-
What’s Normal?
After election day, “This is not normal” became a rallying cry for Donald Trump’s opponents: Harry Reid warned against press coverage that normalized the president-elect; a John Oliver monologue about Trump being abnormal won 14 million YouTube views; this is not normal T-shirts popped up around the country. But in July, after critics opined that his bullying tweets were “not normal,” Trump tweeted back that his social-media usage, far from deviant, was simply “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” Maybe he’s hit on an uncomfortable truth: Even abhorrent things can become standard. Could his behavior become normal? ... Complicating matters, our sense of what’s ideal can be fickle.
-
Are We Born Fearing Spiders and Snakes?
-
Oxytocin May Put ‘Rose-Colored Glasses’ On Relationships
Oxytocin levels may influence whether our partner’s words sweep us off our feet or leave us wanting.
-
Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?
The disintegration of Jake’s life took him by surprise. It happened early in his junior year of high school, while he was taking three Advanced Placement classes, running on his school’s cross-country team and traveling to Model United Nations conferences. It was a lot to handle, but Jake — the likable, hard-working oldest sibling in a suburban North Carolina family — was the kind of teenager who handled things. Though he was not prone to boastfulness, the fact was he had never really failed at anything. Not coincidentally, failure was one of Jake’s biggest fears. He worried about it privately; maybe he couldn’t keep up with his peers, maybe he wouldn’t succeed in life.
-
Hyesung Grace Hwang
“Pupillary Reactivity to Social Exclusion: A Window into the Mechanism behind Social Exclusion Detection” Social exclusion causes distress. However, physiological mechanisms behind such distress responses are unclear. We investigated whether pupil dilation, an automatic physiological response, occurs when excluded by humans versus computers. Pupil dilation increased after exclusion by both humans and computers, suggesting fast-acting sensitivity to exclusion may be an evolutionarily ingrained tendency.
-
Raffles Cowan
“Core Beliefs in Late Adolescence: Factor Structure and Implications for Psychosis, Depression, and Anxiety” Core beliefs contribute to development of psychosis, depression, and anxiety. We found that core beliefs were more factorially complex and linked to attenuated psychotic symptoms in adolescents at ultra-high risk for psychosis, and that they were less factorially complex and linked to depression and anxiety symptoms in non-clinical community adolescents.
