On most days, one great pleasure of my job (reading and reporting on psychological science) is learning something new. As Michelangelo said at age 85, “I am still learning.” A recent example is social psychologist Jean Twenge’s remarkable reports ( here and here ) of teens’ resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparing national teen surveys from 2018 and 2020, she found that “Teens’ mental health did not collectively suffer during the pandemic.” In fact, “the percentage of teens who were depressed or lonely was actually lower in 2020.” Does this surprise you, as it did me? After all, for the past seven months, reports of pandemic-related mental stress have proliferated. “Coronavirus is harming the mental health of tens of millions of people in U.S.,” headlined The Washington Post . Indeed, as the pandemic struck, Gallup surveys found U.S. adults’ quality of life evaluations plummeting, and their worry sharply rising. The Census Bureau reported that a third of Americans were experiencing clinical anxiety or depression. And The Lancet described a similar mental health decline in the U.K. Moreover, multiple surveys found that those most afflicted were young adults. Mental distress , loneliness , and suicidal ideation rose most sharply among 18- to 29-year-olds. For those who have come to view depression and other disorders as biologically influenced—as syndromes that occur even in happy-seeming environments—the pandemic’s “ massive mental health impact ” is a reminder of the power of the situation. Significant stresses, and a thwarting of the human need to belong, can be emotionally toxic. The toll on young adults also reminds us of the importance of face-to-face relationships, especially for younger adults with their many friendships. As Nathan DeWall and I report in Psychology, 13th Edition, older adults “tend to have a smaller social network, with fewer friendships.” So what gives? Why might teens—pulled from school, separated from friends, so close in age to those struggling young adults—exhibit not only stable, but improved mental health during these trying times? One factor is more sleep. We know that a full night’s sleep contributes to health and well-being, and that high school teens are commonly sleep-deprived. In the 2018 survey, only 55 percent of American teens reported sleeping 7+ hours per night. In 2020, while homebound during the pandemic—and without needing to rise so early to go to school—84 percent of teens reported getting 7+ nightly hours. A second seeming factor is family. During the pandemic, 56 percent of teens reported “spending more time talking with their parents,” 54 percent “said their family now ate dinner together more often,” and 68 percent “said their families had become closer during the pandemic.” So, while the pandemic has taken a huge toll on our lives and livelihoods, the news from teen-world offers a reminder: Sleep and close relationships are vital components of a flourishing life. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities In my circle of friends—yours, too?—there is palpable anxiety bordering on despair. They see relationships and health disrupted by a plague with no end in sight, and politics that have descended into warring tribes and broken pledges. Progressives bemoan betting markets that give better than a 40 percent reelection chance to a U.S. president who lampoons mask-wearing, foments racism, threatens democracy, dodges taxes, and rejects climate science, and a future Supreme Court that’s likely to advance right-wing priorities for a generation to come. Conservatives lament the arc of history trending away from them as the nation becomes increasingly diverse, secular, and progressive—making their current ascendance “the dying spasms of a political movement.” My friends are not alone in their angst. In a September, 2020 Gallup Poll , 85 percent reported being dissatisfied “with the way things are going in the United States.” Other U.S. surveys similarly find that a decided majority perceive things as on “the wrong track,” “headed in the wrong direction,” or going “badly.” An internet meme captures the sentiment: “Goodnight moon. Goodnight Zoom. Goodnight impending sense of doom.” If you—from either side of the political spectrum—share some of this anxiety and anguish, and for good reasons, might I point you to three evidence-based information sources that could complement your malaise with a splash of longer-term optimism? First, those on Twitter can sign up for the daily good news fact from Beautiful News Daily . An example: Second, read my psychologist colleague Steven Pinker. In The Better Angels of Our Nature he cogently documents the long-term decline of all forms of violence, including wars, genocide, and murders. That includes the U.S., where violent as well as property crime—and hostility toward women and LGBTQ folks—have sharply declined since the early 1990s. Pinker’s newer Enlightenment Now documents many other ways—from the environment to life expectancy to human rights to quality of life—in which the world is getting better. Bill Gates lauds that latest Pinker book as “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read,” and also praises Hans Rosling’s kindred-spirited Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things are Better Than You Think as “one of the most important books I’ve ever read.” I know, I know: We must not look past lingering systemic racism, the looming climate crisis, or the world’s recent increase in human suffering . The current situation gives us reason for gloom. Climate change, especially, looms as a future weapon of mass destruction. Nevertheless, Rosling, along with his coauthors Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, offer an antidote for utter despair. My eyes were opened as Factfulness compared a) people’s gloomy perceptions of long-term trends with b) factual long-term trends, such as those below. [i]  (For more such information, visit their Gapminder.org .) There are justifications for today’s anxiety and angst. Yet even amid our epoch of incredulity and winter of despair, let us also retain sight of the light and the enduring spring of hope. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) [i] I share these figures with the permission of Rosling’s American editor and publisher who, in a happy coincidence, are also the editor and publisher of a forthcoming book in which I will shine the light of psychological science on the hidden wonders of our lives. ... View more

