It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, June 05, 2026
Being “half-included” in American society takes a toll on immigrant health, study finds
Acculturative discordance – the state of being socially integrated on some dimensions but not on others – is associated with high disability risks after age 65
Toronto, ON – There is a well-documented puzzle in social epidemiology: immigrants have better health than the native-born when they first arrive, but they lose this advantage at older ages. Is acculturation to blame – the process by which immigrants adopt the culture and behavior of their new country?
Although this is a popular hypothesis, a new study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior tells a different story. If anything, acculturation appears to protect health: older U.S. immigrants who speak English well have 40 to 50 per cent lower odds of having a disability than those who don’t. Having a U.S.-born spouse, a marker of social adaptation, is linked with 10 to 20 per cent lower odds of disability than having a foreign-born spouse.
However, when immigrants are acculturated on some dimensions but not on others – an experience called “acculturative discordance” – they have worse health. For example, being married to a U.S.-born spouse but not speaking English well predicts higher risks of ambulatory disability than having a foreign-born spouse and limited English proficiency. Ambulatory disability, including difficulties with walking or climbing, is the most prevalent disability in the U.S. and affects one in four adults aged 65 and older.
“Some immigrants behave and feel very much like Americans, yet they get perceived as foreigners because they don’t sound like the average American or they live in an immigrant enclave,” says Leafia Ye, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto and author of the study. “The results indicate that this discordance can be physically stressful – and show up as disability in later life.”
The study was based on the American Community Survey, a large population survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. It contained 958,211 immigrants aged 65 to 80.
Another key finding is that acculturation protects health more for white immigrants than for Black, Hispanic and Asian immigrants. As a result, highly acculturated white immigrants can retain their health advantage over the U.S.-born at older ages, but minoritized immigrants lose their advantage.
“Racially minoritized immigrants experience another layer of discordance – as they adapt more to U.S. society, they might also confront more racial discrimination and exclusion. This discordance helps explain the racial disparities in health as immigrants get older,” says Ye, who is also an affiliate faculty member with the Institute for Life Course & Aging and the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
“This study highlights that being ‘half-included’ is a tough experience – you are blending in more, but you might also be hitting a wall. It is not the immigrant experience that people typically imagine, so it too often gets ignored – but shouldn’t.”
Credit: Associate Professor Mark Horowitz, Adelaide University.
Fresh concerns have been raised over long-term use of antidepressants, with a new summary of evidence revealing limited benefits and higher health risks, prompting calls for treatment reviews every six months.
Researchers from Adelaide University and The University of Queensland were involved in the clinical overview, which has been published in the Australian Journal of General Practice.
They found there was little robust evidence to suggest that antidepressants prevent relapse beyond 12 months and believe the widely cited benefits supporting long-term use may be overstated due to a fundamental flaw in research design.
“Much of the evidence supporting long-term antidepressant treatment comes from so-called relapse prevention trials,” said Associate Professor of Psychiatry Mark Horowitz, at Adelaide University’s School of Medicine.
“These studies typically compare patients who continue medication with those who stop abruptly or rapidly. Because they don’t distinguish between withdrawal symptoms and the return of depression, we believe many apparent relapses may actually be withdrawal effects from the medication.”
Short-term trials of antidepressants reveal only small differences in improvements when compared to a placebo. There was also some research indicating that the apparent benefit of long-term treatment may be due to the suppression of withdrawal symptoms rather than the true prevention of depression or anxiety.
The research also highlights growing evidence of risks associated with long-term use, including sexual dysfunction, emotional numbing, cognitive impairment, weight gain and increased risk of physical health problems in older adults.
Withdrawal symptoms can be severe and long-lasting, sometimes persisting for months or even years.
“Symptoms such as anxiety, low mood and insomnia occur in both withdrawal from antidepressants and a return of depression. As these studies do not distinguish between them, they will mis-categorise withdrawal as a return of depression as this is the focus of such studies,” said Associate Professor Horowitz.
“If the same approach was taken with cigarettes and feeling worse on stopping them was interpreted as evidence that people should continue smoking them, we know that would be absurd. But the same sort of evidence is used to recommend long-term antidepressants.
“Guidelines need to be updated to reflect that there are no good studies which show that antidepressants are effective in the long term.”
Nearly one in seven Australians are taking antidepressants, with a third of people staying on them for more than a year. Most of this medication is being prescribed by general practitioners, often in situations where guideline criteria may not be fully met.
