01. Welcome to Psych

This is the second in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live. ******* Psychological scientist Becca Levy’s stereotype embodiment theory “proposes that negative age beliefs bring about detrimental health effects that are often, and misleadingly, characterized as the inevitable consequences of aging. At the same time, positive age beliefs do the exact opposite; they benefit our health” (Levy, 2022, p. 15). Reread the above paragraph. The societal messages that tell us about the horrors of aging are slowly killing us. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that weRead More →

While in Washington, DC, for the Association for Psychological Science annual convention, I took an afternoon to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I was especially interested in seeing the exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education which features the Mamie Phipps Clark doll study (Concourse C, Level 2: “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom, 1876-1968”)–and it was her study. In a later interview, Kenneth Clark said, “the record should show [it] was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it” (Rothberg, 2022). While what is here at the museum is largely—but not entirely—accurate, I’m sorry that they didn’tRead More →