‘The more who die, the less we care’

Our editor Jon Sutton on Professor Paul Slovic’s keynote at the British Psychological Society’s online conference.

03 July 2020

There are, said Professor Paul Slovic (Decision Research and the University of Oregon), enormous human and environmental challenges as we face the changing landscapes of the future. 'I have to warn you the talk is quite distressing. It's not a pleasant menu' – climate change, Covid-19, genocide, nuclear war – 'the positive side of it is maybe we can overcome the obstacles to managing them better.'

So in 'confronting the deadly arithmetic of compassion', Slovic also had 'hope for better times in this age of unprecedented risk' – 'I always like to have two titles, in case the first one doesn't work'. His talk centred around the concepts that Daniel Kahneman put forward in Thinking Fast and Slow. – of fast, feeling based thinking, and a slow analytical style. Fast is easy, feels right, and usually works; but it is innumerate and can lead to serious mistakes. Slow thinking can deceive us too.

In terms of that innumeracy, consider what Covid-19 teaches us about climate change – 'act now before it is too late', Slovic said. His native United States, he said, is not only not controlling coronavirus, but is actually going in the opposite direction. He attributed this at least in part to a failure to understand exponential growth, even in the early stages of the outbreak. Climate change and its damages also happen exponentially. Antarctica has lost nearly three trillion tons of ice since 1992, and oceans are rising at the fastest rate in past 28 centuries.

What's to be done? We don't do as well with numbers as we do with visual imagery, so show the impact on Donald Trump's Mar-a-lago complex (or, alternatively, somewhere the wider population might care about) of a 7ft rise in sea levels. Pay attention to experts who think slowly and scientifically. Don't expect people to give up the comforts and conveniences of a climate harmful lifestyle; government and industry must work to develop new ways to meet our needs with less damage. But Slovic doesn't seem to be a fan of a 'softly softly' approach, saying 'We don't need nudges to behave better, we need shoves'.

Confronting that 'arithmetic of compassion', Slovic argued that we are incoherent in our valuation of human life. 'We value individual lives greatly, but those lives lose their value in the face of greater threats.' We've known this for a long time; it's a sentiment encapsulated in the quote, often attributed to Stalin, 'One man's death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic'; in the saying 'Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off'; and in Albert Szent-Györgyi's 'I am unable to multiply one man's suffering by a hundred million'.

After each genocide, Slovic said, we say 'never again'. And then repeat, again and again. In 1994, 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days in Rwanda, while the world watched and did nothing. State-led mass killings have taken place recently in Congo, Myanmar/Burma, Nigeria and many other countries. Why do we rarely intervene? Slovic pointed to various factors: it's dangerous, costly, difficult; there's racism; distance is involved, and a diffusion of responsibility combined with the dominance of protecting national security over protecting foreign lives. But in terms of experimental evidence, he focused on 'psychic numbing', with information failing to convey affect and emotion. We should see every human life as of equal value, or at least think that large losses threaten the viability of the group or society. But our actions don't follow either of these. Our feelings override our analytic judgements; we experience diminished sensitivity as 'n' grows large. 'The feeling system can't count!', Slovic concluded. People report, for example, being more willing to send clean water to a refugee camp in order to save 4500 of 11,000 lives than 4500 of 250,000.

What can we do about it? Slovic pointed to the research of Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov on the 'identified victim' – donations are twice as high with a single victim. Unfortunately, we have a short attention span for this stuff. There may have been a spike in web searches around 'Syria' and 'refugees' after the media published the tragic photo of the drowned three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, and a study showed a surge in donations to the Swedish Red Cross on behalf of Syrian refugees. But they quickly returned to base level. 'An image can wake us up, but then there's a window of opportunity when you're emotionally connected,' Slovic said. 'We start to think "What else can I do?" – if it feels like the answers is nothing, then it dampens out.'