In the aftermath of now-iconic images of senseless police cruelty, public opinion has taken a left turn. In a Monmouth University poll , the number of Americans agreeing that police are more likely to use excessive force against a Black person increased from 34 percent in 2016 to 57 percent today. People responding to a CBS News survey concurred, with 57 percent now perceiving that police in most communities “treat Whites better than Blacks.” But we err, says Attorney General William Barr. “There are instances of bad cops,” he grants. Despite those supposed few bad apples, he disputes the idea “that the law enforcement system is systemically racist.” He has many kindred spirits, with Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Chad Wolf, and Wall Street Journal commentator Heather Mac Donald all arguing that systemic police racism is a myth. Are they right? Biased by the availability heuristic—the compelling power of a readily available image—have our emotions been hijacked by unforgettable but unrepresentative images of police cruelty? Alas, the data suggest that America’s tragic history of racism survives, and not just within police departments: Police killings. From 2012 through 2018, Black men’s mortality risk from police killings has been, relative to their population size, triple that of White men—a difference that has continued through the past year . Police physical force. In Minneapolis , the 20 percent of the population that is Black has reportedly been the recipient of nearly 60 percent of police use of physical force. For broader data see here. Traffic stops. Studies ( here , here , here , here, and here, among many more) have found Black drivers more likely to be stopped, searched, and subjected to physical force. Perceived discrimination. Black Americans, Pew Research reports , “are about five times as likely as Whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity (44% vs. 9%).” Pew also reports that “Nearly two-thirds of Black adults (65%) say they’ve been in situations where people acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity, while only a quarter of White adults [and a third of Asian and Hispanic adults] say that’s happened to them.” Perceived unfairness may be somewhat over reported: People who think they look different (for example, when wrongly believing they’ve been given a disfiguring theatrical facial scar) misperceive others as treating them differently. But there is more than a grain of truth to these perceptions—race-influenced policing is reality. Everyday discrimination. In experiments ( here , here , and here ), people seeking employment interviews, Airbnb reservations, and Uber and Lyft pickups have received better treatment when applying with a name like John rather than Jamal, or Emily rather than Lakisha. Automatic perceptions and reactions. Modern prejudice is also substantially implicit. In experiments, participants have more often perceived an ambiguous object, when held by a Black person, as a gun rather than a bottle. And, when reacting in simulations, untrained participants also shot more quickly. One other finding for us to ponder: Two experiments ( here and here ) show that most folks predict they would be upset and would intervene if witnessing a sexist or racist slur, yet respond with indifference when actually experiencing such. In one study, only 5 percent expected they’d say nothing. But faced with the actual situation, 55 percent stayed silent. Good intentions exceed courageous actions. T. S. Elliot understood: “Between the idea and the reality . . . Falls the Shadow.” So, is there any hope for progress? Are efforts to create a better future pointless? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous quoting of a nineteenth century abolitionist was optimistic: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Today, we can take heart that twentieth century civil rights efforts bent the arc. Acceptance of racial integration, interracial marriage, and Black presidential candidates—all once supported by few—are now supported by 9 in 10 people or more. “Decades ago,” notes astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson , “unarmed Black people getting beaten or killed by the police barely merited the local news. But now it’s national news–even breaking news–no matter where in the country it occurs.” Even implicit racism has been declining . These historic advances are, however, offset—since 2016—by some regression. By modeling divisiveness, the President’s bullying and racist tweets and retweets have contributed to a more polarized and toxic culture. For example, hate groups are more numerous . And the FBI reports that hate crimes increased from 5,850 in 2015 to 7,120 in 2018. The bottom line: In the last six decades, overt racism, violent crime, sexism, homophobia, and other ills have substantially declined . So there is reason for hope. Our efforts can bear fruit. Yet prejudice persists. Systemic racism endures. To reach full justice, the moral arc needs to bend much further. If 2020 is to be an inflection point, there is work to be done on the barrel that can make apples go bad. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit TalkPsych.com .) ... View more

