People without jobs or with less secure housing have poorer outcomes when treated for depression with talking therapy or antidepressants, compared to more socially advantaged peers, finds a study led by UCL researchers. The authors of the new study published in JAMA Psychiatry say that addressing employment and housing needs may be helpful alongside depression treatments to...
A team of communication experts calls for researchers and organizations to take a global view when assessing how to use social media for crisis communication efforts, particularly in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. The call stems from a detailed assessment of almost 200 studies spanning 15 years, which found large swathes of the social media...
Legal documents, such as contracts or deeds, are notoriously difficult for nonlawyers to understand. A new study from MIT cognitive scientists has determined just why these documents are often so impenetrable. After analyzing thousands of legal contracts and comparing them to other types of texts, the researchers found that lawyers have a habit of frequently...
Whether they’re getting a new shirt, a new computer, or taking a trip, people derive less “purchase happiness” from buying things when they feel financial stress, research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shows. “That feeling of financial constraint leads people to revisit their purchase and think about what else they could have done with that...
The more credible that people perceive a news source to be the more they will believe a headline on a story they publish about gun violence, according to researchers at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers. The study, published in the journal Health Communication, sheds light on how the media can shape American attitudes toward gun...
Humans prefer stable relationships and love to avoid social tensions. Sociology so far uses two concepts to describe this preference for social stability, namely, (Social) Balance Theory and the theory of homophily (“birds of a feather flock together”). Researchers from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) now propose a simpler approach. They were able to...
A study published in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that people who embrace the ideologies of libertarianism and anti-egalitarianism are more likely to disregard the risks of COVID-19 and oppose government actions. Assistant professor Yilang Peng of the University of Georgia analyzed data from two surveys to investigate the relationship between attitudes toward COVID-19 and specific political...
Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to...
When it comes to being divisive, it doesn’t get more literal than a wall. Walls exist as a means of separation, creating a sense of security by keeping something—or more typically someone—out. And whether it’s separating Americans and Mexicans, Israelis and Palestinians, East Germans and West Germans, or any other two groups, the political divisiveness...
Experts such as pianists, athletes, and surgeons acquire their skills through extensive practice. However, the neurophysiological and psychological mechanisms that underlie the problem of making mistakes due to psychological stress remain unexplored in the context of pressured situations such as in piano competitions or the Olympics. Training for preventing such mistakes also remain unexplored, in...
