In today’s tech world, many students come equipped with laptops for “taking notes.” Actually, as I noted in an earlier blog post, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer have found that when it comes to remembering and applying concepts, “the pen is mightier than the keyboard.” With laptops, it is easy to take verbatim notes. When writing longhand, students more actively process the material, summarize it in their own words, and learn it more deeply. FatCamera/Getty Images  And as students sitting near the back of the classroom can vouch, their peers often aren’t taking notes. They’re checking Facebook, playing games, messaging, online shopping, and information searching (stimulated by the class, we can hope). So, does this multitasking during class time exact a cost?      When surveyed, students “report little or no effect of their portable device use on learning class material,” report Susan Ravizza, Mitchell Uitvlugt, and Kimberly Fenn from prior studies.   Really? To assess that presumption, Ravizza et al. secured the permission of 84 Michigan State introductory psychology students to have their class-time Internet use monitored. (The students afterward reported that their use was unaffected by the confidential monitoring.)   The results: During the 110 minute class, the average student did nonclass-related Internet browsing for 37 minutes. And the more the Internet use, the lower the final exam score—even after controlling for students’ intelligence (ACT score), motivation, and course interest.   The bottom line: “These findings raise questions” about encouraging students to bring laptops to class when not essential to class activities. ... View more

I never used to cover sleep, but once it became clear that so many students weren’t getting enough sleep, I started talking about it – at length. I had the same experience with stress. The stress and coping chapter was one I typically skipped in Intro, until I opened my eyes to the stress my students were feeling combined with the lack of good coping skills. And now I’m back in that very same boat but this time it’s the number of drug overdoses. Invite your students to visit The New York Times article “You Draw It: Just How Bad Is the Drug Overdose Epidemic [in the United States]?”[Shout out to Ruth Frickle for sending me this article!] and complete each of the graphs to illustrate their best guesses on how, in the US, the number of deaths due to car accidents, deaths from guns, deaths from HIV, and deaths from drug overdoses has changed since 1990. After students draw on each graph, ask them to click the “Show me how I did” button. Next, ask students to calculate how far off they were. For each graph, write down your guess. If you underestimated, subtract your guess from the actual number, write down how much you were off, and note that you underestimated. If you overestimated, subtract the actual number of deaths from your guess, write down how much you were off, and note that you overestimated. After pressing each “Show me how I did” button, text appears explaining the hypothesized causes for the change in the number of deaths. Ask students to read the text following the drug abuse graph, and identify the possible reasons for the steep climb in overdose deaths and identify the ways that have been suggested to reduce the number of deaths. In class, by a show of hands (or using a clicker system), ask students if they were the farthest off on death by car accident? Death from guns? Death by HIV? Or death by drug overdose? (If you’ve covered the availability heuristic, now is a nice time to revisit that concept? “What type of deaths do you hear the most about? Did those deaths receive your highest guesses?” Or if you’re not ready to tackle drug abuse as a topic, use this as an availability heuristic example to help students be more aware of the issue.) If time allows, invite students to discuss in pairs or small groups how researchers could investigate the effectiveness of each drug overdose prevention proposal. If you’d like to use this as a research methods booster, give each group one of the five prevention proposals given near the end of the article. Ask each group to write the proposal as an hypothesis, e.g., If there were “tighter regulation of prescription opioids,” then the number of drug overdose deaths would decrease (or the rate of increase in drug overdose deaths would be slowed). Each group should then identify the independent variable (including experimental and control conditions) and the dependent variable, including operational definitions, and identify any ethical concerns in doing this research. In whatever context you choose to discuss this topic be aware that some of your students may have experience with drug overdoses. They, themselves, may have had an overdose, or they may have a friend or family who overdosed and who may have died as a result. ... View more

