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Joe Biden is the new president of the United States, although half of the country s Republicans believe he stole the election. A lot of people believe conspiracy theories on the other side of the Atlantic. But they aren t only found there.
Conspiracy theories are not exclusive to people who storm the U.S. Capitol. Everyone believes at least one conspiracy theory, says Asbjørn Dyrendal, a professor in NTNU s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who specializes in conspiracy theories.
The more conspiracy theories you bring up, the more people answer yes to one of them.
That fact leads American conspiracy researcher Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami to posit that all people believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Dyrendal basically agrees, but he modifies Uscinski s statement slightly, saying all people believe some conspiracy theory a little.
How quickly can personality traits be modified? An international research team led by the University of Zurich has shown that daily use of a smartphone app can lead to desired personality changes within three months. And three months after the daily interventions, the changes are still noticeable.
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IMAGE: Children with mean friends described increases in relationship negativity over time, whereas children with nice friends reported that relationship negativity declined. view more
Credit: Alex Dolce, Florida Atlantic University
Not all friendships are created equal. Some friends get along; others struggle to avoid conflict. Conventional wisdom holds that the tenor of a friendship with someone who is nice differs from that with someone who is mean, such that the former discourages negative interactions whereas the latter aggravates them. Although it is logical to assume that children who are mean have friendships characterized by growing strife and that children who are nice report little of the same, these assumptions have not yet been tested in the real-world friendships of children.
Credit: Photo by Madeline Mortensen
As teens use of social media has grown over the past decade, so too has the suicide rate among younger people, with suicide now being the second leading cause of death among those ages 10 to 34. Many have suggested that social media is driving the increased suicide risk, but because social media is still relatively new, it s been difficult to determine its long-term effects on mental health.
In the longest study to date on social media use and suicidality, BYU research recently published in the
Journal of Youth and Adolescence now offers some answers.
Through annual surveys from 2009 to 2019, researchers tracked the media use patterns and mental health of 500 teens as part of the Flourishing Families Project. They found that while social media use had little effect on boys suicidality risk, for girls there was a tipping point. Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study when they were abo
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Efforts to improve the social success of autistic adolescents and adults have often focused on teaching them ways to think and behave more like their non-autistic peers and to hide the characteristics that define them as autistic. Psychology researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas, however, have been focusing on another approach: promoting understanding and acceptance of autism among non-autistic people.
The researchers published their findings online Jan. 20 in the journal
Autism. The study showed that familiarizing non-autistic people with the challenges and strengths of autistic people helped to reduce stigma and misconceptions about autism, but implicit biases about autism were harder to overcome.