Presentation topic: Social Connection

Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience, and director of the Social Connection & Health Lab at Brigham Young University. She is also the founding scientific chair and board member for the U.S. Foundation for Social Connection and the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection.

She is an international scientific expert on social connection, the health effects, biological mechanisms, and strategies to mitigate risk and promote protection associated with social connection. Her research has been seminal in recognizing social isolation and loneliness as risk factors for early mortality.

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1604724315

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

The White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse was established via Presidential Memorandum on June 16, 2022 to address online harassment and abuse, specifically technology-facilitated gender-based violence. In consultation with survivors, advocates, educators, experts from diverse fields, and the private sector, the Task Force developed specific recommendations to improve prevention, response, and protection efforts through programs and policies in the United States and globally. As part of this effort, NIH hosted a scientific workshop to identify gaps, opportunities, and challenges in advancing a research agenda to better understand the clinical, health, and developmental impacts of online harassment and abuse and develop innovative prevention and intervention efforts.

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Key Highlights From the Workshop

Landscape Analysis Summary for the NIH Online Harassment Research Portfolio

The 2023 NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival was held on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm ET. To access a recording and materials from this festival, please click here.

In this talk Professor Williamson will provide an introduction to Evidential Pluralism, a new approach to causal inference that has emerged from recent philosophical research on mechanisms in science. According to Evidential Pluralism, in order to establish that A is a cause of B one needs to establish both that A is correlated with B (conditional on potential confounders) and that there is a mechanism from A to B that can account for that correlation; so, in order to assess whether A is a cause of B one needs to scrutinise mechanistic studies alongside studies that measure the extent to which A and B are correlated. Evidential Pluralism motivates a new approach to evidence-based medicine, called EBM+, and a new approach to evidence-based policy assessment, EBP+. It also provides a general framework for integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence, and for integrating social and biomedical mechanisms in the health sciences. Dr. Williamson will discuss some of these developments and show how Evidential Pluralism can explain the role and limits of specific methods for causal enquiry such as randomised controlled trials, graphical causal modelling and theory-based evaluation.

NIH Videocast: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=52416

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1616288038?pwd=NjNscVU3UGZTUStxZ2FZb2F4YlplUT09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

The OBSSR and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Adherence Research Network hosted a series of workshops titled “An Action Agenda: Promoting the Science and Practice of Health Behavior Maintenance.” The goal of these workshops was to develop a deeper understanding of health behavior maintenance to better promote and sustain positive health outcomes. These workshops built on previous efforts by the OBSSR and the NIH Health Maintenance Consortium to identify the processes, components, and contextual factors that influence health behavior maintenance.

The OBSSR and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Adherence Research Network hosted a series of workshops titled “An Action Agenda: Promoting the Science and Practice of Health Behavior Maintenance.” The goal of these workshops was to develop a deeper understanding of health behavior maintenance to better promote and sustain positive health outcomes. These workshops built on previous efforts by the OBSSR and the NIH Health Maintenance Consortium to identify the processes, components, and contextual factors that influence health behavior maintenance.

Health equity has become a hot topic over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic made salient just how separate and unequal the United States remains in modern life, and the consequences of that inequality for the health and wellbeing of individuals and broader collectives. In response, scientists, policymakers, and the broader public renewed their interest in (or became interested in the first time) what can be done to address these issues and improve health equity in our society. Although broad interest in health equity is relatively new, research on this topic is extensive—social scientists have been studying it for decades. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned (and what we still need to learn), the implications of that knowledge and how it is generated, and why the pursuit of health equity is important for advancing theories across the sciences, which has practical benefits for broader society.

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1612552260?pwd=WkwvQkZaengxVUFOL3A5dTVHWHBDdz09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.