Psychological science delights us with its occasional surprises. For example, who would have imagined that electroconvulsive therapy—shocking the brain into mild convulsions—would often be an effective antidote to otherwise intractable depression? massive losses in brain tissue early in life could have minimal later effects? siblings’ shared home environment would have such a small effect on their later traits? after brain damage, a person may learn new skills yet be unaware of such? visual information is deconstructed into distinct components (motion, form, depth, and color), processed by distinct brain regions, and then reintegrated into a perceived whole?   The latest who-would-have-believed-it finding is that the microbiology of the gut may influence the moods of the brain. Digestive-system bacteria reportedly influence human emotions and even social interactions, perhaps by producing neurotransmitters. Moreover, we are told (such as here and here ), healthy gut microbes can reduce anxiety, depression, and PTSD.   New articles on this supposedly “revolutionary” and “paradigm-shifting” microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) research are accumulating, report Katarzyna Hooks, Jan Pieter Konsman, and Maureen O’Malley in a forthcoming (yet-to-be-edited) review . By comparing rodents or humans with or without intestinal microbiota, researchers have indeed found “suggestive” effects on how organisms respond to stress and display emotions. Some researchers are exploring microbiota-related interventions (such as with probiotics versus placebos) as a possible treatment for depression, anxiety, and anorexia nervosa.   The findings are intriguing and worth pursuing but haven’t yet definitively demonstrated “the impact of the microbiota itself on behavior,” say Hooks, Konsman, and O’Malley. Nevertheless, the popular press, sometimes aided by university press offices, has hyped the research in more than 300 articles. People love the news of this research, say Hooks et al., because it lends hope that a natural, healthy diet can provide a simple DIY solution to troubling emotions.   Reading this analysis triggers déjà vu. This cycle of (a) an intriguing finding, followed by (b) hype, followed by (c) reassessment, is an occasional feature of our science’s history. Mind-blowing experiments on people with split brains yielded (a) believe-it-or-not findings, leading to (b) overstated claims about left-brained and right-brained people, which (c) finally settled into a more mature understanding of how distinct brain areas function as a whole integrated system.   Despite the “large helpings of overinterpretation” and the overselling of “currently limited findings,” the Hooks team encourages researchers to press on. “We see MGB research as a field full of promise, with important implications for understanding the relationship between the brain and the rest of the body.” The body (brain included) is one whole system.   (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com ) ... View more

“She [Professor Christine Blasey Ford] can’t tell us how she got home and how she got there,” scorned Senator Lindsey Graham during the lunch break of yesterday’s riveting U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding Ford’s memory of being assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Graham’s assumption, widely voiced by fellow skeptics of Ford’s testimony, is that her inability to remember simple peripheral details discounts the authenticity of her assault memory.   But Graham and the other skeptics fail to understand, first, how extreme emotions signal the brain to “save this!” for future reference. (Likely you, too, have enduring “flashbulb memories” for long-ago emotional experiences?) And second, they fail to understand that peripheral details typically fall into oblivion. In Psychology, 12 th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I explain:   Our emotions trigger stress hormones that influence memory formation. When we are excited or stressed, these hormones make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important is happening. Moreover, stress hormones focus memory. Stress provokes the amygdala (two limbic system, emotion processing clusters) to initiate a memory trace that boosts activity in the brain’s memory-forming areas (Buchanan, 2007; Kensinger, 2007) (FIGURE 8.9). It’s as if the amygdala says, “Brain, encode this moment for future reference!” The result? Emotional arousal can sear certain events into the brain, while disrupting memory for irrelevant events (Brewin et al., 2007; McGaugh, 2015).   Significantly stressful events can form almost unforgettable memories. After a traumatic experience—a school shooting, a house fire, a rape—vivid recollections of the horrific event may intrude again and again. It is as if they were burned in: “Stronger emotional experiences make for stronger, more reliable memories,” noted James McGaugh (1994, 2003). Such experiences even strengthen recall for relevant, immediately preceding events [such as going up the stairway and into the bedroom, in Ford’s case] (Dunsmoor et al., 2015: Jobson & Cheraghi, 2016). This makes adaptive sense: Memory serves to predict the future and to alert us to potential dangers. Emotional events produce tunnel vision memory. They focus our attention and recall on high priority information, and reduce our recall of irrelevant details (Mather & Sutherland, 2012). Whatever rivets our attention gets well recalled, at the expense of the surrounding context.   And as I suggested in last week’s essay, Graham and others seem not to understand “state-dependent memory”—that what people experience in one state (such as when drunk) they may not remember in another state (sober). Nor are Kavanaugh’s supporters recognizing that heavy drinking disrupts memory formation, especially for an experience that would not have been traumatic for him. Thus, Kavanaugh could be sincerely honest in not recalling an assaultive behavior, but also, possibly, sincerely wrong.   (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life visit www.TalkPsych.com.) ... View more

