We humans seem to have an on-again, off-again relationship with facial hair. Prehistoric cave drawings reveal the myriad tools our ancient ancestors used to shave: shark’s teeth, sharpened flints and even clam shells. Nowadays, beards are back in style and people are taking a razor to their brows, instead. But is there a reason we evolved to […]

The APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recognizes APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science.  Award recipients reflect the best of the many new and cutting edge ideas coming from of our most creative and promising investigators who together embody the future of psychological science.  The APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award

Research contributions can be transformative in various ways, such as the establishment of new approaches or paradigms within a field of psychological science, or the development or advancement of boundary-crossing research.   The APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recognizes APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science.  The APS 2023 Janet Taylor

What explains persistent racial disparities in policing, despite police departments’ repeated investments in bias-training programs? A wide range of data indicate that police in the United States tend to stop, arrest, injure, or kill more Black people than White people. Calvin K. Lai (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jaclyn A. Lisnek (University of Virginia)

The champions of unclouded thought were recently put to the test in a study that sought to explore if an illogical puzzle could be more easily solved by an animal with the associative learning approach of a computer. It saw researchers put a group of pigeons to the test to investigate their performance in a

Burnout isn’t just for cubicle warriors and workaholic entrepreneurs. Nobel prize-winning geniuses and beloved celebrities burn out too. And so do experts on happiness, apparently. Yale psychologist Laurie Santos is famous for teaching the university’s most popular class ever — on happiness. Her insights on how to achieve the good life were so incredibly popular that they have even been

… My first experience of an adversarial collaboration was about 40 years ago. My wife, Anne Treisman, and I were studying a new paradigm involving apparent motion and priming. It’s a nice effect. There’s a lot of work on it. And quite a few studies since have followed up on this work. Anne and I had many ideas, and

Last summer, a piece of artwork generated with artificial intelligence took a first prize at the Colorado State Fair. To me, the image looks like a view from the back of the stage at an opera. You see the backs of three singers, then, past them, vague squiggles and forms that may or may not

Does infidelity predict an unhappy relationship? Or is it the other way around? Can a relationship recover after infidelity?  In a recent study published in Psychological Science, researchers found that relationship functioning starts to decline before infidelity happens and that, in most cases, well-being did not recover in the years following the infidelity. The lead

Recent attention has focused on the U.S. state of Florida as its governor has advanced policies that politicize science and infringe on academic freedom—a foundational pillar of science. Unfortunately, these attacks are not limited to Florida. Similar political attacks are occurring in countries and communities around the world.   As a global scientific organization, the