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Alix Spiegel

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

NPR correspondent Alix Spiegel works on the Science desk and covers psychology.

Arriving at NPR in 2003, much of Spiegel's reporting has been on emotion mental health. She has reported on everything from the psychological impact of killing another person, to the emotional devastation of Katrina, to psycho-therapeutic approaches to transgender children.

Over the course of her career in public radio, Spiegel has won awards including the George Foster Peabody Award, Livingston Award, and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. Spiegel's 2007 documentary revealing mental health issues and crime plaguing a Southern Mississippi FEMA trailer park housing Katrina victims was recognized with Scripps Howard National Journalism Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Her radio documentary 81 Words, about the removal of homosexuality from psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is being turned into a film by HBO.

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Spiegel graduated from Oberlin College. She began her career in radio in 1995 as one of the founding producers of the public radio show This American Life. Spiegel left the show in 1999 to become a full time reporter. She has also written for The New Yorker magazine and The New York Times.

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Shots - Health News
1:04 am
Mon May 20, 2013

If Your Shrink Is A Bot, How Do You Respond?

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Credit YouTube
Ellie is a computer simulation designed to engage real people in meaningful conversation and take their measure. The computer system looks for subtle patterns in body language and vocal inflections that might be clues to underlying depression or other emotional distress.
Credit YouTube
Ellie (right) is a computer simulation designed to engage real people, like the woman on the left, in meaningful conversation and take their measure. The computer system looks for subtle patterns in body language and vocal inflections that might be clues to underlying depression or other emotional distress.
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Originally published on Mon May 20, 2013 3:19 pm

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Shots - Health News
1:55 pm
Mon April 29, 2013

Big Sibling's Big Influence: Some Behaviors Run In The Family

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Originally published on Wed May 1, 2013 10:02 am

Patricia East is a developmental psychologist who began her career working at an OB-GYN clinic in California. Thursday mornings at the clinic were reserved for pregnant teens, and when East arrived the waiting room would be packed with them, chair after chair of pregnant adolescents.

It was in this waiting room, East explains, that she discovered her life's work — an accidental discovery that emerged from the small talk that staff at the clinic had with their young clients as they walked them back for checkups.

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Shots - Health News
8:18 am
Wed April 17, 2013

Boston Blasts Remind Us Of Fragility Of Life

Credit Julio Cortez / AP
Jillian Blenis, 30, of Boston reacts while stopping at a makeshift memorial to marathon bombing victims Wednesday.
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Originally published on Wed April 17, 2013 3:33 pm

From the first explosion in Boston on Monday to the second, just 15 seconds elapsed. And in those 15 seconds, three people were mortally wounded, including an 8-year-old boy. The number of injured topped 100, and for those of us watching, it was a profound reminder of a reality we'd prefer to ignore.

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Shots - Health News
3:59 pm
Mon April 8, 2013

Would Angry Teens Chill Out If They Saw More Happy Faces?

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Credit iStockphoto.com
Researchers say that aggressive people tend to interpret ambiguous faces as reflecting hostility.
Credit Penton-Voak et al. / Psychological Science
To try to retrain troubled teens to reinterpret facial expressions, researchers showed them images of happy, angry and neutral faces, and then gave them feedback on how they described them.
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Originally published on Mon April 8, 2013 7:59 pm

All day long we're surrounded by faces. We see them on the subway sitting two by two, pass them on the sidewalk as we make our way to work, then nod to them in the elevator.

But most of those faces don't tell us much about the emotional life of the person behind the face.

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Shots - Health News
1:41 pm
Mon April 1, 2013

Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century

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Credit Steve Debenport / iStockphotography
When anthropologists tallied the use of emotional words through a century of literature, they included many books without clear emotional content — technical manuals, for example, and automotive repair guides.
Credit Alberto Acerbi, Vasileios Lampos, Philip Garnett, R. Alexander Bentley / PLOS ONE
Researchers were able to chart historical periods of positive and negative moods through literature. Values above zero indicate generally "happy" periods, and values below the zero indicate generally "sad" periods.
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Originally published on Tue April 2, 2013 8:18 am

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad?

To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.

Several years ago, more or less on a lark, a group of researchers from England used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books.

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Shots - Health News
3:10 am
Mon March 11, 2013

New Voices For The Voiceless: Synthetic Speech Gets An Upgrade

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Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Samantha Grimaldo was born with a rare disorder, Perisylvian syndrome, and has never been able to speak.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Joseph, Alexandra and Samantha Grimaldo sit around the kitchen counter in the family's home in Marlborough, Mass., playing with Samantha's voice app, though they mostly use sign language at home.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Samantha uses a text-to-speech iPhone app to help her communicate. Here she shows the app interface.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
When Samantha was younger, she carried this device with her to help her communicate.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Samantha watches her brother Nicholas play piano. Their mother says that a new customized voice created by researcher Rupal Patel from a young Samantha's voice sample is happy and has a sweetly familiar quality. "My son — my son Nicholas — I could hear some of his voice in it," she says.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Samantha speaks with her mom, Ruane, about going to the movies with a friend.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
Samantha Grimaldo was born with a rare disorder, Perisylvian syndrome, and has never been able to speak.
Credit Ellen Webber for NPR
The text-to-speech iPhone app that Samantha Grimaldo uses has three voice options for her to choose from.
Credit Courtesy of Mary Knox Merrill/Northeastern University
Rupal Patel is a speech scientist at Northeastern University.
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Originally published on Wed March 13, 2013 11:23 am

Ever since she was a small child, Samantha Grimaldo has had to carry her voice with her.

Grimaldo was born with a rare disorder, Perisylvian syndrome, which means that though she's physically capable in many ways, she's never been able to speak. Instead, she's used a device to speak. She types in what she wants to say, and the device says those words out loud. Her mother, Ruane Grimaldo, says that when Samantha was very young, the voice she used came in a heavy gray box.

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Shots - Health News
2:32 pm
Mon February 25, 2013

To Spot Kids Who Will Overcome Poverty, Look At Babies

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For some kids who grow up in poverty, the bond developed with Mom is especially important in dealing with stress.
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Originally published on Wed February 27, 2013 4:25 am

Why do some children who grow up in poverty do well, while others struggle?

To understand more about this, a group of psychologists recently did a study.

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Shots - Health News
1:33 am
Mon February 11, 2013

Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight

Credit Trafton Drew and Jeremy Wolfe
Notice anything unusual about this lung scan? Harvard researchers found that 83 percent of radiologists didn't notice the gorilla in the top right portion of this image.
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Originally published on Thu February 14, 2013 7:37 am

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Shots - Health News
1:25 am
Mon January 28, 2013

Mercy For Robots? Experiment Tests How Humans Relate To Machines

Credit Christoph Bartneck
Could you say "no" to this face? Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand recently tested whether humans could end the life of a robot as it pleaded for survival.
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Originally published on Tue January 29, 2013 3:15 pm

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Shots - Health News
2:20 pm
Thu December 27, 2012

Shootings Leave Sandy Hook Survivors Rethinking The Odds

Credit Spencer Platt / Getty Images
People visit a memorial outside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 15.
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Originally published on Thu December 27, 2012 9:02 pm

About a month ago, Declan Procaccini's 10-year-old son woke him early in the morning in a fright.

"He came into my bedroom and said, 'Dad, I had a horrible, horrible dream!' " Procaccini says. "He was really shaken up. I said, 'Tell me about it,' and he told me he'd had a dream that a teenager came into his classroom at his school and shot all the kids in front of him."

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