Self-report is the most commonly used method to collect data in behavioral research, but its reliability and validity have always been hotly debated. Obtaining reliable and valid data on behavioral questions especially sensitive ones (e.g., risky sex…
The World Health Organization now recognizes social relationships as an important social determinant of health throughout our lives. Yet, the acknowledgement that social ties can shape our morbidity and mortality has been at times an uphill struggle.…
Culture informs all human behavior: in it we exist as social animals. Perhaps because culture is inescapable it seems also elusive as a definable construct, and the culture of scientists recoils from a variable it believes it cannot grasp … almost li…
My undergraduate class happened upon an interesting puzzle while reading Leisureville by Andrew Blechman: Social gerontologists love intergenerational communities, but older people love age-segregated communities.
“Pull” mHealth portable and wearable devices let us choose the health interventions we want and deploy them from wherever we happen to be. Now, with the advent of increasingly powerful sensors, “push” interventions can adaptively respond to our actio…
The link between social relationships and health has long been established in the U.S. and other high-income countries. Much less is known, however, about this association in other parts of the world. In a recent study published in the Journals of Ge…
We have all experienced stress at some point in time. For brief periods of stress, we may figure out a temporary way to cope which would limit the impact of the stressor on our health. However, stress that is brought on by taxing life events that acc…
Despite being 900 million strong, rural residents in China remain an extremely understudied and underserved population in many aspects, including alcohol use and alcoholism prevention.
Although many people think of aggression as a negative or undesirable emotion, it is a normal part of many species’ repertoire of social behaviors. In fact, aggressive behaviors typically serve an adaptive function—these purposeful and controlled beh…
