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Source: Changing Faces, used with permission. Lord of the Rings A recent viewing of Rings of Power , the latest video-streaming installment of JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy, brought a disquiet—a disquiet to which I was insensitive half a century ago, when I first saw the movie. That was before I became a scientist. Psychological and neural responses to facial anomalies For better and worse, our looks matter. Psychologists have long identified a beauty-is-good stereotype. That is, attractive people receive all sorts of unearned privileges in life. They are hired more easily, given higher pay, and receive lesser punishments for infractions than their less attractive counterparts. We found an analogous facial-anomaly-is-bad bias, in which people who have scars, birthmarks, and developmental differences are viewed as being less intelligent, hard-working, trustworthy, and competent (Jamrozik et al., 2017). Many people harbor such biases implicitly; our br...

Source: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels The November 2022 elections offer several moments of celebration in response to Maxwell Frost’s historic win as the first Gen Z candidate elected to congress. His story of how he began to engage in advocacy work at a relatively young age, coupled with the support he received from adults in his life, is particularly meaningful. It underscores the positive impact of cultivating young people’s capacity to advocate for themselves and others as early as childhood and adolescence. As youth and adults look to build on the current momentum, I offer some recommendations, as informed by the professional literature. One framework that may be helpful for supporting self-advocacy skill development among school-age youth includes the Conceptual Framework of Self-Advocacy that Test et al. (2005) published in the early 2000s. Although the framework was developed to support students with disabilities, it has been useful in my own work wit...

Employment contracts Source: @Khz. megapixel Job insecurity is on the rise, with many jobs linked to short-terms contracts, freelancing, and the gig economy, including zero-hour contracts. These types of jobs may be better than being unemployed, but with no guarantees around income, holiday or sick pay, they can be highly stressful. Indeed, it is not hard to see how the precarious working conditions they offer can be damaging for health: If one has to excessively worry about the pay check, or next contract, or you cannot plan for the future, there is likely to be high distress experienced by individuals in these positions. Relevant to the issue is a piece of research on the biological health implications of such job insecurity that I was involved in a few years back. This work was led by Dr Rachel Sumner and colleagues when she was based at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK. What did this research examine and find? In short, this resea...

When I was in high school, the three-year-old sister of a friend of mine died. My friend took a few days off school, which gave me time to obsess about what I’d say to her when she returned. She was my first friend to experience death up close, and I didn’t want to get it wrong. When the day arrived, another friend and I waited outside the school to greet her. My other friend got to her first, gave her a big hug, and said, “This just totally sucks.” I’d practiced a dozen scripts in my head, but “this just totally sucks” wasn’t part of any of them. I was a bit embarrassed by my friend’s crassness, yet what she said rang truer than any of the platitudes I’d rehearsed. Fast forward several decades. Having survived the deaths of my parents, my sisters, and my teenage daughter, I can truly say I’ve heard it all. And while I know we try our best, I also know that death and grief make us uncomfortable, and our “best” can be clumsy or even hurtful. I’m sure I’ve go...

Source: cuncon/Pixabay Published in the August issue of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews , a recent review paper by Boemo et al. examines the relationship between emotion-regulation strategies and affect (i.e. emotions or mood). Specifically, the paper explores the association between the use of emotion-regulation strategies in daily life and both current and future mood. Emotion-regulation strategies For context, these are the most commonly used adaptive and maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies: Acceptance : Accepting the fact that the unpleasant situation in question has occurred and being open to (as opposed to avoiding or judging) one’s uncomfortable emotional reactions to the situation. Distraction : Directing attention away from the source of stress and toward unrelated activities. Problem-solving : Conscious attempts to alter the stressful situation or its consequences, by finding effective solutions. Reappraisal : Reframin...

