the order, the directive has reignited debate around diversity training and whether it does any good.

The issue is top of mind for college leaders, who are grappling with higher education’s broader reckoning over racial injustice and facing greater pressure from students and others to require such training for faculty and staff members.

What does the research actually say about diversity training’s effectiveness?

A major 2019 study on diversity training found that it could be effective — for some people.

A team of researchers led by Edward Chang, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, tested how diversity training affected people’s attitudes and behaviors at work. The team had 3,000 people at one company voluntarily take diversity training and then explored its effects on their attitudes about women and racial minorities, Chang said.

For people who were less supportive of women beforehand, the training positively changed their attitudes. In other words, they began to acknowledge their own racial and gender biases, and recognized that discrimination against women was a problem. But the training didn’t meaningfully change the behavior of men or white employees, Chang said.

The only category of people who adjusted their behavior were younger women, he said: After the training, they took more initiative to promote their careers.

“There was no evidence of backlash,” Chang emphasized. In other words, even if the training didn’t change people’s actions, it didn’t do any harm.

But other studies have found that diversity training doesn’t work — and, in fact, could make things worse.

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Funding for Research on Risk Factors for Cancer in Rural Populations

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:06:38 GMT

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has issued a funding opportunity for social and behavioral intervention research on risk factors for cancer in rural populations. NCI notes that there have been few cancer research and intervention studies focused on social and behavioral risk factors in rural settings, which this solicitation seeks to address.

NCI outlines in the funding announcement that rural populations have significantly worse health/healthcare outcomes compared to urban populations. Rural counties also have an 8% higher cancer mortality for lung, colorectal, prostate, and cervical cancers than do urban areas. Structural barriers and social determinates of poor health are pervasive in rural areas, and intervention research is needed to address as well as close the gap of those disparities.

Studies should be focused on primary prevention while also addressing one or more social and behavioral risk factors that contribute to cancer disparities. Applications and research questions may address the following:

Disparities in behavioral risk factors for cancer in rural populations (e.g., tobacco use; diet, physical activity, and weight; alcohol consumption; UV exposure and sun-protective behavior; and HPV vaccination);
Social determinants of health and cultural differences such as fatalism and rural identity that influence trust in and attitudes toward institutions, medical providers, and government-sponsored programs in rural populations;
Economic and spatial barriers to healthy food access and physical activity in low-density rural environments;
Comorbidities not traditionally associated with cancer prevention and control (e.g., opiate drug abuse, Hepatitis C virus) in order to leverage available resources for intervention development and delivery;
Technology, communication, and health information inequalities that may contribute to cancer disparities in rural populations.

The deadline for applications is March 15, 2021. Letters of intent can be submitted 30 days prior to the application due date. Interested applicants should be sure to review the “Non-Responsive Projects” section of the funding announcement to ensure their planned project is applicable.

For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s “Social and Behavioral Intervention Research to Address Modifiable Risk Factors for Cancer in Rural Populations” funding opportunity, click here.

"We’re So Freaking Polarized”: See How Americans With Opposing Views Interpret the ...

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:33:01 GMT

This year, some Republicans have accused Democrats of wanting “to destroy the country” and “spewing hatred,” while some Democrats can be heard saying Republicans are “fascists, ruining this country” — a far cry from what would be called ideological debate.

A growing number of researchers believe politics has the ability to alter one’s perception of reality and others.

“It’s getting worse, and I don’t see it unwinding anytime soon,” said New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel. “Political identities are one of the most important and powerful identities that people have right now in this country. And that’s grown over time.”

Gallup polling going back two decades shows a stark and widening political divide on many issues — more Americans are choosing to live in places that are politically like-minded, and UCLA research found in 2016 that more than half of Americans prefer their child marry someone from a specific political party — leading to questions over just show sharply one’s beliefs could shape their worldview.

By showing an identical clip of police clashing with protesters to both Republicans and Democrats, “CBS This Morning” co-host Tony Dokoupil got a firsthand look at how stark the differences could be.

