The winners of the 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world. In a series of mini-episodes, Under the Cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals. Today we hear from Brian Anderson (Texas A&M University) about his research on […]

n a time when traumatic events such as pandemics, shootings and loss seem never-ending, mindfulness can be a tool for feeling capable during periods of uncertainty. “Mindfulness is a collection of practices nowadays, aimed to help most of us cultivate moment-to-moment awareness,” said Monica Vermani, a clinical psychologist based in Toronto and author of “A

On vital measures that predict later success in school and life, small children in the U.S. do worse than kids in comparable countries. This distressing information comes from an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of five-year-olds. For years the OECD has been examining the academic achievement of 15-year-old students from around the world, and recently

Over the past two years, I like to think I’ve gotten practiced at a type of wretched multivariable calculus: pandemic decision-making. The process starts with the blue bubble of a texted invitation or a date flagged on the calendar—a party Saturday, a sibling’s high-school basketball game, a second cousin’s middle-school Quidditch match, a cross-country flight

Depression has long been known to interfere with our ability to set realistic expectations, casting a pessimistic pall over the future. More recently, however, researchers have started to link the negative outlook brought about by depression to an impaired ability to update expectations.   The cognitive inflexibility found in people with depression may contribute to a

Summary: The more a person stares at themselves while talking with a partner in an online chat, the more their mood degrades over the course of the conversation, a new study finds. Alcohol use appears to worsen this effect. As many social gatherings—dates, game nights among friends, and family hangouts—have migrated to an online environment,

The winners of the 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world. In a series of mini-episodes, Under the Cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals. Today we hear from Patricia Lockwood (University of Birmingham), who is researching the

Exceptional researchers from all over the world—Chile and China, Israel and India, Poland and Portugal, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, and beyond—cast their vote for in-person psychological science in Chicago in May at the 2022 APS Annual Convention. “An exhausting (but awesome) five days at #apschi22,” as one of the 2,500 attendees tweeted,

The dominance of neoliberalism is turning societies against income equality.  At least, that’s according to a study published Tuesday in Perspectives on Psychological Science. A team of researchers at New York University and the American University of Beirut performed an analysis of roughly 20 years of data on from more than 160 countries and found that

A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that we often blame our mood for our behavior even though it is, in many cases, prompted by habit. According to the study, this bias frequently leads us to misattribute the real cause of our behavior. “A study by my co-author, Dr. Wendy Wood, found that more than 40% of people’s