“Concerningly, the risk of withdrawal effects appears to increase with the duration of use – one reason for stopping antidepressants sooner rather than later,” said Associate Professor Horowitz.
Researchers say many patients recover from depression without long-term medication and are calling for a re-think of how depression is treated long-term, noting that non-drug approaches such as psychological therapies may offer more durable benefits.
“As GPs, we are becoming more aware of the limited benefits and possible harms associated with long-term antidepressant use and the need to reconsider the ‘set and forget’ approach to prescribing these medicines,” said Professor Katharine Wallis, Head of General Practice at The University of Queensland Medical School.
“There is increasing emphasis on supporting patients to make informed choices about antidepressant use and to stop antidepressants by slowly decreasing the dose.”
Other recommendations include addressing misconceptions about depression being caused by a ‘chemical imbalance’, recognition that worsening symptoms on stopping antidepressants may be linked to withdrawal rather than relapse and wider adoption of gradual weaning strategies when discontinuing medication for long-term users.
Journalist Charlotte Cowles received a call about suspicious activity on her Amazon account. A dentist named Daniel answered a call from a number listed as the local police. Mr. Lee, a retired engineer, was told he had to marry his newfound girlfriend so she could receive an inheritance.
Though the stories of these fraud victims vary greatly, they each end in the same result—an unsuspecting individual is swindled out of money under false pretenses. In the most recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, these real-life accounts are used to illustrate how pervasive and indiscriminate scams, or fraud (terms the authors use interchangeably), can be.
Scams are now one of the most common crimes in the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, scams accounts for 40% of all reported crimes. A 2024 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance states that about half of the world’s population is faced with a scam solicitation at least once a week.
The cost of scams worldwide is estimated to be more than $5 trillion USD a year—roughly equivalent to the combined 2024 budgets for Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. But victims often do not recoup their funds, and for close to 90% of cases, victims do not report that fraud occurred.
In this issue, coauthors Yaniv Hanoch (University of Wolverhampton), Stacey Wood (Scripps College), Marguerite DeLiema (University of Minnesota), Duke Han (University of Southern California), and Peter Lichtenberg (Wayne State University) provide readers with an overview on the latest in fraud research. They also strive to highlight the urgency of fraud’s impact, both to researchers and to individuals beyond academia who can collaborate on direct actions to mitigate it.
“Tackling a widespread and complex phenomenon like fraud is not easy, but as previous examples illustrate, coordinated, cross-sector and multi-modality efforts can dramatically produce social and behavioral change,” the authors wrote. “There is no doubt that psychologists can and should play a vital role in the fight against fraud. This is a call to arms.”
In a commentary accompanying the issue, Jacob Stanley and APS Fellow David Smith of Temple University build on the discussion with a focus on the role of AI. They argue that to understand scams more fully, it is crucial to study them in real time.
“Vulnerability unfolds over time, is amplified by the contexts in which people live and decide, and is increasingly exploited by digital systems designed for speed, scale, and convenience rather than reflection and verification,” they wrote. “If fraud research is to keep pace, it must move beyond static profiles of ‘at-risk’ individuals and toward a richer science of how people, environments, and technologies interact to create exploitable moments.”
Long delays and dismissive attitudes within UK healthcare systems are impacting older British women especially, leaving them angrier and sadder than the rest of Europe.
As the saying (sort of) goes: Hell hath no fury like a British woman scorned… by their healthcare system
According to a new poll, women from the United Kingdom are among the angriest in Europe, with more than a fifth reporting feelings of rage.
Its findings also note a decline in women’s emotional and physical health, and highlight ongoing inadequacies in female healthcare — something termed “medical misogyny” in a 2024 report by the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC).
Since February 2024, the women’s health score for the UK has fallen to its lowest levels going back to 2020, with the country now ranked 48th out of 143 countries.
In comparison, other European countries like Germany, Poland and Latvia all fared much better, ranking at 7, 5 and 2 respectively.
The scores take into account women’s reported levels of emotional health, their access to support and their overall quality of life.
Collectively, the data revealed that 42% of women are experiencing worry and 28% sadness.
Those over the age of 60 were impacted most, noted as the only age group to be angrier and sadder than they were in 2020, when the monitoring first began.
A primary source of women's frustrations in the UK — and across much of the world — continues to be a lack of investment, recognition and support for female health conditions.