All good things must come to an end, and few things have been as good as my colleague Tom Ludwig’s 40-year career, which culminates with his Hope College retirement this Spring.   Not only is Tom a superb teacher and a kind and helpful colleague/friend, he is also a self-taught creator of multiple digital resources for the teaching of psychology. Over 30 years he has created multiple editions of PsychSim, as well as PsychQuest, PsychOnline, PsychInquiry, Exploring Human Development, Active Psych, and, most recently, Concepts in Action. In recognition of his creative work, he has received national and international awards, including what I call the teaching of psychology “Heisman Trophy”—the annual American Psychological Foundation Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award.   In this new Hope College press release, Tom reflects on his career and his passion for teaching and technology. What fewer people know is that Tom is a master of other things as well. To name a few, Tom knows ancient biblical languages, has been the interim president of a Lutheran seminary, has assembled his own furnace and constructed his own kitchen, speaks German, and wrote a computer program to teach himself Japanese Kanji characters before a sojourn in Japan.   Tom Ludwig, who has new fields yet to plow outside the classroom, is one of the most brilliant, as well as nicest, human beings I have known . . . and someone whose birthday our department lovingly celebrated this week. ... View more

Federico Babina is a graphic designer and architect. He has created a series of 16 images, collectively called Archiatric, that are a depiction of different psychological disorders. Visit Babina’s Archiatric page and click through each image. [Shout out to Lisa Thompson Potgieter for sharing these prints on the AP Psych Teachers Facebook page!] After covering disorders, show students this compilation of all 16 images (you can buy the print) and give students an alphabetized list of the disorders depicted. Alzheimer’s Anxiety Autism Bipolar Disorder Dementia Depression Dissociative Disorders Dyslexia Eating Disorder Gender Disorder Insomnia Narcolepsy Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Paranoia Phobias Schizophrenia Ask students to work in pairs or small groups to match each disorder to Babina’s depiction and provide a short justification for why they matched each disorder with that particular image. Once group discussion abates, starting with the top left corner, ask student groups to volunteer their guesses and why. Then reveal the disorder Babina matched with that image. The danger in using images like these to depict complex experiences is that they, by their very nature, oversimplify the experience. For example, the image used to depict obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) captures the need for order sometimes seen in OCD, but it doesn’t capture other common symptoms such as cleaning, checking, and counting. As you identify the disorder that matches the image, ask students how the images depict the disorder. And, more importantly, ask students what symptoms of the disorder are NOT depicted in the image. [Thank you to Susan Nolan, special consultant on this post!] ... View more

On the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook page, Cait Alice was asking for advice on how to handle a student’s misconception of how gender works. Allison Matthews recommended the gender unicorn created by the Trans Student Educational Resources group*.  If you’d like to turn this into a class activity, identify how many groups of 3 you will have in your class. Let’s say 16. Print out 16 copies, and then mark different spots on each continuum for each group.   Show students one as an example of what you are asking them to do. Using the graphic above, explain to students that the person identifies primarily as a woman who dresses and acts more masculine than feminine, whose assigned sex was female, and who is not physically attracted to anyone but is emotionally attracted to men and women with a slight preference for the former. Distribute the marked up gender unicorn handouts to your student groups, asking each group to describe their person. Walk around to each of the groups answering any questions they have. After discussion dies down, ask groups to pair up to share their descriptions. If time allows, invite a few volunteers to display their gender unicorn on the classroom’s document camera and describe their person. As a wrap-up to the activity, encourage students to think about where they fall on each of the gender unicorn dimensions – although your students probably already did this as soon as you showed them the infographic. Give each student an unmarked copy of the infographic to share with friends and family. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * This is an edited post. The original post featured the Genderbread Person ostensibly created by Sam Killermann. A few people, including Allison Matthews, reported a concern with accusations of plagiarism by Killermann. A friend and colleague shared with me this analysis of the plagiarism accusation. Because of the potential issues with plagiarism, I've decided to use an image created by "the only national organization entirely led by trans youth." ... View more

