THE SCOTT AND PAUL PEARSALL SCHOLARSHIP

About the American Psychological Foundation (APF)

APF provides financial support for innovative research and programs that enhance the power of psychology to elevate the human condition and advance human potential both now and in generations to come.

Since 1953, APF has supported a broad range of scholarships and grants for students and early career psychologists as well as research and program grants that use psychology to improve people’s lives.

APF encourages applications from individuals who represent diversity in race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, and sexual orientation.

About the Scott and Paul Pearsall Scholarship

The Scott and Paul Pearsall Scholarship supports graduate work that seeks to increase the public’s understanding of the psychological pain and stigma experienced by adults who live with physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy.

APF supports original, innovative research and projects. Although APF favors unique, independent work, the Foundation does fund derivative projects that are part of larger studies.

Program Goals

The Scott and Paul Pearsall Scholarship

• Encourages talented students to orient their careers to understanding the psychological effect of stigma on people with disabilities.
• Develops strategies to improve the public’s understanding of the psychological pain and stigma felt by individuals with physical disability, in order to reduce harmful misconceptions
• Encourages dissemination of findings to the public, expressly through media.

Amount

One $10,000 scholarship

APF does not allow institutional indirect costs or overhead costs. Applicants may use grant monies for direct administrative costs of their proposed project.

Eligibility Requirements

Applicants must:

• Be full-time graduate students in good standing at an accredited university
• Have received IRB approval before funding can be awarded if human participants are involved

Evaluation Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated on:

• Conformance with stated program goals
• Quality of proposed work

Preference will be given to proposals that contain a plan to disseminate findings to the public, especially through media organizations such as the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) or the Entertainment Industry Council (EIC).

Proposal Requirements

• Description of proposed project to include goal, relevant background, target population, methods, anticipated outcomes, plan for disseminating findings to the public. (No more than 5 pages; 1 inch margins, 11 point font)
• Budget (1page)
• CV
• Letter of recommendation from faculty advisor

Submission Process and Deadline

Submit a completed application online at http://forms.apa.org/apf/grants/ by October 1, 2012.

Please be advised that APF does not provide feedback to applicants on their proposals.

Please contact Parie Kadir, Program Officer, at pkadir@apa.org with questions.

Bad bedside manner — when a health-care practitioner fails to see the patient as human — can make or break an already complex relationship.

Patients crave a deep relationship, full of empathy and trust, with their doctor or nurse. Such a relationship, however, is sometimes lacking in the medical field.

Patients complain that doctors or nurses sometimes talk down to them, forgetting they have a family, feelings and concerns.

What is the psychology behind a bad bedside manner? And is it a conscious or subconscious decision by the doctor?

DEHUMANIZATION

Adam Waytz, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, says bad bedside manner — or what he describes as dehumanization — happens for a variety of reasons, from psychological demands placed on medical practitioners to the disparities in power in the doctor-patient relationship.

As well, technology creates psychological distance between doctors and patients, says Waytz.

“A lot of medical decision-making involves thinking in very mechanical terms and how to problem solve and fix particular issues without recognizing the feelings the person is experiencing,” Waytz says, adding it is often not a conscious decision on the practitioner’s part.

The social psychologist recently published a study with Harvard’s Omar Sultan Haque that looked at the psychological factors that contribute to dehumanization in medicine.

It suggests getting rid of scrubs and gowns to encourage a better sense of individuality, and reminding medical staff of the patient’s hobbies, occupation and family.

“The essence of dehumanization is the denial of a distinctively human mind to another person,” the authors write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Read the whole story: Toronto Star

PROBLEM: Usually, visceral states, or internal conditions that we want badly to change, can get so overwhelming that we project them onto others. A person who’s freezing, for instance, would likely assume that the people around him must be cold as well. But how far does this effect extend?

METHODOLOGY: To see if political rivals can also feel each other’s pain, researchers led by Ed O’Brien asked subjects to read a short story about a person who was either a left-wing, pro-gay rights Democrat or a Republican proponent of traditional marriage. This character goes hiking in winter and gets lost with no food, water, or extra clothes. After reading the story, they asked the participants whether the hunger, thirst, or cold was most unpleasant for the hiker and what the hiker most regretted not packing. They were also asked how hungry, thirsty, and cold the hiker felt, and what their own political views were. The researchers then compared the answers of respondents who were warm and comfortable in the nearby library with respondents who were cold and miserable outside during winter.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic

A walk in the park benefits people suffering from depression, say researchers on the basis of new evidence.

