Description: Have you heard of Long Covid? It involves a number of symptoms that resemble those seen in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) in which individuals recovered from Covid infections experience long-term shortness of breath, fatigue, and body aches and pains. What causes these symptoms? Are they due to lingering Covid effects?… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Health Psychology
Psychology of Covid: Vaccine Skepticism -Its NOT a Knowledge Issue
Description: As the Covid vaccines roll out we general conversation is shifting from when vaccines will be generally available to when will we have enough people vaccinated that we close in on what seems like the almost mythical herd immunity. One of the topics of this more recent line of discussion within the media concerns… Read more »
Psychology of Covid-19: Name Your Experience – Languishing
Description: Perhaps you have had enough of trying to summarize how you are feeling and doing “these days” as the pandemic rumbles along and has not vanished at the sight of the first few raised vaccination needles. There have been many, many attempts to explain what we, or may be, experiencing: it is a problem… Read more »
Anxiety and Entrenched Habits: Treatability
Description: I will not even ask whether you know what anxiety is, of course you do, especially given how much experience we have all had with it recently. Have you also heard about the Yerkes-Dodson Law? Basically, it says that for most tasks that we take on, a certain amount of stress increases our performance… Read more »
Psychology of Covid-19: How to Wait in Lines
Description: How good are you at waiting in line? Would your answer be different if you were thinking of waiting in line to pay for your groceries as compared to waiting in what, these days, passes for an ill-defined virtual line that will determine when you get your vaccination for Covid-19? Culturally, the British are… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Re-emerging and Adaptation
Description: No matter how you spent the past year I suspect that it was different than the previous 5, 10, or many many more years and that the biggest difference was the nature and extent of your social contacts. Perhaps you got really good at zoom (despite the force personal appearance fixations it can produce);… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: The Vaccine Dilemma Game
Description: Social psychology often involves examining the social give and take between individuals and at some of the ways that individuals may bias their perceptions or out and out act in their own interest at the expense of other’s outcomes. This work includes things like the Just World Hypothesis (e.g., maybe people who flaunt social… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Pandemic Negative Thought Patterns
Description: Try this statement on for size. The way we think, the way we focus our attention, the way we organize and reflect upon our thoughts are, in large part, best thought of as adaptations to the world we are living in (the physical AND the social world). Does that make sense? OK, now, how… Read more »
Video Games, Social Media and Mental Health: Research Debates on Screen Time Continue
Description: The debates and the research focused upon the impacts of video gaming and social media use on developing children and youth are heated and ongoing. The primary difficulty in sorting out the effects of video gaming and social media use is tied up in the comprehensive nature of their uptake in the population. As… Read more »
Psychology of Covid: Hitting the Pandemic Wall
Description: Have you heard of something called the General Adaptation system (GAS)? Hans Selye (1907-1982) working at McGill University in Montreal was trying to find a model with which he could use rats to study the impact of longer-term exposure to moderate to high levels of stress. What he came up with as a rat… Read more »
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