Psychology in Action

Tag: stigma

  • Weighing in on Weight Stigma: Obesity Stigma Symposium at UCLA

    The prevalence of adult obesity in the United States has nearly doubled since 1980, and over two-thirds of American adults are currently overweight or obese. Weight bias (stereotyping or discrimination directed at an individual related to his/her weight) is prevalent in modern American society, and overweight individuals experience weight bias from a range of sources,…

  • Psychology Classics: Claude Steele’s Stereotype Threat Paradigm

    Psychology Classics: Claude Steele’s Stereotype Threat Paradigm

    In the late 1980s, a university committee at the University of Michigan called for psychology professor Dr. Claude Steele to tackle the problem of academic achievement among minority students at the university. His subsequent research resulted in the discovery and identification of one of the most far-reaching and influential phenomena in social psychology

  • Changing How We Look at Mental Illness and Changing Lives

    One in five children in the US suffers from mental illness, but less than 25% of those children actually receive mental health services. That’s absolutely terrifying, especially if you consider all the kids who have other psychological struggles but don’t meet diagnostic criteria for a psychological disorder. How many children then aren’t getting the help…

  • Women’s Health and Perceptions of Gender

    For many pressing health issues, including HIV/AIDS, cancer (in particular lung cancer), and suicide completion, women have lower rates than men. Women are the minority at birth, but the number of women (in the national surveys) far surpass men in survival rates across the lifespan, with a broad gender difference easily noticed when visiting my…

  • Two forms of alcoholism: One which warrants a chronic disease model, and college

    When it comes to drug addiction, no matter how you look at it and which model you believe in, there are the transients and the ones with serious problems…

  • The Origins of Mental Disorders

    The recent article in the New York Times outlining research on the preschool-age depression has raised public interest in the origins of mental disorders. Many non-scholars and even some psychologists are skeptical about the emergence of psychological problems in very young children. The stability of temperament (personalities traits such as extraversion and introversion) is now…

  • Social Defeat may play a causal role in schizophrenia

    Some ethnic minority groups have higher rates of schizophrenia than the general population. My first thought was that the differences were genetic. Current research has found a strong genetic component to schizophrenia, and given that different ethnic groups may have different rates of high risk genotypes, the genetic variation between groups may be in part…