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Wray Herbert

Director of Public Affairs
Association for Psychological Science
Washington, D.C., USA
Website:

Topic: Explore how mental illnesses are being treated under the Americans With Disabilities Act

Published Work:

The Children of War
The former child soldiers of Mozambique's civil war offer insights into morality and human resiliency.

Just Say No to Aging?
A provocative new book from a Harvard psychologist suggests that changing how we think about our age and health can have dramatic physical benefits. Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It's 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to "Cheers" and "Murphy Brown." Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated.

Recovering alcoholics are generally counseled to stay away from "people, places and things"-anything, that is, that might be a cue for drinking. Bars are an especially potent trigger for the cravings that can lead to relapse.

When Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. He later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and what follows is an excerpt:

Nobody likes to feel bad. Sadness saps our energy and motivation. Melancholy wrecks our health and invites disease. Misery leaves us -- well, miserable. Yet many experts believe that these negative emotions have an upside, that they clarify our thinking and foster more deliberate and careful decision making. Some even say that sadness is a reality check on unwarranted optimism and self-regard.

Almost 3,000 people died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That includes the victims in or near the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and all the passengers in the four commandeered jets, including the flight that went down in rural Pennsylvania. But it does not include the many hidden victims of lingering terror -- an additional 1,500 whose dread of another attack led, indirectly and much later, to their deaths.

In 2009 a regiment of Danish soldiers, the Guard Hussars, was deployed for a six-month tour in Afghanistan's arid Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold.