During my tenure as APS President, I’ve called for broadening the way we train psychological scientists to prepare them for potential careers outside of academia. In my presidential columns for the Observer, I’ve discussed—and invited other leading scientists to discuss—career opportunities in technology, government, and more. In this final presidential column, I’ve asked APS Fellow Barbara Wanchisen, a behavioral scientist with a history of working in public policy, to offer her thoughts on graduate training.  —Wendy Wood, APS President  During a reception at a psychology convention ..read more

Editorial Fellows, clockwise from top left: Ivan Carbajal, Leyla Loued-Khenissi, Chelsea Boccagno, Aishwarya Rajesh, Kongmeng Liew, Dieu Truong. Six psychological scientists representing different cultures and nationalities have been named inaugural APS Editorial Fellows. APS launched the Fellows program to help scientists develop their skills as editors, with a goal of creating and sustaining a pipeline of diverse and representative journal editors. Two Fellows are assigned to each of three APS journals: Psychological Science, Clinical Psychological Science, and Advances in Methods and P ..read more

Promoting effective messaging • Sticking with it The numbers show why public health officials are declaring a global mental health crisis. At least 970 million people worldwide are living an anxiety and depressive disorder, according to the World Health Organization. And according to a recent longitudinal study, nearly half of adults worldwide will develop a mental disorder in their lifetime (McGrath et al., 2023).   Researchers, advocates, and care providers have made progress over the past few decades in increasing the number of people receiving appropriate mental health car ..read more

APS Fellow Tess Neal, a clinical and forensic psychologist at Iowa State University, is focused on understanding and improving human judgment processes, particularly among trained experts.   Your research focuses on human judgment processes as they intersect with the law and the nature and limits of expertise. What led to your scientific interest in these subjects?  Early in my graduate training, I had a stellar statistics teacher and mentor—Jamie DeCoster—who taught us about exploratory vs. confirmatory processes in science and why those distinctions matter for a credible body of kn ..read more

Oppressed Groups Engender Implicit Positivity: Seven Demonstrations Using Novel and Familiar Targets Benedek Kurdi, Amy Krosch, and Melissa Ferguson Disseminating accurate information about past wrongdoing in intergroup contexts (including discrimination, slavery, or genocide) constitutes an indispensable first step toward reconciliation and restitution. However, worryingly, such information may produce ironic effects: Because oppression itself is extremely negative, implicit (automatic) evaluations of oppressed groups may shift in a negative, rather than positive, direction. Contrary to thes ..read more

Whether we are trying to master a new language or play a musical instrument, the pain of making mistakes is a big obstacle, especially early in the learning curve. But novices become experts only when we push ourselves to the edge of our abilities, and errors are both inevitable and essential for moving forward. … Curious about the power of tests as a learning tool, cognitive psychologists Henry “Roddy” Roediger and Jeff Karpicke had hundreds of students memorize excerpts from a test-preparation book for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). One group memorized these passages by r ..read more

Think back to the United States as it was a year ago, a decade ago, a generation ago. Is the US a more caring or less caring nation now than it was back then? If you think Americans have lost their compassion, the data would be on your side — until recently. Since the late 1970s, psychologists have measured empathy by asking millions of people how much they agreed with statements such as “I feel tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.” In 2011, a landmark study led by researcher Sara Konrath examined the trends in those surveys. The analysis revealed that Americ ..read more

When we imagine a typical scene—for example, a kitchen—we tend to recall not just what a place looks like, but the sounds we associate with it. These audio associations can help us recognize objects more quickly, wrote Jamal R. Williams (University of California, San Diego) and Viola S. Störmer (Dartmouth College) in Psychological Science, such that we may identify a photo of a tea kettle more quickly when we hear the sound of water boiling or an “audio scene” of someone working in their kitchen.  “Despite the intuitive feeling that our visual experience is coherent and comprehensive, the ..read more

How much of our behavior is habitual? APS President Wendy Wood and her colleagues answered this question on April 16 during “Habits and Behavior Change—A Case Study of Digital Technology,” an APS Science for Society webinar.   In a study in which some participants had strong habits involving drinking particular sugared beverages and others didn’t, Wood and her colleagues tested the behavior change in sugared beverage consumption and found that persuasive messages were not successful at changing habitual behavior (Itzchakov, Uziel, & Wood, 2017). Through her review of the literatu ..read more

Crowds Can Effectively Identify Misinformation at Scale Cameron Martel, Jennifer Allen, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand   Identifying successful approaches for reducing the belief and spread of online misinformation is of great importance. Social media companies currently rely largely on professional fact-checking as their primary mechanism for identifying falsehoods. However, professional fact-checking has notable limitations regarding coverage and speed. In this article, we summarize research suggesting that the “wisdom of crowds” can successfully be harnessed to help identify mis ..read more