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When Patients Do Nothing: Illness and Inertia
The Huffington Post: One of the most daunting public health challenges is getting people to take care of themselves in the most basic ways. It's not that people with cardiac risk don't know about exercise and its heart benefits. Or that people with diabetes are unaware of insulin treatment. Or that the elderly don't know about the flu and flu shots. It's that they don't take the first steps in helping themselves get and stay healthy, like seeing a physician and having a checkup and filling a prescription. In this sense, the biggest health risk for many is doing nothing, and the cost of this medical non-compliance could be higher than $100 billion a year in the U.S. alone. ...
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‘Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People’ by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald
The Washington Post: What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are? That seems to be the conclusion of the past few decades of social psychology research. Freudstuck a dagger in the comforting idea of complete, conscious self-awareness, but experimental findings suggest that not only do we not know ourselves, if we did, we might not invite ourselves over for dinner. This research takes Freud’s dagger into our vanity and twists it. One of the greatest sources of torque is what’s called the Implicit Association Test, a computer-based assessment that susses out unconscious biases.
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Happiness Grows with Age, But Depends on Generation
LiveScience: People tend to get happier as they age, but individuals' overall well-being depends on the era in which they were born, a new report shows. For example, adults who lived through the Great Depression tend to report lower levels of well-being than those who were raised in more recent prosperous times, researchers say. ... "When individuals make judgments about their well-being, those judgments reflect more than just an assessment of the individual's current situation," the researchers, led by Angelina R. Sutin of Florida State University, wrote in their report in the journal Psychological Science.
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Being Ashamed of Drinking Prompts Relapse, Not Recovery
TIME: Embarrassment over an excessive-drinking session doesn’t necessarily lead to more sobriety. In a study of alcoholics and relapse rates, researchers found that the more shame-ridden a drinker looked when talking about drinking — interpreted through body language like hunched shoulders — the more likely he or she was to relapse and the more drinks he or she downed during that relapse. ...
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Research Explores How Our Relationships Can Impact Our Health
New reports published by the Association for Psychological Science take a closer look at physiological and genetic factors that may help to explain the influence that our relationships can have on our physical health. Does Attachment Get Under the Skin? Adult Romantic Attachment and Cortisol Responses to Stress Paula R. Pietromonaco, Casey J. DeBuse, and Sally I. Powers Our adult relationships can affect our overall health in the long-term, but they can also influence how we respond to specific stressors in the short-term.
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People most remember events from late adolescence and early adulthood
The Washington Post: Our 20-somethings are having a moment. They’re inspiring self-help guides, television shows, Tumblrs-turned-handbooks, major newspaper and magazine think pieces on why they do what they do (or don’t do). The current crop of young adults are recession-squeezed, peculiarly savvy and adrift, connected and lonely, knowing and naive. But what is it with 20-somethings in general? And why are we so fixated on this no man’s land between childhood and stable adulthood? A little-known but robust line of research shows that there really is something deeply, weirdly meaningful about this period.
