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The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments
The Atlantic: At Christmastime, my brother, my father, and our chocolate Labrador pile into the car to drive across the state of Washington to see my grandparents. We’ve been doing it since I was born. The three of us—before my brother and I put our headphones in to tune everything out—try to have meaningful conversations. Soon I’ll go back to school in England, my brother will go back to school in California, and Dad will go back to work in Washington, a transatlantic triangle keeping us apart. The three of us are together twice a year, at best, but on our car trip there’s rarely anything new exchanged.
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Tweets can better predict heart disease rates than income, smoking and diabetes, study finds
The Washington Post: Is Twitter becoming a new public health database? The latest evidence: A group of researchers has found that analyzing tweets can accurately predict the prevalence of heart disease. In fact, the researchers say, Twitter can serve as a better predictor of coronary heart-disease rates than factors such as smoking, diabetes, income and education, obesity -- combined. The findings from the University of Pennsylvania were published this week in the journal Psychological Science. The research is part of a larger effort to incorporate big data into science, rather than relying on the time- and cost-intensive process of collecting representative samples and conducting surveys.
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How the Brain Stores Trivial Memories, Just in Case
The New York Times: The surge of emotion that makes memories of embarrassment, triumph and disappointment so vivid can also reach back in time, strengthening recall of seemingly mundane things that happened just beforehand and that, in retrospect, are relevant, a new study has found. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that the television detective’s standard query — “Do you remember any unusual behavior in the days before the murder?” — is based on solid brain science, at least in some circumstances.
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The Facts About Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD
In a recent article in The New York Times Sunday Review, US Marine Corps Veteran David J. Morris chronicled his experience getting treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at a Veterans Affairs hospital. In his essay, he detailed his adverse reactions to Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy, one of the only PTSD treatments to have wide-reaching empirical support. In PE therapy, individuals are asked to approach — in both imaginary and real-life settings — situations, places, and people they have been avoiding. The repeated exposure to the perceived threat disconfirms individuals’ expectations of experiencing harm and over time leads to a reduction in their fear.
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Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions
The New York Times: The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated. Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers.
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Surprise!
Slate: If I could ensure that kids come away from science class with one thing only, it wouldn’t be a set of facts. It would be an attitude—something that the late physicist Richard Feynman called “scientific integrity,” the willingness to bend over backward to examine reasons your pet theories about the world might be wrong. “That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school,” Feynman said in a 1974 commencement speech. “We never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.” ... In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted.