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There Won’t Be a Clear End to the Pandemic

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:29:52 GMT

The pandemic has rendered many activities unsafe, but thankfully it can’t stop us from fantasizing about them. A common balm that people reach for is the sentence construction “When this is over, I’m going to ____.” It seems to help, if only in a fleeting way, for them to imagine all of the vacations they’ll go on, all of the concerts they’ll attend, and all of the hugs they’ll give, as soon as they’re able to.

Unfortunately, the sublime post-pandemic period that so many are longing for will likely not arrive all at once, like a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve. If and when the pandemic is over someday—in the sense that it’s safe to resume normal life, or something like it—pinpointing its conclusion may never be possible. Internalizing that, and mentally bracing for a slow fade into the new normal, might lead to less angst.

Whatever the end of the pandemic might look like, the United States is nowhere close to it at the moment; week after week, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to test positive for COVID-19, and several thousand die from it. But when the threat of the pandemic does eventually subside, the process will likely be gradual and incremental. “I don’t think there’s going to be, all of a sudden, one day when we can all go make out with people at the grocery store,” Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. “Our concept of how the pandemic will end is just as oversimplified as the way we’ve approached everything else about it.”

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As a result, although many people have a distinct memory of the beginning of the pandemic, they may not experience a single parallel moment marking the end of it. The break between the Before Times and the present was conspicuous, but the transition from the present to the After Times will likely be more piecemeal and less tidy.

The way that people process the end of the pandemic could have to do with how abruptly their life changes after it. One theory for how people mentally perceive transitions from one event to another is that they notice when their expectations of what will happen next start to get upended—“like the disorientation you feel when a movie abruptly shifts to a new setting,” says Lance Rips, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Under this framework, if someone undergoes a big life change during the final stages of the pandemic (say, moving or getting a new job after a bout of unemployment), they might be more likely to register a turning point. But if instead they merely start going out more, day by day, that might not yield the same discombobulation that can mark moments of transition.

Even if people crave a swift restoration of normalcy, many have come to terms with the fact that they won’t get it. “Wearing a mask is just like making sure you pocket your keys at this point,” says Athul Acharya, a 34-year-old lawyer in Portland, Oregon. The pandemic “has now lasted long enough that I, at least, don’t find myself waiting for the end. Looking forward to it? Yes. But anticipating it as a thing that will happen in the tangible future? Not so much.”

But a gradual fade-out—one without clear indicators about the safety of resuming normal activities—might be particularly distressing for some people. “Those with generalized anxiety disorder, in which a person experiences uncontrollable worry over a range of topics, could really be suffering,” Sandra Llera, a clinical-psychology professor at Towson University, wrote to me in an email. “If we don’t have a clear-cut ending, those with a tendency to worry”—whether they have a diagnosable disorder or not—“might experience a lot of stress about when we can begin to safely return to business as usual.”

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Don’t Just Lead Your People Through Trauma. Help Them Grow.

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:26:06 GMT

The last several months have stacked painful experiences on top of each other: a global pandemic, economic collapse, and new reminders of perennial racial injustice and police violence. This July, rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. were more than triple those of early 2019. The simple question, “How are you?” has turned into an emotional minefield.

Workplaces are saturated with trauma, too, and leaders are agonizing over how to keep their teams healthy as everyone works remotely and juggles any number of stressors. The science of trauma offers some insight about this moment, and some surprising hope: Instead of asking how we will recover from these painful times, we should ask how we will be changed by them. In many cases, we have an opportunity to change for the better.

In October 2001, researchers surveyed thousands of Americans about their experiences in the wake of the World Trade Center attack. How often did they have intrusive memories of 9/11? How much trouble were they having sleeping, concentrating, and connecting with others? Four percent of respondents — and 11% of New York City residents — met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, even though none had been in the towers that day.

Events like 9/11 are psychological earthquakes that shatter our assumptions that the world is safe and just, even if we’re not in imminent danger ourselves. They lay bare how vulnerable we are — and how little we control. PTSD is the most well-known outcome of trauma, and often presents as long-term, debilitating difficulty recovering a sense of safety and stability. However, it’s not as common as you might think. In an analysis of 54 studies surveying tens of thousands of people, psychologist Isaac Galatzer-Levy and his colleagues examined how individuals fared in the months and years after suffering traumas including serious injuries, loss of loved ones, and combat. They found that 65% of survivors showed a “resilient trajectory,” remaining psychologically stable.

