News by Subject Social & Behavior

A year of evidence and analysis finds the pandemic has severely disrupted food systems and upended livelihoods, but also that responses have demonstrated the power of well-crafted policies to blunt the impact of major shocks while laying the groundwork for stronger, more resilient food systems.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sociology head and professor Tim Liao found that Americans were happier in states with higher wealth inequality when they had people of similar backgrounds -- some richer, some poorer -- to compare themselves with.

A new observational study is the first to examine suicides occurring during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in multiple countries and finds that suicide numbers largely remained unchanged or declined in the pandemic's early months. The study is published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

A Kaiser Permanente study of nearly 50,000 people with COVID-19 suggested that regular physical activity provided strong protection from hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, and death. Even exercising inconsistently lowered the odds for severe COVID-19 outcomes when compared to people who were not active at all.

Human screams signal more than fear and are more acoustically diverse than previously thought, according to a study published April 13th 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Sascha Fru?hholz of the University of Zurich, and colleagues. Remarkably, non-alarming screams are perceived and processed by the brain more efficiently than alarming screams.

What can vaccine proponents, clinicians and public health communicators learn from "anti-vaxxers?" A lot, according to new guidance for pro-vaccination social media events written by University of Pittsburgh health scientists. The five-part guidelines, published today in the journal Vaccine, arose from an analysis of a grassroots pro-vaccination campaign, #DoctorsSpeakUp, organized last year. Unexpectedly, more than three-quarters of the tweets associated with the event were opposing vaccination, researchers found.

Around the world, street art by famous and not-so-famous artists adorns highways, roads and alleys. In addition to creating social statements, works of beauty and tourist attractions, street art sometimes attracts vandals who add their unwanted graffiti, which is hard to remove without destroying the underlying painting. Now, researchers report novel, environmentally friendly techniques that quickly and safely remove over-paintings on street art. The researchers will present their results today at ACS Spring 2021.