Marc Berman, post-doctoral fellow at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute, working with Michigan and Stanford Universities, said: “Our study showed that participants with clinical depression demonstrated improved memory performance after a walk in nature, compared to a walk in a busy urban environment.”

Berman, however, cautioned that such walks are not a replacement for existing and well-validated treatments for clinical depression, such as psychotherapy and drug treatment, the Journal of Affective Disorders reports.

Berman’s research is part of a cognitive science field known as Attention Restoration Theory (ART) which proposes that people concentrate better after spending time in nature or looking at scenes of nature, according to Baycrest statement.

Read the whole story: Indo Asian News Service

Sipping a bowl of soup is an easy way to give yourself a healthful boost — as long as you keep an eye on the nutrition label. Nearly 99 percent of us consume more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, the upper limit recommended for African Americans, people older than 50 and those with high blood pressure or chronic kidney disease, according to a recent analysis from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. (The 1,500 figure covers about half of the U.S. population; the limit for most other people is 2,300 milligrams.)

And much of the sodium in our diet is in prepared foods such as soup. The good news is that the National Salt Reduction Initiative is working with foodmakers to reduce salt intake by 20 percent over the next five years.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post

The most popular baby names often change a bit year to year, but not Jacob, which in 2011 marked its 13th year as the most popular name for boys, according the Social Security Administration’s tally for 2011, out Monday.

Sophia is the new No. 1 name for girls, moving the most popular girls’ name for the past two years — Isabella — to second-best. Mason was No. 2 on the boys’ list. The federal agency notes that although Mason has been a relatively popular name since the 1990s, it had never reached the top 25 names until 2010. That’s when it hit No. 12, suggesting the rise may be due to reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian’s son, Mason.

Recent baby name trends reflect influences of celebrities, pop culture and society, notes Pamela Redmond Satran, who has followed baby names for decades. In 1988, she co-authored the first of 10 baby-name books. She also co-founded the baby-name website Nameberry.com.

Read the whole story: USA Today

Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. “What’s unclear is, we don’t actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects,” says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we’re good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair.

One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but pictures of objects don’t have that problem. So Bernard and his colleagues used a test where they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen. Some of the pictures were right side up and some were upside down. After each picture, there was a second of black screen, then the participant was shown two images. They were supposed to choose the one that matched the one they had just seen.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren’t any harder to recognize when they were upside down—which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.

We see sexualized women every day on billboards, buildings, and the sides of buses and this study suggests that we think of these images as if they were objects, not people. “What is motivating this study is to understand to what extent people are perceiving these as human or not,” Bernard says. The next step, he says, is to study how seeing all these images influences how people treat real women.

APS Past-President Elizabeth Loftus

That’s the conclusion of Joel Stein in this recent Time article. “I’ve always been proud that my columns are 100% accurate, which isn’t all that hard since I write only about me. But,” says Stein, ‘it turns out that I’m an awful source.”

Keeping facts straight in our memory is a difficult task for humans, but the Internet has made it easier for us to record our lives, and just as easy for others to fact check. Stein writes “that night we fell in love instantly with our spouse? There’s a wall post on our Facebook Timeline and a Gmail to our best friend about how we weren’t sure if we wanted a second date… If I tell my son that I walked six miles in the snow to school, he’ll GPS it on his Google Goggles and tell me it was only 1.7 miles.”

For insight on the science behind our inaccurate memories, Stein reached out to APS Past-President Elizabeth Loftus, from University of California, Irving. Loftus, winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology and the 2010 AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award among others, is well-known for demonstrating that our memory is far from foolproof.

Loftus told Stein that she thinks a future of constantly realizing our stories are wrong will be a happy one. “It should make us more tolerant when we hear people say things that we don’t think are true. Because it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying,” Loftus says. “It will be better for relationships. It’s going to make things better for justice.”

Read the full article “Don’t Speak, Memory”

To learn more about Elizabeth Loftus read Mind Changer and Game Changer, ‘Memory, Like Liberty, Is a Fragile Thing’ or watch Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: Beth Loftus.

A recent Pew study reveals what many of us have already observed: re-employed workers — those who lose their jobs and are then hired elsewhere — are more likely to consider themselves overqualified for what becomes their current position and are less likely to get a sense of identify from their work. In other words, they end up at jobs they don’t really want.

Whether you’ve lost your job and are looking to be the exception to this rule, or you’d like to trade your current position for one that better matches your qualifications, here are three strategies to help you receive an offer for the job that you actually want

Read the whole story: Business Insider