Even more surprising is that many survivors experience increased well-being after trauma. In the aftermath of shocking events, people often start over and rethink their priorities. They might change careers to better match their values or reconnect with estranged friends. Many experience greater purpose, stronger social connections, or deepened spirituality. Psychologists call this “posttraumatic growth,” or PTG, and it’s fairly common: In one meta-study of more than 10,000 trauma survivors, about 50% reported at least some PTG.

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Affirm Values

Many managers and leaders I’ve talked with are losing sleep not only over their own struggles, but over those of their colleagues and employees, whose sense of security and self-worth have been jeopardized. One way to combat these threats is to focus on the values that define us, regardless of the circumstances.

When psychologist George Bonanno and his colleagues surveyed people directly impacted by 9/11, they found that those who reported a clear sense of purpose and autonomy were more likely to remain resilient in the 18 months following the attacks.

A simple exercise in values affirmation can help boost team morale and restore a shared sense of purpose. Have team members list their most important guiding principles — for instance, helping others or expressing creativity — and write about why those values matter to them. Participating in an affirmation exercise like this produces powerful, long-term results, including fostering resilience and growth in the face of adversity.

Leaders can and should take this moment to affirm their organization’s values as well. Here it’s critical to be concrete. When the values on a company’s wall diverge from the reality on the ground, talk alone can produce disenchantment and cynicism. If you want to emphasize well-being for your team, allocate time and resources for employee mental health. If you want to address racial justice, go beyond bias training and rethink your company policies and systems; for instance, commit to diversifying top leadership. By linking words and action, you can help your team focus not just on what they do, but why they’re doing it.

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The Surprising Benefits of Talking to Strangers

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:23:46 GMT

Imagine you die. You wake up in a world only made up of people you remember.

“All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served your food each day at lunch… It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your 1,000 connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away. It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws breadcrumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.”

This scenario of a potential afterlife was envisaged by novelist and neuroscientist David Eagleman in his short story Circle of Friends, which he wrote over a decade ago. Eagleman told me there have been multiple shared readings of this tale about missing strangers during the Covid-19 pandemic. As we have retreated into the cocoons of our family and friends to stay safe, the glaring absence of those on the periphery of our lives has prompted more people to reflect on the significance of strangers.

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‘Anti-social paradox’

When I was a reporter in South Africa, I was travelling along a remote country road in the Free State with a BBC colleague, Milton Nkosi who is from South Africa. We were lost. Milton, who has a reputation for knowing someone in every corner of the country, wound down the window and embarked upon a conversation with a woman standing outside. How are you, how is your family, how are your parents? The woman then gave us directions. I laughed as Milton’s reputation was enhanced, only to find the woman was a total stranger. Milton explained it would have been impolite and disrespectful to ask for directions without establishing a proper connection.

However, in much of the developed world people consistently overestimate the level of discomfort they would feel if they were to reach out to someone they don’t know, even in pre-Covid times. Nick Epley at the University of Chicago has devoted much of his academic life to investigating our relationship with strangers. Epley became intrigued by his fellow commuters’ attitudes. Why did they ignore each other every morning? Was it that family and friends are beneficial but strangers are dangerous, or rather we expect them to be? Epley conducted an experiment, pre-Covid-19, in which participants were told to either talk to no one, carry on as usual or make conversation with whoever sat next to them. He discovered what he termed an “anti-social paradox”, where people consistently underestimated how much they would enjoy talking to strangers.

For one day in June 2019 I hosted a BBC Crossing Divides On The Move day with eight UK public transport companies encouraging their passengers to strike up a conversation with a stranger. Posters and public announcements helped give the passengers an excuse to reach out and strike up a conversation with a stranger. British people are famously reserved, but Epley replicated his Chicago experiment that day and found “Brits enjoyed talking to strangers just as our American participants did.” The longer people had talked the better they felt, even if they expected to be happier in solitude or thought themselves introverts.

