Two studies examined how intergroup contact in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) corresponds with shifts in intergroup attitudes and broader construals of intergroup relations in society. In Study 1, youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina from diverse ethnic backgrounds (n = 122) responded to a survey about their contact experiences, intergroup attitudes, and perceptions of relations between ethnic groups in BiH. Study 1 demonstrated that among Bosnian youth, more frequent positive intergroup contact significantly predicted more positive attitudes toward ethnic outgroup members (e.g., outgroup trust, closeness, empathy, humanization, and willingness for future contact), but did not predict holding more positive broader construals of relations between ethnic groups in BiH (e.g., as enemies or allies). Study 2 used a pre–post design to replicate and extend these findings by evaluating the effects of a week-long “Peace Camp” Intervention that brought together youth from diverse ethnic backgrounds (n = 43). This study found that youth reported significantly more positive attitudes following the Peace Camp Intervention; however, there were no significant pre–post differences in youths’ construals of relations between ethnic groups. Taken together, these findings indicate that, in contexts of ethnic conflict, intergroup contact may have greater effects on measures that tap into intergroup attitudes toward ethnic outgroups than on measures that assess their broader construals of relations between groups in society.

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Enhancing prospects for social integration after genocide is important, as past research has shown that greater social integration in local communities can curb future outbreaks of violence (McDoom, 2014) and reduce the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms associated with past violence (Rieder & Elbert, 2013). Thus, the present research seeks to extend prior work investigating factors that increase willingness for social integration (Kauff et al., 2021; Paolini et al., 2018; Ron et al., 2017) to a post genocide context. Study 1 used self-reported responses from a large community survey (n = 435), and Study 2 used pre and post assessments from a year long structured dialog intervention (n = 81) with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders of the Rwandan genocide. Across two studies we demonstrate that even after genocide, where divergent collective narratives are common and deeply connected to traumatic experiences, greater openness to communicating with outgroup members about conflict experiences is associated with greater willingness to socially integrate, controlling for age, gender, self-reported positive contact, and empathy. Study 2 found that although survivors tended to enter these programs significantly less open to communicate and less willing to socially integrate compared to perpetrators and bystanders, they grew more open and willing following their participation in dialog-based interventions with genocide perpetrators and bystanders. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.

In 2021, the world continues to face a serious, widespread challenge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments and civil society are grappling with unprecedented impacts on healthcare and the economy as well as restrictions of normal social interactions of millions. Still, the climate emergency has not rested. Unless addressed, carbon levels will continue to rise through this pandemic, the development and disbursements of vaccines, and the next pandemic. From a psychological perspective, there are many commonalities between the current COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing crisis of climate change. This whitepaper begins by summarizing the broad similarities between these two crises. From there, we draw parallels between COVID-19 and climate change across four domains of psychological research. In doing this, we identify evidence-based approaches that policymakers and other key decision-makers can adopt to holistically respond to the two global crises of climate change and public health. We conclude with a broad discussion on the role of psychological science (and other social and behavioral sciences) in policy.

Cardiovascular activity causes some imperceptible changes in different regions of human body. These changes set the stage for isolated systolic hypertension, diastolic dysfunction and heart failure, atrioventricular conduction defects and aorta valve calcification. Activity of heart, which is an indicator of physical health and lifestyle are required to be measured remotely and continuously. In this paper a system is proposed, which is able to estimate pulse rate of a subject remotely without any biological effects on it. Estimation is done by utilizing facial video of a subject. Our proposed framework utilize SLIC superpixels for ROI detection and adaptive least mean square method is adapted to suppress the effect of illumination variation. For performance verification we have tested our system on publicly available large database MAHNOB-HCI and shows that our method shows significant improvement than existing works.