In January, a study by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reported that women lose a combined 75 million years of healthy life every year, yet only receive 6% of total private healthcare investment.
This has meant that, while women are more likely than men to seek medical help, they still struggle to receive adequate treatment.
In particular, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has shown notable gaps in its pelvic and menopause care, according to Pure Unity Health. The same report stated that only 2% of UK medical research funding was spent on pregnancy, childbirth and female reproductive health in 2025.
As a result, women are increasingly turning to social media for solidarity, with Reddit communities like r/endometriosis and r/menopause each containing over 100,000 members.
However, while these spaces can be powerful tools for raising awareness, they also carry the risk of misinformation, highlighting the urgent need for more in-person professional care.
“Women’s responses [to the poll] clearly illustrate the continuing deterioration across many aspects of their health and wellbeing,” Tim Simpson, the general manager for UK & Ireland, Benelux & Nordics at Hologic, told The Independent.
“Additional UK research found many are facing delays in care and losing confidence in the system,” he added.
These healthcare delays are one of the most pressing issues, with access to specialised NHS services largely dependent on where you live in the country. For example, those in bigger cities like London tend to have quicker wait times compared to rural areas.
More investment is also needed for chronic female conditions, many of which remain underresearched — and can have debilitating consequences on women’s lives.
According to Hologic’s study, a third of women were found to be experiencing daily physical pain, and nearly one in four reported health problems serious enough to interfere with activities.
“The good news is that we know where many of the challenges lie,” Simpson said.
“Women are telling us they want earlier diagnosis, faster access to care and greater use of innovative technologies. Improving women's health will take continued commitment from policymakers, the NHS, clinicians and industry working together to deliver the changes women are asking for.”
The rise in remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased time spent alone and worsened workers’ mental health, according to a new study based on survey data from more than 500,000 Americans. In evaluating remote employees’ mental health, the analysis moves beyond the main consequence of remote work more typically evaluated in studies to date: worker productivity. The study’s results suggest that “the shift in work location to the home carries measurable costs at the population level,” Emma Zhang and Rourke O’Brien write in a related Perspective. After the pandemic led to many people working from home, the results of studies evaluating the mental health impacts on employees were mixed. To understand remote work’s effect on human well-being better, Natalia Emanuel and colleagues analyzed data from five nationally representative US-based surveys that together spanned more than a decade and included 568,000 respondents. They compared workers’ experiences before the pandemic (2011 to 2019) with experiences from the post-peak period (2022 to 2024), excluding the acute pandemic years of 2020 to 2021. The authors found that workers in jobs amenable to remote work experienced substantially larger post-pandemic increases in time spent alone, worsened mental well-being across multiple measures, and increases in the use of mental health services and prescriptions. These effects were particularly pronounced among individuals living alone. Noting a limitation of their study, the authors said, “Given that our data end in 2024, we cannot fully capture long- term adaptations among remotable workers.” If workers made changes, such as cultivating social networks outside of work, they may not yet have reaped the full benefits by the time of the study, they added. “Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online,” Emanuel et al. conclude.
Data is available for the creation of data visualization images. For more information, please contact Natalia Emanuel at natalia@nataliaemanuel.com
“We want to show pre-service math teachers that data science isn’t a separate universe from the math they already study. It's built on it,” said Eric Weber, professor and chair of mathematics at Iowa State University.
Credit: Photo illustration by Deb Berger/Iowa State University.
AMES, Iowa — When Eric Weber, professor and chair of mathematics at Iowa State University, talks about data science with future math teachers, he doesn’t begin with code, algorithms or buzzwords.
Instead, he asks them to imagine the scientific method — form a hypothesis, collect data, conduct experiments — running in reverse.
“In data science, you don’t start with a hypothesis or prediction,” Weber said. “You start with the data that already exists — maybe numbers someone collected years ago, or information gathered for a totally different purpose — and you work backward. You look for patterns, connections or surprises in the data, and those clues help you figure out what questions you should even be asking. So, instead of testing a hypothesis, you’re discovering one.”
This definition is the basis for curriculum Weber and colleagues at Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) have designed to help prepare future math teachers to teach data science in high-school classrooms. Their work reflects a growing national consensus that data science literacy should be part of secondary education.
“Multiple professional societies in mathematics, statistics and mathematics education have released statements in support of teaching data science in high schools,” Weber said. “But while high schools are being encouraged to add data-science courses, the teachers expected to teach them often receive little to no preparation.”