Many people may feel hesitant about striking up a conversation, not knowing what to say. They could take advice from a book, the Art of Conversation, written in 1867. “Prepare for conversation by storing the mind with interesting matter: history, not forgetting the history going on at the present time, remarkable crimes and trials, and biography particularly of celebrities.” That advice was for people taking journeys in a shared carriage with strangers. At the time individuals couldn’t imagine joining a carriage without speaking to the people with whom they were sharing the journey.

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Beyond the mask

Wearing a mask, vital to protect the health of ourselves and those around us, alters the way we make a connection. New York University neuroscientist Jay Van Bavel tells me that our brain processes faces within a few hundred milliseconds of seeing someone. In that micro time, we determine if the face is a friend or foe, if they look friendly or menacing. In cultures that aren’t used to face coverings, learning to communicate effectively could take some adjustment. (Read more about how masks affect our interactions.)

Van Bavel suggests the need for a powerful marketing campaign to help people understand the function of masks and enable us all to see them in a new light. Indeed, thousands of commuters in Japan wore masks every day pre-Covid, not because they were hypochondriacs, but because they had a cold and wanted to protect the needs of the people around them. Reframing mask wearers as people who have chosen to be considerate of those around them can make us feel a measure of generosity and warmth to them.

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Meet The Rebel Psychologist Turning Managers Into Leaders In Two Minutes A Day

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:20:19 GMT

In today’s workplace, 35% of the population are Millennials. A third of them are managing teams and yet a majority – 58% – have not received management training, according to a CareerBuilder study.

That’s not to say that millennial managers don’t want to grow. Most of the time, they simply lack the resources to develop their skill set in a way that’s reflective of their demands.

Now, in 2020, flip-charts, workshop rooms and week-long seminars are long gone, but management training has yet to experience the digital disruption that we’ve seen in other areas of our lives.

The wisdom on leadership and building great teams is out there. However, finding it in books, podcasts, videos and blog posts is tedious and cumbersome, and so most millennial managers embark on their leadership journey unprepared and under-equipped.

Enter Bunch, a startup founded by Darja Gutnick, Charles Ahmadzadeh, and Anthony Reo.

As a psychologist-gone-rogue, Darja quit her Ph.D. to start her first company, and she’s now a third-time founder. After having worked for corporates like BMW, being a researcher in the field of organizational innovation, as well as a strategy consultant and leadership coach, she is on a mission to change the way we develop the new generation of leaders. The team has just released Bunch, an AI Leadership Coach that enables users to become better leaders in two minutes a day.

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Renita: No two leaders are alike, though. And the future of tech lies in personalization. How are you tackling customization? Where does the AI fit in?

Darja: Personalization is actually one of our top priorities. If not the top priority. When I open my app, I am getting different tips than you would. We don’t dictate what managers learn, we just provide them with a customized path. The AI coach decentralizes and democratizes how leaders learn and grow.

After our onboarding questions, we assign each user one of 14 leadership archetypes: this is a proprietary psychological profiling framework, developed based on a scientific framework measuring organizational culture of our partner Prof. Dr. Charles O’Reilly at Stanford GSB. Your profile reveals your beliefs, what kind of team you would succeed in, what your potential strengths and weaknesses could be, and your best collaborators. Based on this and your learning goals, our AI-powered recommendation technology recommends and personalizes tips for you.

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Burning Out

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:17:10 GMT

As a frequent commentator on all things higher ed, Kevin McClure likes his predictions to be right. But in the case of a recent article he wrote about the growing threat of faculty burnout, he wanted to be wrong.

“Basically what I heard over and over again was people saying, ‘That’s me. This is how I feel. This gives words to the way that I’m feeling walking into fall semester,’” McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said about feedback he received. “So it’s a situation where many people confirmed my argument that there will be a wave of burnout — but it does increase my level of concern.”

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Lisa Jaremka, assistant professor of social-health psychology at the University of Delaware, and co-author of a recent paper on “common academic experiences no one talks about” — including burnout — also said that the main consequences of burnout include mental health issues. Disillusionment with work is another danger.

Jaremka experienced burnout as a graduate student and again as an assistant professor, but she said last week that “I would absolutely expect that burnout is worse during the pandemic, particularly for women with school-aged children.”