Slovic ended with a stark warning around how the 'prominence effect' can cause a disconnect between values and actions, and the implications of this in the nuclear age. 'Prominence is like an attentional spotlight – lives not in the spotlight are ignored no matter their number.' The existence of nuclear weapons may have become taken for granted, but Slovic is clearly worried about 'the caveman and the bomb in the digital age'. 'People say they're not used, but actually that's not true, and in any case is a pointed gun not being used?' As Bruce Blair wrote in 2016, 'The city of Moscow alone lies in the bore sights of more than 100 nuclear weapons.'

Bringing his talk back round to the deadly arithmetic of compassion, Slovic referred to Roger Fisher, Professor of Law at Harvard University, who in 1981 suggested that the secret code the President needs to initiate a nuclear attack should be implanted near the heart of the person who would need to be sacrificed in order to start a nuclear attack.

In conclusion, Slovic urged us to 'understand the strengths and weaknesses of fast and slow thinking as a necessary first step towards valuing lives humanely and improving decisions'. Find out more at https://www.arithmeticofcompassion.org

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/more-who-die-less-we-care(accessed 16.3.26)

The precise meaning of emotion words is different around the world

A new study has examined how we experience emotions based on the culture and language we are brought up in.


By Emily Reynolds



When you can't quite put your finger on how you're feeling, don't worry — there may be a non-English word that can help you out. There are hundreds of words across the world for emotional states and concepts, from the Spanish word for the desire to eat simply for the taste (gula) to the Sanskrit for revelling in someone else's joy (mudita).

But what about those words that exist across many languages — "anger", for example, or "happiness"? Do they mean the same thing in every language, or do we experience emotions differently based on the culture we are brought up in? Is the experience we call "love" in English emotionally analogous with its direct translation into Hungarian, "szerelem", for example?

In a new paper in Science, Joshua Conrad Jackson from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues looked at 2,439 distinct concepts (including 24 relating to emotion) from 2,474 languages. The team analysed the similarities and differences between languages based on patterns of "colexification": instances in which multiple concepts are expressed by the same word form.

In Persian, to use the team's example, the word ænduh can be used to express both grief and regret; in the Dargwa dialect, spoken in Dagestan in Russia, dard means grief and anxiety. It follows, therefore, that Persian speakers may understand grief as closer to regret, and Dargwa speakers closer to anxiety.

The analysis allowed the researchers to create networks of concepts that showed, for each language family, how closely different emotional concepts related to each other. These revealed wide variation between language families. For instance, in Tad-Kadai languages, which can be found in Southeast Asia, southern China, and Northeast India, "anxiety" was related to "fear"; in Austroasiatic languages, anxiety was closer to "grief" or "regret". In Nakh Daghestanian languages spoken mainly in parts of Russia, on the other hand, "anger" was related to "envy", but in Austronesian languages it was related to "hate", "bad", and "proud".

But there were some similarities. Words with the same emotional valence — i.e. that were positive or negative — tended to be associated only with other words of the same valence, in all language families across the world. Happiness, for example, was linked to other positive emotions, even if the specific associations were slightly different depending on the language family. (This wasn't always the case though: in some Austronesian languages, "pity" and "love" were associated, suggesting pity may be more positive or love more negative than in other languages). Similarly, low-arousal emotions like sadness were also unlikely to be compared to high-arousal emotions like anger.

And geography also seemed to matter: language families that were geographically closer tended to share more similar associations than those that were far away.

The study's findings suggest that emotional concepts do vary between languages up to a point, raising the question of just how similar supposedly universal experiences are.

Of course, it's impossible to know exactly how somebody else is experiencing the world, and language can often be woefully inadequate when it comes to expressing our internal life.

