Child Brides, Inmate Firefighters, Mushroom Houses

Underage Marriage is More Common in America Than You Realize. Why? (0:31) Guest: Fraidy Reiss, Founder and Director, Unchained at Last Over the last ten years, US Immigration and State Department officials says more than five thousand girls under the age of 18 have been brought to the US to marry an older man. Sometimes 20 or 30 years older. Immigration officials have also approved thousands of applications from underage girls living in the US to bring an older spouse to America. And it’s all perfectly legal under US immigration law and marriage laws in nearly every state. You probably thought child marriage only happens in far off places, didn’t you? (Originally aired 4/2/19) Brain Scans Often Misinterpreted in Criminal Justice System (21:36) Guest: Eyal Aharoni, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, & Neuroscience, Georgia State University If someone commits a crime and, afterward, doctors discover the person has a brain tumor, should the punishment be different? That’s the whole point behind the “insanity” defense – hoping for a lighter sentence by showing that on some level, a person’s brain caused the crime.  No surprise, then, that it’s becoming more and more common for defense attorneys to present brain evidence in court – sometimes even MRI or CAT scans of the defendant. How much weight should judges give this evidence? (Originally aired 7/25/19) Staying Compassionate in the Face of Mass Suffering (37:11) Guest: Daniel Lim, PhD, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab, Pennsylvania State University With wildfires fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, and the devastating plane crash in Iran, we are bombarded with stories of suffering in the news and on our social media feeds right now. Researchers have noticed something strange about our ability to feel compassion for others: Compassion does not generally grow as the number of people suffering increases. Rather, we’re subject to something called “compassion fatigue.” Psychologist Daniel Lim’s research has