…

Christina Maslach, professor of psychology emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, said that there is a “widespread tendency to add the word ‘burnout’ to all kinds of topics.” Yet it’s “not at all clear that the word means the same thing in all of these instances. In some cases, burnout is being used to mean exhaustion, but burnout is actually much more than that.”

…

Beyond individual interventions, Jaremka’s article includes a series of cultural and structural recommendations for institutions to reduce burnout, such as not setting “toxic” expectations, encouraging and modeling work-life balance, valuing quality work over quantity, and understanding the current limited research-funding environment. Bertram Gawronski, one of Jaremka’s co-authors and a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote that burnout is very much about people feeling like they have no “control over their outcomes.” This is not the same as simply having too much work, he said.

…

Sian Beilock, president of Barnard College and a psychologist who studies the science of why people choke under pressure, said burnout is “something we all experienced from time to time, and really, it’s the lack of motivation and feeling of struggle around whatever you need to do.”

One way people ward off burnout is turning to different “identities” when one part of life becomes overwhelming, Beilock said — such as going for a run after a difficult day of teaching. That kind of “stepping away” is harder to achieve at the moment, she added, yet she advises her faculty members to try and do it.

“A lot of us are having to multitask all the time, and as humans, we’re not very good at that.”

From the Top

Beilock said that institutions asking their faculty members to do more must do more to support them. Barnard revised its curriculum this semester to better address issues related to COVID-19 and social justice and moved from a semester format to approximately eight-week units, which it believes are more conducive to online learning. All of that has required the faculty to innovate, and the institution’s teaching and learning, technology, and Center for Engaged Pedagogy staff members have been working hard to support them.

Barnard is also expanding its student-centered Feel Well, Do Well campaign for transparency and dialogue on mental health to college employees.

“Mental health is everyone’s responsibility,” and talking about it shouldn’t be limited to the counselor’s office, Beilock said.

…

Is It OK to Reveal Your Anxiety or Depression to Your Boss?

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:11:22 GMT

Workers everywhere are having a tough time. Should they ask for help on the job?

The share of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression ballooned during the pandemic, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, rising to 40.9% by mid-July. A similar national survey from the first half of 2019 put that number at 11%.

For many, 2020 has ushered in fears of falling sick and losing a job, tension over the coming election and racial inequality, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by an untenable work-life juggle.

Meanwhile, some bosses are revealing vulnerabilities—such as a personal story from the CEO during an all-hands meeting or a crying child on a Zoom call—and asking, “How are you?” in a way that indicates they don’t expect a rote upbeat response.

So, should you answer honestly? And, if you are struggling with a mental-health issue, should you seek an accommodation such as a different schedule, extended remote work or a leave of absence?

“In some ways, the current crisis gives people cover,” says Jill Hooley, a psychology professor at Harvard University. But Dr. Hooley is still leery of her patients broaching such conversations with their bosses.

“There’s more stigma out there than we would like to think,” she says. “Less is more.”

Talk of emotional health was already seeping into the office before the novel coronavirus sent many workers home. Requests for accommodations linked to mental illness were up, according to employment lawyers. Companies built departments devoted to improving workers’ well-being, offering meditation, on-site therapy and resiliency training. And young people entering the workforce from schools where they chatted about anti-anxiety medicine or received extra test-taking time for attention-deficit disorder often weren’t afraid to speak up.

…

Are You Lying More in the Pandemic? Some Certainly Are

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:08:40 GMT

As much of the United States moves toward reopening in phases, some people are enjoying little bites of pre-pandemic life, such as dining in restaurants, exercising in gyms and learning in classrooms. With the gradual return comes a set of intrusive health questions: Are you experiencing any symptoms? Have you been exposed to anyone who has tested positive for the coronavirus? Answering those questions is where it gets tricky.

People usually tell one to two lies a day, according to a 1996 university study. Consistent with the belief that lying is an everyday social interaction, participants said they did not view their lies as serious and did not worry about being caught, the researchers said.

But what about lying during a pandemic that has brought widespread economic damage and produced a national health crisis?

