Psychology

In March 2020, a few days before lockdown was introduced, the UK government launched the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, widely referred to as “furlough”. This scheme provided employees who were unable to work due to the pandemic with 80% of their pay (capped at £2,500 per month). The purpose of the scheme was to keep people in jobs while their employers couldn’t necessarily afford to pay them. An estimated 25% of UK workers were furloughed at some point, with the number peaking at 8.9 million people in May 2020. Other countries ran similar schemes. The COVID pandemic has had a significant…

In the modern era, people are rarely not busy. When we have a free moment we are reading on a cell phone or playing a game. There are even jokes about someone sitting in a coffee shop and seeming bizarre because they just enjoy a coffee.  Six experiments with a total of 259 participants show drinking coffee, or anything else, without a phone may be good for us. the researchers compared people’s predictions of how much they would enjoy simply sitting and thinking with their actual experience of doing so. In the first experiment, they asked people to predict how much they would enjoy…

One thing that must annoy psychiatrists is that everyone will try to claim expertise in their field if they want to make a political point - in the case of a recent paper it is literally humanities scholars who want more mask and vaccine mandates. To achieve that, and despite having nothing we might consider qualifications, they used profiling to suggest a clinical diagnosis. They did it by creating their own custom analysis to claim that while other studies showed there were lots of reasons people might not like to wear a mask, opponents casually claiming they were selfish or even…

Hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry, is widely used in everyday language but the phenomenon has not been widely explored by science outside of laboratory environments. You have probably seen it in television commercials, where someone is irritable, complains a lot, or fatigued until they get a candy bar, when they revert back to themselves. A new survey finds it is not just clever marketing.  The team recruited 64 adult participants from central Europe, who recorded their levels of hunger and various measures of emotional wellbeing over a 21-day period. Participants were prompted…

A saying in psychology goes that more truth comes out when people are drunk. This is even when it comes to politics, where studies showed that young people who espouse more liberal beliefs get more conservative when they are inebriated. They stop saying what they think they should be saying based on what people want to hear. Along that line, a wealthy person who was raised poor is more likely to see through excuses of poor people than someone born into money, according to a new paper. They are less 'sympathetic' than people who have never had to struggle.  In their first two studies, Koo…

On June 17, 1972, Washington, D.C., police arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Although the administration’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed the crime as a “third-rate burglary,” its scope would grow to consume Richard Nixon’s presidency and then bring it to an end 26 months later. As with other infamous episodes, such as the Teapot Dome scandal or the Chappaquiddick tragedy, the event would come to be known by the place where it occurred. But unlike those two precedents, the Watergate Office Building would be immortalized as the…

In a new paper, scholars say depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues are more common than ever before, and that people of color are impacted most. The data are from surveys, and young people have always felt a need to 'live in important times' and believe everything is different than any other generation faced, but young people today went through an economic meltdown and then a pandemic, with all of the resulting media attention and worry that entailed. The Healthy Minds Network pool was between 2013 and 2021 from 350,000 students at over 300 campuses.  They found that the…

During the almost two years of on-again off-again COVID lockdowns, we heard lots of concern from many different corners about the mental health effects of forcing people to stay home and keep away from friends and family. Many research projects were undertaken to attempt to measure the scale of the impacts on mental health. However, the speed with which research was generated meant in some cases, research quality was sacrificed, and some research found evidence of an effect on mental health, and some didn’t. To make sense of the very mixed findings, my colleagues and I conducted a review…

Japan has a high suicide rate, so it was news when there were reports from the National Police Agency that October 2020 had more suicide deaths in just that month than they had deaths due to COVID-19 for the year.(1)  A recent cohort study analyzed Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare data for the period before and during the pandemic, people who committed suicide each month from January 2009 to September 2021, and found that early on in the pandemic there was no meaningful increase, but there were clear surges of suicide incidence among women and men in their 20s later. Like…

In the quest to create more social justice and equity, a lot of economic common sense leaves the discussion first. If I become a politician by promising you that you'll get your own personal doctor, for example, you aren't getting a real doctor - you are getting someone handed a doctor title but is really a naturopath, homeopath or whatever else that can be found cheap. It's a great sales pitch and plenty of people will carry water for it and hope for the best, but it is unworkable in the real world, the health care equivalent of a “chicken in every pot”. We have seen this in the quest to…