If the hardiest weed in our cognitive neuroscience garden is that “we only use 10 percent of our brains,” the next hardiest weed is this myth: “All our past experience is ‘in there’ and potentially retrievable by hypnosis or brain stimulation.”   I could almost believe this, after marveling at my aging mother-in-law, a retired pianist and organist. At age 88, her blind eyes could no longer read music. But sitting at a keyboard, she could flawlessly play hundreds of hymns, even ones she had not thought of for 20 years.   How and where did her brain store those myriad notes? For a time, some surgeons and memory researchers marveled at patients’ apparently vivid memories triggered by brain stimulation during surgery. Did this prove that our whole past, not just well-practiced music, is “in there,” in complete detail, just waiting to be relived?   That’s what neurosurgeon Ben Carson presumed in this 2013 tweet: And that’s what he said again on March 6 th in his first speech as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: “I could take the oldest person here, make a hole right here on the side of the head, and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate, and they would be able to recite back to you verbatim a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there; it doesn’t go away.”   Alas, everything is wrong about this. Our flawed memories, as every introductory psychology student learns, are constructions that incorporate both our past and recent experiences. Moreover, the hippocampus, while a vital part of our memory processing, is not a long-term computer memory stick.   And about those brain-stimulated memory flashbacks . . . . As Elizabeth Loftus has reported, they appear invented, not a vivid reliving of long-forgotten experiences. But our memory imperfections have a silver lining. As Williams James wrote in Principles of Psychology, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” To discard the clutter of useless or out-of-date information—where we parked the car yesterday or our old phone number—is surely a blessing. So be glad that neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who knows a lot, is wrong about memory. ... View more

The vast majority of students who take Intro Psych are not psychology majors. Our Intro Psych students will be working in medicine, engineering, hotels/restaurants/tourism, politics, business, etc. They are The Public. The first six of “9 Tips for Communicating Science to People Who Are Not Scientists” written by Marshall Shepard, physical meteorologist, apply to teaching Intro Psych as well. (Shout out to Molly Metz for posting this article to the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook group.) “Know your audience.” Who are your Intro Psych students? What are they majoring in or thinking about majoring in? How many have children? How many have full-time jobs? Is this their first year in college? The more you know where your students are coming from, the better you can meet them where they are. “Don’t use jargon.” Or, for the Intro Psych class, don’t use jargon to explain jargon. When talking about conditioning, for example, it’s easy for instructors to toss around terms like unconditioned response and discriminative stimulus, but we need to remember that these terms are likely brand new to most of our students. Defining as we go can help bring students into our world. “The unconditioned response – the unlearned response in this example is…” “Get to the point.” Students don’t need the entire history of personality research to understand today’s trait theories. Traditionally Intro Psych instructors talk about Pavlov’s dogs before launching into contemporary examples of classical conditioning. Do we have to talk about dog drool before talking about heroin overdoses? (See Siegel, 2005 for an overview of classical conditioning and drug use.) That’s not to say you may not have good reasons for talking about the history behind a particular concept, but be conscious of the reasons you are telling that history. Don’t just do it because that’s how you’ve always done it or because that’s how you saw it done. “Use analogies and metaphors.” We know that people learn better when they can connect new concepts to what they already know or what they can visualize. Even better, in small groups, ask your students to create analogies or metaphors for a concept you just covered in class. “Three points.” My problem is that psychology is just so dang fascinating I want to tell students everything I know. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as too much information. My solution? A couple times a week I post announcements to my students through our course management system with the subject line “Nifty things about…” whatever we recently covered. Those who wanted more information on that topic can get it; those who don’t can move on to something else. “You are the expert.” I was in my mid-20s when I first walked into a community college classroom as the instructor. I looked around the room at students twice my age and new that the instructor-as-all-knowing-authority model wasn’t going to work. Instead, I acknowledged what I knew and acknowledged what my students brought to the table: “I know the theory, and you have the life experiences. Let’s merge them together and see what we get.” I still come from that perspective today, even though my students are no longer twice my age. Although, I confess, there was stuff then that I thought I understood that I clearly didn’t – oh, to have those students back again! References Shepherd, M. (2017, February 22). 9 Tips for Communicating Science to People Who Are Not Scientists. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2016/11/22/9-tips-for-communicating-science-to-people-who-are-not-scientists/#6ef0a79b66ae Siegel, S. (2005). Drug tolerance, drug addiction, and drug anticipation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(6), 296-300. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00384.x ... View more