Incidents in which people were dishonest about their health have been well documented over the last several months. In March, a New York man lied about his Covid-19 symptoms to gain access to a maternity ward to see his wife, who later developed flulike symptoms. The same month, a woman who flew from Massachusetts to Los Angeles and then to Beijing was placed under investigation after she was accused of lying about her symptoms. In August, a woman in Washington State was shamed for lying to her manicurist about testing positive for the virus.

…

Robert Feldman, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of “The Liar in Your Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships,” said that his research showed that people typically tell three lies within the first 10 minutes of meeting someone else.

“It’s part of what we do as members of society,” Professor Feldman said. “We tell people that we’re feeling well when we’re not feeling so well.”

Another common example of lying, he said, is saying that you liked a gift you didn’t like.

“Society operates on lies in many ways,” Professor Feldman said. “Most of these lies are probably fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but they are lies.”

Professor Feldman said that he believed the number of lies people tell had gone up during the pandemic and that there were incentives to being dishonest.

“It’s important, during the course of this pandemic, to be honest, stay at home and to wear a mask, to do social distancing,” he said. “But I also think there are a lot of subtle pressures that push people to not be totally truthful.”

When people do lie, he said, they sometimes give themselves excuses that it’s OK because they’re just trying to cope with the pandemic.

…

The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 15:06:18 GMT

Transitions are some of the most difficult periods in our lives. Even when we choose them, the disequilibrium they bring can be painful or frightening; when they are imposed upon us, they are even more distressing.

We have been awakening to the reality that the coronavirus pandemic is not a temporary affliction, but an involuntary transition from one way of life to another. Our jobs and personal lives are shifting and, in many cases, will never fully return to “normal.” The only certainty is that, even if a vaccine or cure comes along in the next few months or years, the future won’t look like the past. You may never go back to work like before. Dating may never be the same. Your alma mater might go broke and disappear. Will you hug your friends or even shake hands as much as you used to? Perhaps not.

As uniquely uncomfortable as this feels, it isn’t so different from other life transitions. And truth be told, COVID-19 may not be the most difficult transition you are facing today. Almost every day, I hear from people who are quietly struggling much more through “ordinary” transitions, such as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a forced retirement. Even when the transition is completely voluntary, it can be the source of intense suffering, because it involves adapting to new surroundings and changing your self-conception.

…

Difficult, painful transitions can yield great understanding of our lives’ purpose. Research on how people derive a sense of purpose has found that while periods of pain and struggle make us temporarily unhappy, they also make us feel as if our lives have more meaning. For example, one of my sons is in the military. His boot camp was absolutely brutal, and a day after it finished, he told me that he’d never voluntarily do anything like that again. But today he talks about the experience—which earned him the title “U.S. marine”—with amusement, relish, and pride.

One of the things we learn by not resisting challenging transitions is how to cope with subsequent life changes. In his book Meanings of Life, the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister argues that a sense of meaning gained through change makes the rest of life seem more stable. This is one of the great consolations of aging and seeing a lot of change—transitions likely don’t cause as much distress.

Difficult periods can also stimulate innovation and ingenuity. A large amount of literature talks about “post-traumatic growth,” in which people derive long-term benefits from painful experiences, including more appreciation for life, richer relationships, greater resilience, and deeper spirituality. Another manifestation of this growth, according to some newer scholarship, is heightened creativity. I have noticed a new well of creative energy during my own transition. While I have always written and spoken a lot, my productivity has increased dramatically this past year, even during the pandemic; my comfort in exploring and expressing new ideas appears inversely related to my sense of stability. Among other things, this column is the fruit of my transition.

…

New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 13:00:00 GMT

The Future of Women in Psychological Science
June Gruber, Jane Mendle, Kristen A. Lindquist, et al.

