Social Movements as Parsimonious Explanations for Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change.

Recently, interest in aggregate and population-level implicit and explicit attitudes has opened inquiry into how attitudes relate to sociopolitical phenomenon. This creates an opportunity to examine social movements as dynamic forces with the potential to generate widespread, lasting attitude change. Although collective action remains underexplored as a means of reducing bias, we advance historical and theoretical justifications for doing so. We review recent studies of aggregate attitudes through the lens of social movement theory, proposing movements as a parsimonious explanation for observed patterns. We outline a model for conceptualizing causal pathways between social movements and implicit and explicit attitudes among participants, supporters, bystanders, and opponents. We identify six categories of mechanisms through which movements may transform attitudes: changing society; media representations; intergroup contact and affiliation; empathy, perspective-taking, and reduced intergroup anxiety; social recategorization; and social identification and self-efficacy processes. Generative questions, testable hypotheses, and promising methods for future work are discussed.

Healing Trauma While Staying at Home: Using Telehealth to Conduct a Brief Treatment Program for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Studies suggest that a three-session brief treatment program (Brief Relaxation, Education, and Trauma Healing [BREATHE]) can help treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and symptoms of trauma; however, the program has not been examined via telehealth. Thus, the current study evaluated the feasibility of BREATHE delivered via telehealth. The intervention included breathing retraining and psychoeducation about PTSD and trauma. Thirty participants from the community with confirmed PTSD diagnoses participated in this telehealth program. Treatment retention was high, and participants showed decreased PTSD symptoms, posttraumatic cognitions, depression, anxiety, overall psychiatric symptoms, and internalized stigma and increased resiliency at posttreatment and 3-month follow up. Results suggest that a telehealth brief treatment program for PTSD is feasible and effective for individuals with PTSD. [Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, xx(x), xx-xx.].

Implicit and Explicit Racial Attitudes Changed During Black Lives Matter.

Lab-based interventions have been ineffective in changing individuals' implicit racial attitudes for more than brief durations, and exposure to high-status Black exemplars like Obama has proven ineffective in shifting societal-level racial attitudes. Antiracist social movements, however, offer a potential societal-level alternative for reducing racial bias. Racial attitudes were examined before and during Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its high points of struggle with 1,369,204 participants from 2009 to 2016. After controlling for changes in participant demographics, overall implicit attitudes were less pro-White during BLM than pre-BLM, became increasingly less pro-White across BLM, and were less pro-White during most periods of high BLM struggle. Considering changes in implicit attitudes by participant race, Whites became less implicitly pro-White during BLM, whereas Blacks showed little change. Regarding explicit attitudes, Whites became less pro-White and Blacks became less pro-Black during BLM, each moving toward an egalitarian "no preference" position.