Last month (January 2017), the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a memo to law enforcement and prosecutors. The subject of the memo was “Eyewitness Identification: Procedures for Conducting Photo Arrays.” The DoJ’s last document that dealt with photo arrays was released in 1999. The authors of this memo acknowledge that a lot of research on eyewitness identification has happened since then, and that it was time to incorporate that research into new guidelines. The information provided in this document would make a nice addition to your coverage of memory in Intro Psych. It’s a wonderful example of how psychological research can be applied in real-world settings, and in this case, where people’s lives are at stake. The DoJ recommends that the police officer who is showing the eyewitness photographs of potential perpetrators be blind to the suspect. In other words, the police officer who is showing the photographs has no idea who his/her fellow police officers suspect is the perpetrator. This is for the same reasons researchers are blind to conditions – to avoid unintentionally cuing the eyewitness/research participant. If it’s a small police department, they might not have someone available to show the photographs who does not know who the suspect is. In that case, the DoJ recommends that the officer be “blinded,” where the officer doesn’t know which photograph the eyewitness is looking at any given time. Even better, the DoJ suggests having the photographs presented on a computer screen so no one else needs to be present. Another DoJ recommendation is that eyewitnesses, after identifying a photograph as that of the perpetrator, make a rating of confidence in their own words. “[N]ew research finds that a witness’s confidence at the time of an initial identification is a reliable indicator of accuracy.” Ask students, given what they now know about memory construction, what they would think if they were on a jury and the witness’s confidence at initial identification was very low but when on the witness stand during the trial was very high. Whatever procedures a law enforcement department uses, the DoJ recommends video recording the process. That’s the best proof that the eyewitness’ memory was not inadvertently (or intentionally) contaminated. If time allows, after discussing memory but before discussing the guidelines yourself, invite students to create them. With students working in small groups, ask students to create recommendations to law enforcement regarding the showing of suspect photographs to eyewitnesses. What recommendations do students have for how the photos should be displayed and what the officer showing the photographs should do or not do? After discussion dies down, ask volunteers to share the recommendations from their groups with rationales. And then highlight for students some of the DoJ recommendations. ... View more

My friend and psychology colleague, Sue Frantz, alerted me to the pride the University of Kansas athletic department took this week in setting a Guinness World Record—with a 130.4 decibel crowd roar during their men’s basketball team’s come-from-behind win over West Virginia. That took my mind to my hometown Seattle Seahawks’ pride on having the loudest outdoor sports stadium, thanks to its “12th Man” crowd noise—which has hit a record 137.6 decibels . . . much louder than a jackhammer, noted hearing blogger Katherine Bouton.  As I mentioned in earlier blog post, with three hours of 100+ decibel game sound, “many fans surely experience temporary tinnitus—ringing in the ears—afterwards . . . which is nature warning us that we have been baaad to our ears. Hair cells have been likened to carpet fibers. Leave furniture on them for a long time and they may never rebound. A rule of thumb: If we cannot talk over a prolonged noise, it is potentially harmful.” Coincidentally, Sue Frantz’s Highline College is just 17 miles from Seahawks stadium, where, she tells me “my former postal carrier ruptured his eardrum. He said he felt the sound wave move from one end of the stadium to the other, and when it bounced back, he felt a sharp pain in his ear that faced that end of the stadium. His eardrum never recovered; his hearing loss was permanent.” The hearing aid industry may welcome the future customers whose hearing decline is hastened by such toxic noise. But for the University of Kansas and my Seahawks, these disability-enhancing Guinness Records are matters for concern, not boasting. ... View more

For those gearing up to teach the social psych chapter in Intro, the news is rife with examples. You could talk about the Rattlers and the Eagles at Robber’s Cave State Park in 1954. Or you could talk about Muslims, Jews, and Christians in 2017. “Almost every day in New York last week there was an interfaith conference or prayer service – involving Christian groups as well as Muslims and Jews – devoted to the current crisis over predominantly Muslim immigrants and refugees” (Demick, 2017). It seems that U.S. president Donald Trump’s immigration policies have created a superordinate goal. There also appears to be a shift in ingroup boundaries. Historically, there has been tension between “my” religious group and “your” religious group. But now the ingroup seems to defined as “refugees” – both past and present. “Formed in 1881 to resettle Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, [the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] has in recent years devoted itself to helping non-Jewish refugees. In the last year, it helped resettle more than 4,000 in the United States, about half of them Muslim. [Rabbi Jennie] Rosenn said that 270 synagogues and thousands of congregants nationwide have volunteered their time to find housing and furniture for refugees, to teach them English and enroll their children in school” (Demick, 2017). For those who were Holocaust refugees and their families, the rhetoric and the political action strikes too close to home. The message is simple: We were refugees and you are a refugee; we will take care of you. Amazon has proposed their own ingroup reframing in this commercial where two religious leaders – and friends – discover they have the same problem. Video Link : 1936   References Demick, B. (2017, February 5). How Trump's policies and rhetoric are forging alliances between U.S. Jews and Muslims. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-jew-muslim-2017-story.html ... View more