Gruber and colleagues analyze 10 topics relevant for women’s professional prospects in psychological science: career advancement; financial compensation; service assignment and practices; lifestyle roles and work–family conflict; gender biases; prevalence and perceptions of positions of power; intersectionality; harassment and incivility; agency, self-esteem, and self-promotion; and lack of belonging. The authors discuss empirical evidence for each of these issues and clarify gender gaps and positive change. They hope that a better understanding of these issues will spark conversation and help to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Self-Regulation Without Force: Can Awareness Leverage Reward to Drive Behavior Change?
Vera U. Ludwig, Kirk Warren Brown, and Judson A. Brewer

Effortful self-control is one way to regulate behavior to achieve goals (e.g., restraining oneself from eating cake to lose weight). However, another way to self-regulate behaviors relies on autonomous motivation (e.g., eating healthfully because doing so is intrinsically satisfying or aligned with one’s values). Ludwig and colleagues propose that bringing awareness to one’s subjective experience and behavior can change the value (or reward) one assigns to learned but unhealthy behaviors, leading to behavior changes. These changes would derive from reinforced learning, rather than being forced and dependent on self-control.

Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?
Diego A. Reinero, Julian A. Wills, William J. Brady, Peter Mende-Siedlecki, Jarret T. Crawford, and Jay J. Van Bavel

Reinero and colleagues investigated the impact of political ideology on the quality of scientific articles, including their replicability. They asked psychology students and laypeople to classify the political slant (liberal vs. conservative) of the abstracts of 194 articles reporting studies that had been subjected to later replication attempts. The political slant of the articles was not associated with the success of later replications, subsequent citations, original effect size, or original sample size. However, research with a greater political slant—liberal or conservative—appeared to be less replicable.

A Call for Greater Attention to Culture in the Study of Brain and Development
Yang Qu, Nathan A. Jorgensen, and Eva H. Telzer

Developmental cultural neuroscience—a potential interdisciplinary approach combining developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and cognitive neuroscience—could compensate for the current dearth of studies considering cultural and ethnic variation in neural processing across the life span. Qu and colleagues analyzed 80 publications in developmental neuroscience, finding that 99% of them used samples from Western countries and only 22% provided a detailed description of the racial/ethnic makeup of their sample. These findings point to the importance of incorporating culture into the investigation of neurodevelopment.

When Beliefs Face Reality: An Integrative Review of Belief Updating in Mental Health and Illness
Tobias Kube and Liron Rozenkrantz

Kube and Rozenkrantz integrate different lines of research about how people adjust their beliefs in light of new evidence. Some research suggests that everyone is prone to biases when updating their beliefs, although people with mental disorders appear to have difficulty updating disorder-specific dysfunctional beliefs (e.g., patients with depression may have difficulty revising negative beliefs). These biases include failures to take information into account that goes against one’s own view, with political and societal implications. The authors discuss different anomalies in belief updating, propose a new model of belief updating, and recommend directions for future research.

The Emerging Science of Virtue
Blaine J. Fowers, Jason S. Carroll, Nathan D. Leonhardt, and Bradford Cokelet

The study of virtues has grown in the past two decades and has incorporated diversified research methods. Fowers and colleagues propose a framework to help to resolve theoretical and methodological challenges surrounding the science of virtue. Their model, STRIVE-4 (Scalar Traits that are Role sensitive, include Situation × Trait Interactions, and are related to important Values that help to constitute Eudaimonia), depicts virtue as acquired traits dependent on one’s role and situation and related to values that partly constitute eudaimonia (human flourishing). The model also proposes that virtue traits include components of knowledge, behavior, emotion/motivation, and disposition.

Hinshaw Receives Sarnat Prize for Research on ADHD

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 13:28:51 GMT

APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Stephen P. Hinshaw has received the 2020 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health for his work on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. The Sarnat Prize, awarded by the National Academy of Medicine, is presented annually to an individual or organization in recognition of outstanding achievement in improving mental health through basic science, clinical applications, and public policy.

Hinshaw, a professor of psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of California’s Berkeley and San Francisco campuses, has led the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD since 1992. Through this and other projects on attention and impulse-control in children, Hinshaw has increased understanding of the psychobiological basis of ADHD and how enhanced parenting practices may help address children’s ADHD-related challenges at school.

In 2019, Hinshaw was awarded the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation’s prestigious Ruane Prize for his work on the biological and contextual risk factors of ADHD, particularly in girls and women. His Girls with ADHD Longitudinal Study has followed 140 individuals diagnosed with ADHD during childhood since the 1990s, shedding light on the role of family influence, peer rejection, and early trauma in the long-term trajectory of the disorder. Hinshaw discussed his research on ADHD, as well as potential interventions and how to reduce the stigma around mental illnesses and disorders, during his APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award Address at the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago.

