Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Kim Mills, and I'm speaking to you from APA's Technology Mind and Society Conference in Washington.

This is an interdisciplinary meeting aimed at assessing current efforts to understand and shape the interactions of human beings and technology,

for identifying priorities for future work, and for promoting the exchange of ideas and collaboration among participants.

Dr. Christopher Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. He has clinical experience

in working with offender and juvenile justice populations, as well as in conducting evaluations

for child protective services. His research focuses on media violence and video games in particular,

and he recently served as guest editor of a special issue of the APA Journal Review

of General Psychology on that topic.

But he's here today to talk about suicide contagion, which fits in with his interest in

how political pressure, social panics, and the so-called culture wars can distort media research.

Welcome, Dr. Ferguson.

Thanks for having me here today. So the first

question that comes to my mind is whether your research has shown that there is such a thing as suicide

contagion. Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, it really matters. Contagion by who or what

is really sort of an essential issue. So there really are three pools of research

on suicide contagion.

One is by peers.

So if one of your friends or someone

in your social environment commit suicide,

does that make you more likely to commit suicide

if you're kind of on that edge of considering it?

...