In a new paper published by Scatterplot, the MAA Journal of Data Science, Weber and his co-authors argue that future math teachers are the educators best positioned to take on this role — but only if their training programs give them the tools to do it.
“Our goal is to help close that gap with the curriculum we’ve created,” Weber said.
Weber’s co-authors are Heather Gallivan, associate professor of mathematics education at UNI; Lydia Butters, a former math education student at UNI who now teaches at Cedar Falls (Iowa) High School; and Stephen Nathan Mercil, a former mathematics doctoral student at Iowa State who is now an instructor at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.
Teaching data science by starting with what teachers already know
The curriculum, which is a five-week, self-contained module delivered within coursework taken by pre-service math teachers at Iowa State and UNI, focuses on the relationship between math and data science.
“We want to show pre-service math teachers that data science isn’t a separate universe from the math they already study,” Weber said. “It’s built on it.”
Many data-science ideas, including modeling, optimization and visualization, grow directly out of algebra, geometry and calculus, so instead of focusing on coding or software, the curriculum module uses familiar mathematical structures to introduce new concepts, Weber said.
A regression line becomes a model.
A classification problem becomes a geometry puzzle.
An optimization routine becomes a function‑minimizing exercise.
Weber said this strategy helps pre-service teachers get past the intimidation factor.
“If we can break down the initial barrier of, ‘I don’t know what data science is,’ then their ability to make that transition becomes pretty quick,” he said.
A project shaped by timing and a growing need
The idea for this project began in 2019, when Weber and Mercil first piloted the curriculum at Iowa State. The first full run happened in spring 2020, just as the pandemic forced classes online, Weber said.
The project expanded after Weber teamed up with Gallivan, whose background in statistics helped merge the two universities’ approaches. Funding from the Iowa Space Grant Consortium allowed the team to refine the lessons and offer the curriculum at both campuses starting in 2023.
“The module has been taught every spring at Iowa State and UNI since then, and each year, we add improvements based on student feedback and classroom experience,” said Weber, who is also a member of a committee assembled by the Iowa Department of Education to help write data science learning standards for the state.
To help future teachers see how data science works in practice, the curriculum uses a mix of synthetic and real‑world datasets.
One set simulates animal‑tracking data — timestamps, locations and headings — to give students a chance to explore visualization, dimensionality reduction and prediction. Another uses housing data collected by local high‑school students, allowing pre‑service teachers to practice multiple regression and think about how they might guide their own students through similar projects.
These examples, Weber and team said, help teachers understand how data‑science questions emerge from the data itself — and not from a prewritten hypothesis.
Preparing teachers for an AI-driven world
Weber said a broader goal of the project is to prepare teachers for classrooms where artificial intelligence and automated decision‑making are already part of students’ daily lives, and to help future teachers understand the relationship between AI and data science (“they’re closely related,” Weber said, “but they aren’t the same thing.”).
“Data science is the bigger field,” Weber said. “It’s about using math, statistics and computer tools to make sense of data and find patterns.”
Artificial intelligence, he explained, is about creating systems that can do tasks that usually require human thinking. AI systems learn from data, so they depend heavily on the work data science does.
The link between data science and AI comes from machine learning, a part of AI that learns patterns directly from data.
“Machine learning uses the same math and statistics that data science uses,” Weber said. “Simply put, data science helps us understand what the data is saying, and AI uses that understanding to make decisions or take action.”
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects data science jobs will grow 34 percent between 2024 and 2034, a rate that is significantly faster than the average for all occupations.
“Artificial intelligence is powerful, but we'll still need data scientists — humans in the loop,” Weber said. “AI systems don’t ‘think’ the way humans do; they learn patterns from large amounts of data and make predictions based on probability. Without someone who understands how that data was collected, what it represents and where it might be misleading, the results can be wrong or even harmful. Data scientists can interpret and contextualize the output of those systems.”
Early results show promise
The researchers’ curriculum has now run for four consecutive spring semesters at Iowa State and UNI, Weber said, adding that one former student is already teaching data science at a high school.
Additionally, a pre- and post-assessment administered during the first implementation showed measurable gains in students’ understanding of data science concepts, suggesting the approach is helping future teachers build both confidence and competence.
Weber said these early signs reinforce the need for continued investment in teacher preparation.
“We hope to obtain additional funding that will help us expand our work and support teachers who are already working in the field with in-service programming and classes that could earn teaching licensure renewal credits,” Weber said.
