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How to overcome ‘compassion fatigue’
Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston in August 2017, forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes and stranding others on roofs and porches. Millions watched the disaster unfold on their television screens, but one group sprang into action. The “Cajun Navy” — boat owners from Louisiana, many of whom had endured the ravages of Hurricane Katrina — hitched all manner of watercraft (bass boats, air boats) to their vehicles, drove to Texas and set about rescuing thousands of residents. The informal group, which coordinates using social media, has also traveled to North Carolina and Florida to help flood victims.
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Caring about tomorrow
About 70 percent of Americans believe that the climate is changing, most acknowledge that this change reflects human activity, and more than two-thirds think it will harm future generations. Unless we dramatically alter our way of life, swaths of the planet will become hostile or uninhabitable later this century — spinning out ecological, epidemiological and social disasters like eddies from a current. And yet most Americans would support energy-conserving policies only if they cost households less than $200 per year — woefully short of the investment required to keep warming under catastrophic rates. This inaction is breathtakingly immoral. ...
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Got Pain? A Virtual Swim With Dolphins May Help Melt It Away
Virtual reality is not new. But, as people search for alternative ways to manage pain — and reduce reliance on pills — VR is attracting renewed attention. Imagine, for a moment you've been transported to a sunlit lagoon. And, suddenly, it's as if you're immersed in the warm water and swimming. That's what Tom Norris experiences when he straps on his VR headset. "It's fantastic, I really feel like I'm there," says Norris, who is 70 years old, retired from the military, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife. As dolphins frolic and swim by in the virtual scene, "I get a strong feeling of pleasure, relaxation and peace," he says. ...
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Suicide attempts are hard to anticipate. A study that tracks teens’ cellphone use aims to change that
Every Wednesday afternoon, an alert flashes on the cellphones of about 50 teenagers in New York and Pennsylvania. Its questions are blunt: "In the past week, how often have you thought of killing yourself?" "Did you make a plan to kill yourself?" "Did you make an attempt to kill yourself?" The 13- to 18-year-olds tap their responses, which are fed to a secure server. They have agreed, with their parents' support, to something that would make many adolescents cringe: an around-the-clock recording of their digital lives.
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Seeing is feeling – How Artificial Intelligence is helping us understand emotions
Recently published research supported by NIMH and NIDA sheds light on how our brains process visual information with emotional features by incorporating machine-learning innovations and human brain-imaging. The researchers started with an existing neural network, AlexNet, which enables computers to recognize objects and adapted it using prior research that identified stereotypical emotional responses to images. This new network, EmoNet, was then asked to categorize 25,000 images into 20 categories such as craving, sexual desire, horror, awe and surprise. EmoNet could accurately and consistently categorize 11 of the emotion types and reliably rate the emotional intensity of the images.
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Video: APS Panel Discusses Nexus of Impact and Life
Can social science’s impact be boiled down to improving and enriching lives? In recent years, there has been an uptake in requirements from funders across the globe to prove impact of scholarly work, and simultaneously, intensified scrutiny about the value of social and behavioral science.