And while the research suggests that those emotional experiences may vary in subtle ways across the world, deep down it seems we're not so dissimilar at all.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/precise-meaning-emotion-words-different-around-world(accessed 13.3.26)

Σεξουαλικά προβλήματα

Υπάρχουν αποδείξεις ότι το σημερινό πορνό μπορεί να βλάψει τη σεξουαλική απόδοση. Αυτό ισχύει για τη στυτική δυσλειτουργία (ED), την καθυστερημένη εκσπερμάτωση (DE), την πρόωρη εκσπερμάτωση (PE), τη χαμηλή λίμπιντο και την ανωνυμία. Επίσκεψη Σεξουαλικές δυσλειτουργίες που προκαλούνται από πορνό των υλικό που σχετίζεται με την πορνογραφική χρήση και τα σεξουαλικά προβλήματα Για να ξεκινήσετε την ανάρρωσή σας από στυτική δυσλειτουργία που σχετίζεται με την πορνογραφία, διαβάστε αυτό το εισαγωγικό άρθρο - Δηλητηριωμένη ED (ΠΑΡΔΑΛΟΣ).

Περιηγηθείτε σε χιλιάδες αναφορές αυτοαξιολόγησης για να μάθετε τι είναι εκείνοι που έχουν ανακτηθεί από τις σεξουαλικές δυσλειτουργίες που προκλήθηκαν από πορνογραφικές δοκιμασίες: Επανεκκίνηση σελίδας λογαριασμών 1, Επανεκκίνηση σελίδας λογαριασμών 2 και Επανεκκίνηση σελίδας λογαριασμών 3. Επιπλέον, οι ακόλουθες οκτώ σελίδες περιέχουν πιο σύντομες ιστορίες που περιγράφουν ανάκτηση από σεξουαλικές δυσλειτουργίες που προκαλούνται από πορνογραφίες: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Διαβάστε μια περίληψη της σχετικής έρευνας στο Η έρευνα επιβεβαιώνει την απότομη αύξηση των νεαρών σεξουαλικών δυσλειτουργιών, καθώς και 150 άρθρα ειδήσεων και συνεντεύξεις με εμπειρογνώμονες και θεραπευτές που προειδοποιούν για τις επιπτώσεις του πορνό στη σεξουαλική απόδοση Ειδικοί που αναγνωρίζουν και αντιμετωπίζουν σεξουαλικές δυσλειτουργίες που προκαλούνται από πορνό.

Δυστυχώς, η άγνοια των πορνο-προκαλούμενων σεξουαλικών δυσλειτουργιών εξακολουθεί να είναι συχνή. Βλέπω Τι εμπειρογνώμονες λένε στους πάσχοντες του PIED (το καλό και το κακό).
Έρευνα

Τι γίνεται με τις σπουδές; Αυτή η λίστα περιέχει πάνω από τις μελέτες 50 που συνδέουν την πορνογραφική χρήση / τον εθισμό με πορνό σε σεξουαλικά προβλήματα και τη χαμηλότερη διέγερση σε σεξουαλικά ερεθίσματα. ο πρώτες μελέτες 7 στον κατάλογο αποδεικνύουν αιτία, καθώς οι συμμετέχοντες απομάκρυναν την πορνογραφική χρήση και θεραπεύονταν χρόνιες σεξουαλικές δυσλειτουργίες.

Οι μελέτες 80 συνδέουν τη χρήση πορνό με λιγότερο σεξουαλική ικανοποίηση και σχέση ικανοποίησης. Οι μελέτες που αφορούν σε αρσενικά έχουν αναφερθεί σε σχέση με την πορνογραφική χρήση φτωχότερες σεξουαλική ή ικανοποίηση σχέσεων. Όσο γνωρίζουμε, αυτό ισχύει όλοι 80 μελέτες. Ενώ μερικές μελέτες συσχετίζουν τη μεγαλύτερη χρήση πορνό σε γυναίκες με την καλύτερη (ή ουδέτερη) σεξουαλική ικανοποίηση, οι περισσότερες δεν έχουν (δείτε αυτήν τη λίστα - Porn μελέτες που αφορούν τα θηλυκά θέματα: Αρνητικές επιδράσεις στην διέγερση, τη σεξουαλική ικανοποίηση, και τις σχέσεις).