Originally posted on October 28, 2014. With nearly 5000 misery-laden deaths and no end in sight, Ebola is, especially for Liberia and Sierra Leone, a West African health crisis.  It may not yet rival the last decade’s half million annual child deaths attributable to rotavirus—“Where is the news about these half-million kids dying?.” Bill Gates has asked.  But West Africans are understandably fearful.   And North Americans, too . . . though perhaps disproportionately fearful? Thanks to our tendency to fear what’s readily available in memory, which may be a low-probability risk hyped by news images, we often fear the wrong things.  As Nathan DeWall and I explain in the upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, mile for mile we are 170 times safer on a commercial flight than in a car.  Yet we visualize air disasters and fear flying. We see mental snapshots of abducted and brutalized children and hesitate to let our sons and daughters walk to school. We replay Jaws with ourselves as victims and swim anxiously.  Ergo, thanks to such readily available images, we fear extremely rare events. As of this writing, no one has contracted Ebola in the U.S. and died.  Meanwhile, 24,000 Americans die each year from an influenza virus, and some 30,000 suffer suicidal, homicidal, and accidental firearm deaths.  Yet which affliction are many Americans fearing most?  Thanks to media reports of the awful suffering of Ebola victims, and our own “availability heuristic,” you know the answer. As David Brooks has noted, hundreds of Mississippi parents pulled their children from school because its principal had visited Zambia, a southern African country untouched by Ebola.  An Ohio school district closed two schools because an employee apparently flew on a plane (not the same flight) in which an Ebola-infected health care worker had travelled.  Responding to public fears of this terrible disease, politicians have proposed travel bans from affected African countries, which experts suggest actually might hinder aid and spread the disease. Déjà vu. We fear the wrong things. More precisely, our fears—of air crashes versus car accidents, of shark attacks versus drowning, of Ebola versus seasonal influenza—are not proportional to the risks. Time for your fall flu shot? ... View more

Originally posted on January 20, 2015. In the January Observer (here)​, Nathan digests—and suggests how to teach—David Creswell and Emily Lindsay’s explanations of how mindfulness improves health.  Mindfulness serves to recruit brain regions important for stress control and it inhibits the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axes from going into overdrive. David (here) notes that marriage predicts happiness.  Does it also predict physical health?  A massive meta-analysis by Theodore Robles and his colleagues indicates that, in Robles’ words, the marriage-health relationship “is similar to that of associations between health behaviors (diet, physical activity) and health outcomes.” But why?  Does marriage influence health or are healthy people more likely to marry?  Longitudinal studies suggest that marriage influences future health—for reasons that Robles explains and that class discussion might identify. ... View more

Originally posted on March 10, 2015. Nathan and David’s monthly synopses of important new findings reported in Current Directions in Psychological Science continue, and include their teaching ideas. In the February APS Observer, Nathan shines a light on “dark personalities.”  “Some people have hidden lusts or greed,” he notes, “whereas others embezzle millions. Understanding the science of dark personality helps us avoid labeling people as simply good or bad. By shining a light on the ingredients of a dark personality, we can learn who we ought to fear and when to fear them.” In the same issue, David summarizes the emerging field of health neuroscience, and suggests ways to help students think about brain ßà body interaction. In the upcoming March issue, Nathan explains “When Two Emotions are Better than One” and suggests how to teach students the importance of emotional differentiation. Also in the March issue, David identifies ways in which “Psychological Science Meets Religious Faith”—a topic of increasing interest in psychology: ... View more

Originally posted on April 2, 2015. Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, are enabling psychologists to mine giant data sets that allow mega-scale naturalistic observations of human behavior. The recent Society of Personality and Social Psychology convention offered several such “big data” findings, including these (some also recently published): “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those of friends, spouses, or family.” That’s how Michal Kosinski, Youyou Wu, and David Stillwell summed up their research on the digital trail left by 86,220 people’s Facebook “likes.” As a predictor of “Big Five” personality test scores, the computer data were more significantly accurate than friends’ and family members’ judgments. (Such research is enabled by the millions of people who have responded to tests via Stillwell’s myPersonality app, and who have also donated their Facebook information, with guarantees of anonymity.) Another study, using millions