Source: Michael Fischer/Pexels Cannabis users are getting older. Studies suggest that cannabis use in older adults, particularly after retirement, has quadrupled. I’ve written previously about how cannabis affects human brains differentially across the lifespan. Most older users, primarily between 50 and 60 years old, report their most common reason for turning to cannabis is for pain reduction due to illness or injury. Most patients report that cannabis has fewer unpleasant side effects than over-the-counter or prescription pain medications. A recent study assessed the relationship between long-term medical cannabis use and cognitive function in a sample of middle-aged and older patients with chronic pain. Their results suggest that the use of whole-plant medical cannabis does not have a negative impact on cognition in older patients. It is critical to take notice that this study, as well as most other epidemiological studies, utilized the whole pla...

A Vital Signs report recently released by the CDC includes grim news about the drug overdose spike that occurred in the U.S. in 2020—one that likely continues today. We already knew the overall overdose rate went up 30 percent that year, but the new report showed how uneven overdose rates were among different demographic groups. The numbers paint a bleak picture Key findings from the new CDC report include: The overdose rate was 44 percent higher among Black people and 39 percent higher among Native American/Alaskan Native (NA/AN) people than it was for non-Hispanic white people. Older Black men (65+) were nearly seven times more likely to overdose than older non-Hispanic white men. Young NA/AN women (25-44) were twice as likely to overdose than younger non-Hispanic white women. Only 8.3 percent of Black people who overdosed had ever gone to substance use treatment. Note: Prior treatment was rare for all groups, with white people the most likely to have...

By Hayley Cleary, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University; David Thompson, CFI, President, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates; and Ashley M. Votruba, J.D., Ph.D., SPSSI Blog Editor, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Did you know that police are legally allowed to lie to suspects when interrogating them? Many people don’t . Did you know that police can also lie to kids? Most parents don’t . Yet deception is a time-honored tool in the American police interrogator’s toolbox, and police sometimes use the same coercive tactics with juvenile suspects as they use with adults. Developmental scientists, social psychologists, and interrogation researchers have long known that using deception during criminal interrogations is a dangerous practice. False evidence ploys—a tactic where police tell suspects they have “foolproof” evidence of their guilt such as DNA or incriminating eyewitness te...

Source: Roksolana Zasiadko / Unsplash A new study in the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy explains how the instinct to destroy our own relationships is rooted in the urge to protect ourselves against the possibility of actually being vulnerable with our partners. “It is instinctual to want to belong with others and connect with others in a meaningful and intimate way,” explains psychologist Raquel Peel, the lead author of the research. “But, if as part of that process, we experience pain, the instinct to self-protect can take over. This means that avoiding pain becomes the main goal, as opposed to seeking intimacy.” Put simply, relationship sabotage happens when we choose our instinct to protect ourselves over our instinct to connect with others so we can avoid vulnerability and, therefore, trauma. It can also come from not wanting to repeat what has happened in a previous relationship or what we have seen happen in another relationship....

You may value the stability in your relationship, especially if you haven’t always had the luxury of a partner who you could count on being there for you. However, as time goes by, perhaps you’re feeling that things are just a bit too steady and predictable. On a day-to-day basis, your schedule always follows the same basic pattern, often determined by work and family commitments, Over the course of a year, or several years, you and your partner rarely show any variations in where you go, what you do, and when you do it. If you’re starting to feel a bit itchy for change, new research suggests that there may be a way to tinker with it while still holding onto its shape and size. By taking stock of some of life’s fundamentals, you and your partner may discover ways to enhance your feelings about your relationship, and each other. Purpose in Life and Relationship Satisfaction According to Northwestern University’s Gabrielle Pfund and Washington University in ...

Aging autocrats are bad for the economy, according to a newly published paper by Richard Jong-A-Pin and Jochen Mierauab entitled, "No country for old men: Aging dictators and economic growth." Jong-A-Pin and Mierauab developed a model of the relationship between the age of a dictator and economic growth. The model predicted that as a dictator got closer to death, the economic growth rate in their country would decrease. The model’s predictions, the authors claim, are supported by empirical evidence based on a large sample of more than 400 dictators from 76 countries. The bottom line: A one-year increase in the age of a dictator decreases economic growth by 0.12 percentage points. What’s the evolutionary explanation for this problem with power? We think it’s something akin to the problem with sugar. In the natural environment, sugar was hard to get, and getting it could be dangerous. You had to climb cliffs, brave bees, and/or trek for miles through...