Hinshaw will receive the Sarnat Prize, which includes a medal and a $20,000 cash award, virtually during the National Academy of Medicine’s annual meeting October 19, 2020.

Online Research: From Funding to Data Collection

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 12:35:38 GMT

Be creative and keep methodology in mind: two key takeaways from the APS webinar Online Research: Tools and Techniques. Robert Ariel (Virginia Wesleyan University) and Joshua VanArsdall (Elmhurst University) and shared their experiences and tips for conducting research online, and Elise Rice, a program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), discussed how online research may impact funding options.

Taking Experiments From the Lab to Online

Ariel is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on metacognition, self-regulation of learning, and the application of cognitive psychology to education. He outlined challenges researchers may encounter while trying to adapt experiments to online settings, such as needing to use specialized software that participants cannot not access on their own computers. For such challenges, he recommended the readily available solution of using a videoconferencing platform like Zoom, which can allow subjects to see and interact with the researcher’s computer. Despite potentially slowing down data collection (only one participant at a time) and not being appropriate for studies that involve measuring reaction times, Zoom “gives subjects something that approximates the lab experience,” he said. Another advantage is that Zoom doesn’t require researchers to code new experiments or set up servers and databases. Asked about possible security issues during experiments, he added that experimenters can regain immediate control of their computer simply by clicking their mouse.

For researchers who wish to collect data in larger batches, Ariel recommended programming tasks using free tools that require minimal coding knowledge, or avoiding the need for servers by developing online experiments. He gave a tutorial about how to use jsPsych, a library of commonly used tasks already coded and ready to be used in experiments, and Cognition.run, an online experiment platform that uses the jsPsych architecture to host experiments and store data online.

Click here to download a guide about how to use Zoom to run your experiments
Click here to download a guide about how to use jsPsych and Cognition.run

Using Data Available Online

VanArsdall, who studies the processes at the intersection of cognitive psychology, social cognition, and memory, has mastered the use of existing online data to answer research questions. Content analysis (quantitative analysis) helps him identify the frequency of hashtags or the occurrence of different words, for example, and thematic analysis (qualitative analysis) helps him parse data publicly available on social media platforms. VanArsdall also underscored the importance of rethinking research questions to explore how they can be answered by publicly available data, and thoroughly defining the phenomenon that will be measured. He shared the example of a colleague who studies parenting and collects data from “mom blogs”—an approach that provides access to a lot of data that is often subjective. “You’re only seeing what people are presenting to you,” VanArsdall said. “Keep context in mind.”

More tips on using online data:

Keep in mind methodological and ethical considerations, such as the fact that most online data was not initially intended to be used in research and may not fully represent the individuals behind them.
Do not make causal inferences, as you would in a laboratory experiment. You can correlate variables, but you cannot manipulate variables when analyzing data already available.
Consider whether random sampling is possible and how it will affect data interpretation, and think about linking to relevant data, such as historic crime, weather, or laws and policies, as well as to contingencies or time (when were tweets posted? in response to what?).
Be careful not to misrepresent data, and always seek Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval—even for publicly available data.

Applying for Funding for Online Research

Rice studied social psychology and now serves as a program officer for the Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Program at the NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. She talked about funding considerations for online research, whether for primary data collection (i.e., experiments) or secondary data analysis (i.e., data publicly available). The foremost step toward getting funding? Connect with a program officer, just as you would for in-person research funding.

For primary data collection, consider whether your topic and methods are within the scope of the funding opportunity and whether your methods and rationale are scientifically sound. For secondary data analysis, the funding mechanisms may differ but the principles are similar: You still must ensure that “your proposed analyses and inferences are scientifically sound,” said Rice. Moreover, instead of focusing on the online aspect of your research, focus on the soundness of your methods and the importance of your research questions.

View a recording of the Research Online: Tools and Techniques webinar and the full list of past and upcoming APS webinars:

Path to My Postdoc
Adding Value and Solving Problems: Virtual Networking for Scientists
Careers Outside of Academia
The Basics of Peer Review