of posts from almost 69,792 Facebook users, found that people who score high on neuroticism tests use more words like “sad,” “fear,” and “pain.” This hints at the possibility of using social media language analysis to identify people at risk for disorder or even suicide. Researchers are also exploring Smartphones as data-gathering devices. Jason Rentfrow (University of Cambridge) offers an app for monitoring emotions (illustrated here), and proposes devices that can sense human behavior and deliver interventions. In such ways, it is becoming possible to gather massive data, to sample people’s experiences moment-to-moment in particular contexts, and to offer them helpful feedback and guidance. Amid the excitement over today’s big data, psychologist Gary Marcus offers a word of caution: “Big Data is brilliant at detecting correlation....But correlation never was causation and never will be...If we have good hypotheses, we can test them with Big Data, but Big Data shouldn’t be our first port of call; it should be where we go once we know what we’re looking for.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 7, 2015. The April APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan, “The Truth About Trust.” Drawing from the work of Paul Van Lange, it identifies principles of trust—as learned, socially received, reasonable, and constructive. The essay also offers three easy classroom activities that engage students in thinking more deeply about trust. In the same issue, my essay on “How Close Relationships Foster Health and Heartaches” suggests how instructors might engage students’ thinking about everyday stress and social support.  It then summarizes, from the work of Karen Rook, the benefits and costs of social relationships, and how relationships impact our health and well-being, for better and for worse. ... View more

“So, what do you make of this?,” asked the woman in the airplane seat next to me this week, as she pointed to an article about corporations cancelling meetings in Paris in response to last week’s terrorist attacks. Eight guys with guns commit horrific evil and capture the world’s attention—leading to calls for revenge, proposals to ban Syrian refugees from the U.S., and fears of European travel. When terrorists kill people in bunches, they create readily available—and memorable—images that hijack our rational thinking. Meanwhile, I replied, even more people—some 200—die of homicidal gun violence in the U.S. each week. But they mostly die one by one, eliciting little or no national outrage or resolve. Is this (without discounting the likelihood of future terrorist acts) yet another example of our human tendency to fear the wrong things (as I’ve explained here, here, and here)? The shared threat of terrorism further hijacks rationality, by triggering us/them thinking, inflaming stereotypes of the “other” among us, and creating scapegoats. Thus, although refugees have reportedly committed no terrorist acts—either in Paris or, since 2001, in the USA—more than half of U.S. governors are seeking to block Syrian refugees, and reported threats against Muslims and Mosques have increased. “We don’t know who [the Syrian refugees] are,” declared Donald Trump. “They could be ISIS. It could be the great Trojan Horse.” Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post Intelligencer Collection. A personal note: U.S. politicians’ calls to effectively shut out Syrian refugees, and even (a la Donald Trump) to register all Muslims in a database, evoke a déjà vu. In 1942, while I was in my mother’s womb, a fear-filled American government gave the Japanese-Americans living on my Bainbridge Island, Washington, home six days to pack a suitcase and be Sixty-two years later ground was broken for a national memorial at the historic site, with former internee and Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community president, Frank Kitamoto, declaring that “this memorial is also for Walt and Millie Woodward, for Ken Myers, for Genevive Williams . . . and the many others who supported us” and who challenged the forced removal at the risk of being called unpatriotic. The motto of the beautiful memorial​ , which I visit on nearly every trip home to Bainbridge: Nidoto Nai Yoni​ —Let It Not Happen Again. at the ferry dock for that March 20th day that began the internment of 120,000 of our fellow Americans. Among their tearful friends and neighbors at the dock was my father (who for many of them was their insurance agent, and who maintained their insurance over objections from insurance companies who viewed the internees properties as at-risk). As a Bainbridge resident, Washington’s current governor, Jay Inslee, knows that story well, and recalled it when standing apart from other governors wanting to exclude Syrian refugees: We are a nation that has always taken the path of enforcing our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our humanity, our relationship with the rest of the world. And we've hewed to those values, even in troubled times. And when we haven't, we've regretted it. I'll give you an example. I live on Bainbridge Island, this little island just west of Seattle. And it was the first place where we succumbed to fear in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. And we locked up Washington and American citizens, and we sent them to camps—Japanese-Americans. . . . So my neighbors were locked up by the federal government and sent to camps for years while their sons fought in the Army in Italy and were decorated fighting for democracy. We regret that. We regret that we succumbed to fear. We regret that we lost moorage for who we were as a country. We shouldn't do that right now. - Originally posted by David Myers on the Talk Psych ​blog on November 21st, 2015. ... View more