Source: Mascha Tace/Shutterstock Some writers like to burn the midnight oil and believe they experience more verbal fluency in the evening; others are early risers who seem to have greater verbal abilities in the morning. On both ends of the chronotype spectrum, writers who are "morning larks" or "night owls" may have better focus and attention because there are fewer distractions in the wee hours of the morning. Whether staying up late or getting up in the predawn hours, extreme chronotypes' verbal skills may benefit from the peace and quiet of working when most of the world is sleeping. Interestingly, previous research using Horne & Östberg's Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire ( MEQ )—which identifies if someone is a definite morning type , definite evening type , or intermediate chronotype —suggests that, overall, evening types tend to have superior verbal abilities. However, previous research on morningness v...

Can women be involuntarily celibate? The recent movement of "femcels," or women who struggle with finding sexual partners, would suggest so. Although the original "incel" community was founded in 1997 as an inclusive environment for lonely people of any gender, the community shifted to be all but exclusively male and has unfortunately been connected with hatred and violence towards women, including several mass killings. Women have been excluded from the community, with many people claiming that women cannot be involuntarily celibate. Now, the femcel community is steadily gaining attention and membership. In response to the “red pill” community, which claims to see the “truth” (a reference to "The Matrix") that women are overprivileged, femcels created the “pink pill,” which proposes that unattractive women are underprivileged including in sexual relations. Both incel and femcel communities have been banned on Reddit for incitin...

Source: 5second/Adobe Stock Financial scarcity is a major psychological stressor that contributes to changes in biological processes. It is a stressor that quite literally gets beneath the skin. With the financial crisis that has hit the globe, money woes that were once relegated to working-class populations have now drifted to the middle class like a cloud of fog, as it progressively makes its way toward elites. Putting food on the table It is hard to put a hierarchy on stress. The body does not care whether you feel stressed because of work, relationships, caregiving, discrimination, bereavement, disability, or finances. The body responds the same. But financial stress is a particularly insidious stressor that has the ability to permeate every aspect of our lives. Because, ultimately, we need money to live. Irrespective of class, the ability to pay bills, put food on the table, and enjoy life without the pressure of debt collectors knocking at the...

I research leaders who have passionate hobbies, and I recently zoomed in on the “comedians” category: managers who do standup comedy or improvisational theatre in their spare time. They believe that their hobby is also making them better leaders. In this, they are not an exception; all leaders I spoke with—including a CEO who makes grandfather clocks in his garage—said the same about their passionate pursuits. (If you really want to know, making grandfather clocks compensates for what you lose when, as a leader, you no longer produce something yourself but only through others; this compensatory mechanism further translates into psychological well-being in the leader role. In other words, when you become a top leader, making grandfather clocks keeps you from going cuckoo). But even compared to other hobbies, the case for comedy as a leadership booster looks particularly strong. Humor is becoming recognized as an essential leadership skill. Yes, much of the re...

If you read up on cultivating happiness, practicing mindfulness, or just generally building a satisfying life, gratitude comes up again and again. Acknowledging the positive things in our lives has benefits we can feel and that scientists can measure. Gratitude is also a good way to take care of our relationships. In their review of more than 1,000 research articles, Dr. Brian Ogolsky and his colleagues identified gratitude as one of the 19 key strategies people use to preserve their romantic relationships. When we express our appreciation, it improves the “give and take” in the relationship (reciprocity) and increases our sensitivity about what our partners need. It’s also just nice to feel appreciated for what we contribute to our relationships. Considering there are 19 relationship maintenance strategies, why focus on this one? I have three reasons why gratitude is worth trying—and, spoiler alert, it’s because it’s easy. Saying “thank you” is familiar t...