Οι φωνητικοί κριτικοί του πορνογραφικού εθισμού ισχυρίζονται ψευδώς ότι η «υψηλή σεξουαλική επιθυμία» εξηγεί τον εχθρικό εθισμό του πορνό. Στην πραγματικότητα, πάνω από 25 μελέτες ψεύδουν τον ισχυρισμό ότι οι σεξουαλικοί και οι τοξικομανείς «έχουν μόνο υψηλή σεξουαλική επιθυμία».

ΠΗΓΗ:

https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/el/sexual-problems/(accessed 10.3.26)

What's it like to live with alopecia?

A new paper takes a bird's-eye view on research into lived experiences of hair loss.

03 March 2026

By Emma Young



Alopecia is a term that covers several types of hair loss, which range in appearance from patchiness to complete bodily baldness. Many people with the condition find it distressing, and it's known to increase the risk of depression and anxiety as well as impair quality of life. Despite how closely linked appearance can be with mental health, a comprehensive understanding of how affected people feel about the condition and how they cope with it has been lacking.

In a bid to address this gap, Zoe Hurrell at Cardiff University and colleagues pored through 22 studies on a total of 990 people living with alopecia, looking for over-arching themes in their lived experience. In their paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, the team reports finding five such themes.

The first theme was: who am I without hair? Participants across the studies described the loss of their hair as deeply traumatic, even akin to losing a limb. There also felt their hair loss dehumanised them, and made them feel unattractive and stigmatised. There were physical challenges, too: people who had lost eyelashes and eyebrows reported more sweat and dust getting into their eyes, causing irritation, and even leading them to avoid exercise.

Participants also talked about what the team characterise as a 'difficult journey to acceptance'. Many reported feeling shocked or fearful at first and they tried different ways to cope, with some seeking support and others hiding themselves away. With greater acceptance of their condition, though, some said they felt a sense of personal growth, and a new awareness of their strengths.

The way that society helped or hindered people with alopecia was another major theme that emerged from the analysis. Support from loved ones was crucial for some, while for those who didn't get this, support groups often helped. A general lack of public awareness of the condition contributed to feelings of shame and alienation however, and, the team reports, participants across the studies feared judgement and experienced negative reactions, including staring, jokes, bullying, and even physical abuse.

The fourth major theme to emerge was the complexity of concealing hair loss. "Participants described alopecia as a private issue that they felt compelled to conceal," the team writes. Many used wigs, or scarves, or hats or make-up, and talked about feeling more self-confident when their hair loss had been concealed.

The fifth theme focused on unmet needs. Participants felt that health care providers prioritised their medical treatment (though the team also notes that effective treatments for alopecia are lacking) over addressing the emotional toll of the condition, the researchers report. "There was a narrative across studies that people felt dismissed and let down by health care providers," they write.

Overall, the work reveals that alopecia has a profound impact on people's lives. It also suggests that there's a real need for effective psychological interventions to help anyone who is affected to cope better, the team writes, as well as to help them to accept what many people in these studies felt to be the forging a new personal identity — ideally while also experiencing feelings of personal growth.

Read the paper in full:
Hurrel, Z. et al. (2026). A systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative studies of alopecia: Managing identity and appearance changes. British Journal of Health Psychology, 31(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.70048

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/whats-it-live-alopecia(accessed 9.3.26)

Η αγάπη κάνει την οικογένεια. Καμπάνια του Ιδρύματος Ωνάση.

Χωρίς ντροπή. Xωρίς στίγμα. Μόνο αγάπη.



