Month: November 2015

Threat and Prejudice and Moral Exclusion, Oh My!

This is why I do the research I do on the power of perceived threat in prejudice and moral exclusion:

Ken Knight, 54, a heating and cooling technician from Florence, S.C., said he agrees with Bush and Cruz that only Christian refugees should be let into the country.”I wouldnt bring the Muslims. They cut your head off. You cant trust them. Im sure there are good ones, but theyre like the mob. Once you get in, you cant trust them,” he said after a church service

I want to understand that strange thought process.

And, of course, Christians and terrorists are mutually exclusive, aren’t they?

Link to the article: Cruz: ‘No meaningful risk’ of Christians committing terrorism – The Washington Post.

Promise derailed

picThe Washington Post has a profile of a star athlete who was bound for the WNBA, until schizophrenia took her off course. It is a striking profile, and well illustrates the potential for stress to sometimes trigger the emergence of this disorder.

Link to the article: How one of the nation’s most promising basketball players became homeless – The Washington Post.

Apple, Human Factors, and I/O Psychology

Fast Company has an excellent analysis, written by the progenitors of the Apple User Interface Guidelines, of Apple’s move away from fundamental design principles in the quest for beauty in their user interfaces.

These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles.

Human factors and I/O Psychology came into play when they developed the original user interface. It seems they are not paying the same attention to experimental evidence of what works.

I have noticed that the Mac OS has become more inconsistent and difficult to use over the last several years. As iOS and Mac OS converge, there are confusions and requirements for me to remember what works when and where. In the past, the consistency and simplicity of the interface made operations much less demanding on the user.

Link to the article: How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name.

Weight stigma negatively impacts mental and physical health

We talked about weight stigma in General Psychology a week or so ago. A good article in the NY Times illustrates the depth of the problem. A new study by a social psychology graduate student, Jeffrey Hunger, at UC Santa Barbara finds:

those who were overweight or obese were more likely to report problems like depression, anxiety, substance abuse and low self-esteem if they had experienced weight-based discrimination in the past.

It also includes a quote from a professor of popular culture, Courtney Bailey:

fat stigma intensified after 9/11, when Americans’ sense of vulnerability translated into increased animosity toward the fat body

This echoes some research we did in Mark Shcaller’s lab at UBC where it was found that perceived vulnerability to disease was correlated with anti-fat prejudice.

Link to the article: Is Fat Stigma Making Us Miserable? – The New York Times.

Making sure we consider the biopsychosocial model

The NY Times has a good Op-Ed piece by George Makari on the problem of mental health being reduced to biological processes. It argues that we need to be careful to not dismiss the power of psychological and social factors in mental health and illness. This is the “biopsychosocial” model I refer to frequently in class. He uses the 2015 study by Kane, et al. that I presented in class as an example of the strength of a multi-modal understanding of mental illness and treatment. He also lambasts the NIH for making new rules that require grants to include biomarkers and neurological circuit investigations in future researcn.

clinical pragmatism has seriously declined in the United States, as psychiatry has veered toward pharmacology

Link to the article: Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem – The New York Times.