Speaking to military personnel on February 6 th , President Trump lamented that terrorist attacks are “not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.” The implication was that opposition to his seven-country immigration ban arises from our being insufficiently aware and fearful of the terrorism threat.   Or, we might ask, are we instead too afraid of terrorism? In 2015 and again in 2016, feared Islamic terrorists (none from the seven countries) shot and killed fewer Americans than did armed toddlers (see here and here). Homicidal, suicidal, and accidental death by guns claim more than 30,000 American deaths each year.   After vivid media portrayals of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, 27 percent of Americans identified terrorism as their biggest worry. In two national surveys (here and here), terrorism topped the list of “most important” issues facing the country.   Ergo, does the evidence not compel us to conclude that we are, thanks to the hijacking of our emotions by vividly available images, too much afraid of terrorism . . . and too little afraid of much greater perils? And might we instead fault the media for leaving us too unafraid of the future’s great weapon of mass destruction—climate change? Are some prominent voices today, as in George Orwell’s 1984, seeking to control us by manipulating our fears? To me, George Gerbner’s cautionary words to a 1981 congressional subcommittee seem prescient: Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures. ... View more

Ready to add a current and relevant example of group polarization to your social psych lecture? At NITOP I had a lobby conversation where Victoria Cross was showing Jane Halonen and myself an online course she had created to help students get up to speed before taking a stats class. In one of her modules, she has a wonderful Pew Research Center animated gif showing the polarization of American politics between 1994 and 2014 (Suh, 2014). After discussing group polarization, show students the animated gif on this page (click on the "Animate data" button). National surveys show that over a 20-year span, Americans have become more polarized in their political beliefs (as have members of Congress).  Here is a still shot from 1994 showing the difference between people who identified as Democrat and people who identified as Republican. Not only are the medians close, but there is a lot of overlap in the political leanings of the members of the parties. In this still shot from 2014, you can see that the Democrats have moved more to the left and the Republicans have moved more to the right, and the overlap between the parties has shrunk. In Congress, the division is even greater. "[T]here is now no overlap between the two parties; in the last full session of Congress (the 112th Congress, which ran from 2011-12), every Republican senator and representative was more conservative than the most conservative Democrat (or, putting it another way, every Democrat was more liberal than the most liberal Republican) (Suh, 2014). Invite students to take a couple minutes to think about what they just learned about group polarization. How might the factors that are known to contribute to group polarization apply in this example. Give students an opportunity to share with one or two students near them. After discussion dies down, ask a couple volunteers to share their explanations. Next, ask students to consider ways to counter this group polarization. What can we do as individuals to reverse this political group polarization? After small group discussion, ask volunteers to share their suggestions.   References Suh, M. (2014, June 12). Section 1: Growing Ideological Consistency. Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/  ... View more