Την Τετάρτη 29 Νοεμβρίου το “I’m Positive” επέστρεψε στην Κεντρική Σκηνή της Στέγης με μια επετειακή και τελευταία βραδιά, η οποία συμπύκνωσε μέσα της ανθρώπινες ιστορίες που ακούγονται δυνατά, προσωπικές αφηγήσεις που εμπνέουν και γίνονται παράδειγμα ενάντια στο στίγμα και την προκατάληψη. Γιατί οι θετικές φωνές ακούγονται δυνατότερα. 40 χρόνια μετά το πρώτο θύμα του HIV στην Ελλάδα, μαζευτήκαμε ξανά και ενώσαμε τις φωνές μας για όσα δεν πρέπει να ξεχαστούν ώστε να μην επαναληφθούν, για όσα ενώνουν τους ανθρώπους, για εκείνα που μας κάνουν να νιώθουμε και να είμαστε ασφαλείς, για όλα αυτά που μας επιτρέπουν να ζούμε τον έρωτα, αλλά και για όσα πρώτα μας κάνουν να αποδεχόμαστε εμείς τον εαυτό μας και ύστερα μας δίνουν τη δύναμη να διεκδικούμε ορατότητα και συμπερίληψη για όλες, όλους, όλα.

Με τη συνεργασία του Συλλόγου Οροθετικών Ελλάδος «Θετική Φωνή», την Τετάρτη 29 Νοεμβρίου δώσαμε βήμα σε ανθρώπους και ιστορίες που πρέπει να ακουστούν, ώστε να μην υποφέρει κανένα άτομο πλέον από τα ταμπού, την άγνοια και τις ανισότητες. Η επιστήμη έχει προχωρήσει. Ας ακολουθήσει και η κοινωνία.

Μαζί, στην Κεντρική Σκηνή της Στέγης, μετρώντας περισσότερες από 30 ιστορίες ανθρώπων που μοιράστηκαν στιγμές της ζωής τους, συναντηθήκαμε και πάλι σαν μια οικογένεια που κάθε χρόνο μεγαλώνει, με μια υπόσχεση: Να συνεχίσουμε να μιλάμε ανοιχτά ξανά και ξανά, μέχρι τα αυτονόητα να γίνουν πραγματικότητα για κάθε άτομο. Τη συζήτηση συντόνισαν η Λυδία Παπαϊωάννου και η Katherine Reilly.





Το 2022 μεταφέραμε ένα μήνυμα για τα δικαιώματα των ομόφυλων οικογενειών στην Ελλάδα. H καμπάνια αγκαλιάστηκε από πολλά άτομα κάθε ηλικίας, όμως δέχτηκε και αρνητικά σχόλια. «Η μαμά πού είναι;», «Βρες μάνα τότε.», «Η οικογένεια κάνει την οικογένεια και αυτό που διαφημίζετε δεν είναι οικογένεια.», «Οικογένεια είναι ΜΠΑΜΠΑΣ ΜΑΜΑ ΠΑΙΔΙΑ. Όλα τα υπόλοιπα είναι ΑΝΩΜΑΛΙΕΣ.». Aυτά ήταν ενδεικτικά κάποια από τα σχόλια χρηστών, που δείχνουν πως χρειάζεται να επιμένουμε για τα αυτονόητα.

Έναν χρόνο μετά, η Στέγη του Ιδρύματος Ωνάση μαζί με τις Οικογένειες Ουράνιο Τόξο και την Google, ενώνουν τις δυνάμεις τους για να γίνει ο δεσμός «θεσμός». Η καμπάνια αγάπης και συμπερίληψης που παρουσιάστηκε το 2022, βγαίνει αυτούσια. Καμία λέξη δεν θα αλλάξει, μέχρι να αλλάξει όλη η κοινωνία. Όσες φορές χρειαστεί, μέχρι να γίνει πραγματικότητα. Η αγάπη από μόνη της έχει τη δύναμη να ταρακουνήσει, να αναθεωρήσει, να εξημερώσει και να εξελίξει. Η αγάπη κάνει την οικογένεια.

https://youtu.be/Q91sxBYmYno

ΠΗΓΗ:

https://www.onassis.org/el/initiatives/lgbtqia/(accessed 6.3.26)