Professional networking can seem like a daunting endeavor for many young scientists and graduate students, especially those considering careers outside of academia. In an APS Professional Development webinar, five psychological scientists shared their own experiences and advice on expanding your relationships not only in academic circles, but in industry as well. Related content: Career Crossroads? How to Map Your Journey Beyond Academia Speakers in the webinar, “Conference Hints III: Networking Tips – Academia and Beyond,” discussed how to initiate conversations and build relationships at s ..read more

Many parents ponder why one of their children seems more emotionally troubled than the others. A new study in the United Kingdom reveals a possible basis for those differences.  Adolescents who view their households as more unstructured, disorganized, or hectic than their siblings develop more mental health and behavioral problems in early adulthood, the study, published in Psychological Science, suggests.  In research tracking thousands of twins born in the mid-1990s, Sophie von Stumm, a psychology professor at the University of York, found that teenagers who perceived their homes a ..read more

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt that people wrote you off? Maybe a teacher suggested you weren’t talented enough to take a certain class, or a boss implied that you didn’t have the smarts needed to handle a big project. In the latest in our “Innovation 2.0 series,” we talk with Mary Murphy, who studies what she calls “cultures of genius.” We’ll look at how these cultures can keep people and organizations from thriving, and how we can create environments that better foster our growth ..read more

Rewatching recorded behavior, whether on a Tik-Tok video or police body-camera footage, makes even the most spontaneous actions seem more rehearsed or deliberate, new research shows. The findings, published in Psychological Science, raise new questions about the judgments people make about everything from TV advertisements to courtroom evidence.  “In the modern world, recording, sharing, and replaying is easier and more common than ever before, underscoring the importance of understanding how these behaviors impact perceiver judgments,” researchers led by Kristin Donnelly of the Universit ..read more

APS William James Fellows Kent C. Berridge, Vonnie C. McLoyd, Nora S. Newcombe, and Henry Wellman have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). APS Fellow and 2024 Mentor Awardee Brenda Major and APS Fellow Eveline Crone have also been elected to the academy.   Established under a congressional charter signed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, the NAS is a private, nonprofit institution charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Scientists are elected by their peers for outstanding contributions to resear ..read more

One Wednesday in May 2023, a small group gathered at an outdoor café in Barcelona, Spain, sipping coffee in the late morning sunshine and talking about their lives. They reflected on how to use their time and the struggle to find meaning. Although their interactions may have seemed unremarkable to anyone passing by, the group’s meeting was part of a carefully designed experiment, aimed at alleviating a painful experience: loneliness. … High rates of loneliness and isolation have led some public officials, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, to declare an “epidemic.” But whether l ..read more

Many studies show that sexual attraction in long-term relationships decreases over time. Is this decline inevitable? Are we doomed to be not as into our partners as we were in the honeymoon period? Can we get too close to our partners?  APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum interviews relationship expert Amy Muise from York University to answer these questions. Muise’s recently published work in APS’s journal Current Directions in Psychological Science addresses when and how closeness with our partners forms and declines over time. Muise shares a new development in relationship research on how ..read more

Liberals and conservatives don’t agree on much, including when it comes to combating climate change. But there is one surprising behavior where partisans from both ends of the spectrum seem to have more common ground than previously thought: planting trees. Our new research  suggests that finding climate actions with bipartisan support is already possible–even in a country as politically polarized as the United States. Planting trees matters; that’s why we measured it. As trees grow, they slow climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air, storing it, and releasing oxygen into th ..read more

Editor’s note: This article is a slight modification of a release originally distributed by Northwestern University on April 30, 2024.  Loneliness in adulthood follows a U-shaped pattern: It’s higher in younger and older adulthood, and lowest during middle adulthood, according to new research that examined nine longitudinal studies from around the world.   The study—published in Psychological Science—also identified several risk factors for heightened loneliness across the whole lifespan, including social isolation, sex, education, and physical impairment.  “What was striki ..read more

Teaching Current Directions remains committed to bringing cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom. We can link the column’s birth to two sources: APS Executive Director Emeritus Alan Kraut and the glacial pace of academia. In 2002, Kraut wrote to Hope College Psychology Professor David Myers with the germ of an idea to connect Current Directions in Psychological Science’s content to the classroom. But the teaching column idea simmered on the back burner, never finding the right time to start. A decade later, Myers recruited me as a successor coauthor for his Introduction to Psych ..read more