Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Swine flu and psychology



A quick post to provide some links for talking about the recent swine flu outbreak in your psychology classes. I don't mean this to be a clearinghouse for general swine flu information, though this CNET site is a pretty amazing one-stop site for links to pages with all kinds of information. Please post links that you find on psychology and swine flu below!

The APA has a helpful page about how to deal with the anxiety that may arise from thinking about swine flu. A similar post from PsychCentral says turn off the radio and TV.

Be careful of your sources: Swine flu: Twitter's power to misinform ("in the context of a global pandemic ... having millions of people wrap up all their fears into 140 characters and blurt them out in the public might have some dangerous consequences, networked panic being one of them.")

A special warning to those with OCD.

Dreading the worst when it comes to epidemics.

Swine flu may get worse but right now driving your car is 40 to 100 times more deadly.

In the Durham Herald-Sun our local rising star Duke behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely (author of the positively reviewed book Predictably Irrational) suggests the fear may already be overblown. "Right now, this looks to me like over-excitement," said Ariely. "I hope I'm not proven wrong, but it's very possible there's a lot of over-reaction here."

The Sacramento Bee has more of the amazing photos that you see at the top of this post here and here.

And don't forget to ...

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