Understanding how trauma appears in media and impacts vulnerable communities is important for researchers from various fields to investigate. However, to begin to understand this specific type of media, we must ask not what is traumatic media but what traumatic media looks like. This article evaluates the spectrum of what, I term, trauma(tic) media looks like.
Where do all the studies come from? Behind every headline trumpeting a new finding in psychology, you can usually find an article in a peer-reviewed psychology journal. But how reliable are these findings? This is what many scientists have recently started to wonder. Because of this, journals in psychology are starting to insist on better reporting of research studies. In this first post of a two-part series, I will explain some of the standards that have typically been used to judge whether a study deserves publication or not.
Recently celebrity activists such as Beyoncé, Jennifer Garner, and Sheryl Sandberg have thrown their weight behind a campaign to ban the term “bossy” to describe women (banbossy.com, #banbossy). The goal of the campaign is to encourage young women to step into leadership roles and to assert themselves in the classroom and in life. In this blog I highlight the social value of celebrity activism and I highlight important caveats of celebrity activism based on science.