Have you expanded the amount of positive psychology you cover in Intro Psych? Here’s an in-class activity to get students to consider their happiness and the happiness of others around the world. Ask students, “What is the happiness country in the world?” Before they answer, ask students to consider how such a thing could be measured. Give students a minute or two to jot down some ideas, then ask students to turn to one or two nearby students to share ideas. After a couple minutes of sharing ask for a few volunteers to share their ideas. Researchers (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2016) looked at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (World Bank data), “healthy life expectancy” (World Health Organization data), social support, freedom of choice, generosity, perceptions of corruption, and self-report on yesterday’s positive and negative affect (all from Gallup World Poll data). From these data, researchers calculated scores for 157 countries. Ask students to guess which country is the happiest. The answer: Denmark. Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and Finland round out the top 5. Canada is number 6. The United States? Number 13. Why is Denmark so happy? The Danes and Dana Dunn (2017) will tell you it is (at least partially) because of the concept of hygge (HOO-gah) -- cozy. “Danes burn 13 pounds of [unscented] candle wax a person a year, doing so even in classrooms and office buildings” (Green, 2016). “How to get hygge? Go home and stay there, preferably in your hyggekrog – a.k.a. ‘cozy nook’ – wrapped in a blanket, drinking a cup of coffee and watching a Danish police procedural about a serial killer with your friends” (Green, 2016). Ask your students to take a couple minutes to think about whether they have hygge in their own lives. If so, what does it look like? If not, what might it look like? Then give students a couple minutes to share their hygge experiences with one or two other students. Following this short discussion, ask for volunteers to share with the class.   References Dunn, D. (2017, January). Quotidian positive psychology: Helping students seek strengths and apply what they learn. Paper presented at the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, St. Petersburg Beach, FL. Green, P. (2016, December 24). Move over, Marie Kondo: Make room for the hygge hordes. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/24/fashion/wintering-the-danish-way-learning-about-hygge.html Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2016). World Happiness Report 2016, Update (Vol. I). New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network. ... View more

You have likely heard of the classroom demonstration where the students condition the instructor or a student volunteer to do some behavior by clapping (positive reinforcement) whenever the person gets closer to the behavior. Jon Skalski, Joel Lynch, and Amy Martin (2017) from Rockford University take this demo up a notch by modifying it to help students understand not only shaping, but also positive/negative reinforcement/punishment.   Skalski (personal communication, January 19, 2017) explains: I have a student volunteer step outside the classroom. The class selects a behavior that they would like to shape in his/her absence (like standing the corner and/or scratching the head).  The volunteer returns to the room. I place a backpack loaded with textbooks on his/her shoulders. Then, I remove a couple books when the student starts doing something that approximates what the class has selected for the volunteer to do (as a form of negative reinforcement).  I add books (as a form of positive punishment) when the student is not doing what I am trying to shape. I add skittles to a cup (positive reinforcement) and also take skittles away from the cup (negative punishment) to shape approximations of the desired outcome. Thus, the demonstration involves rewarding (both positively and negatively) and punishing (both positively and negatively) at the same time, at least in shaping a single behavior, and it is quite vivid and memorable. I then help students to process and think about the demonstration in order to make distinctions about positive and negative forms of reinforcement and punishment.   During the demonstration, Skalski changes which technique he is using from moment to moment. In doing so, students can see the impact each change has on the volunteer’s behavior. After successfully training the volunteer to do the selected behavior. Skalski recaps what the students just saw. Shout out to Jon Skalski for this clever demonstration! REFERENCE Skalski, J., Lynch, J, & Martin, A. (2017, January). Teaching negative reinforcement; it’s not punishment. Poster session presented at the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, St. Petersburg Beach, FL. ... View more

“Hundreds of studies” have found an association between religiosity and health or well-being, observes Harvard biostatistician and epidemiologist, Tyler VanderWeele in a forthcoming chapter. But “only a very small number” have rigorously examined causality. If people who worship regularly are healthier or less depressed (which they tend to be), is that because religious engagement promotes health and well-being, or because healthy, buoyant people more often leave their homes to worship?   Cecilie_Arcurs/E+/Getty Images To discern causality, new studies are assessing people’s health, their religiosity, and other health predictors, and then following them through time—for 20 years among 74,534 women in one Nurses Health Study. When controlling for various health risk factors, those who attended services more than weekly were a third less likely to have died than were non-attenders. In another analysis, the same comparison yielded a “5-fold lower rate of suicide.”   These and other such findings lead VanderWeele to conclude that “religious participation . . . is a powerful social determinant of health.”   But why? Unpacking the religiosity variable, VanderWeele and his colleagues, in the mortality study, report that social support explained 23 percent of the religiosity effect, not smoking explained 22 percent, less depressive symptoms explained 11 percent, and optimism 9 percent. People who are active in faith communities experience more social support, smoke less, are less depressed, and  are more optimistic than are those not active in such communities. ... View more