Under the Cortex

Did you know that loneliness is different from social isolation? Psychologists define loneliness as a subjective concept which is related to one’s own expectations.   In this episode, Under the Cortex hosts Samia Akther Khan, PhD candidate from King’s College London, whose research examines the feeling of loneliness across lifespan. The conversation with APS’s Özge G. Fischer-Baum focuses on the d...

Psychology PhDs have skills broadly relevant for teaching, industry, and government. They are integral to producing basic research and evidence-based solutions for policy and industry. Only about half of psychology PhDs are hired in academia, but psychology graduate training in the United States has largely retained the classic graduate training model of a direct path to an academic job. It's time...

At the height of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, the Association for Psychological Science joined countless other organizations around the world in turning to podcasts to share findings and conversations. The result is Under the Cortex, which now celebrates 100 episodes in which psychological scientists help us understand some of their most interesting and impactful new research. This special episo...

Scientists usually expect childhood to be nurturing, safe, and characterized by high levels of caregiver investment. However, evidence from history, anthropology, and primatology can challenge this view. Throughout human evolution, children have faced threats and deprivation, at varied levels across space and time. And these varied levels of exposure to adversity—which over time were higher than i...

How can our habits of thinking make us vulnerable to deception? What characteristics of information make it more likely to manipulate us? And how can we spot deception before it’s too late? In this episode of Under the Cortex, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris join APS’s Ludmila Nunes to answer these questions and more, drawing from their brand new book: Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and...

  Pervasive misconceptions about and bias against drug use in the United States have led to clinical norms that pathologize any use of certain kinds of drugs. This bias has harmful consequences. For instance, conflating substance use with substance disorder is used to justify curtailing certain people’s rights, which has broad consequences. Treating drug use as a brain disease reveals clinician bi...

Cognitive psychology studies universal processes such as memory, decision making, or emotions, for example. However, the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that support the field’s longtime focus on studying “cognitive universals” might have resulted in a science of human cognition based on the performance and behavior of people who are predominantly White, English-speaki...

Consensually nonmonogamous relationships are defined by explicit mutual agreements to have multiple emotional, romantic, and/or sexual relationships. But is there really a type of person who engages in this type of relationship? And are these relationships actually lower in quality compared with monogamous relationships? Research has revealed several misconceptions about consensually nonmonogamous...

The mass incarceration of Black people in the United States is gaining attention as a public health crisis with extreme mental-health implications. Despite Black Americans making up just 13% of the general U.S. population, Black people constitute about 38% of people in prison or jail. What does this have to do with psychological science? Well, historical efforts to oppress and control Black people...

While we are fussing about the artificial-intelligence revolution, a demographic revolution may have much more radical consequences: There are more older people than ever in the world. In her last presidential column for the APS Observer, APS President Alison Gopnik, who studies learning and development at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about how psychological science may help us t...

A growing problem in research and publishing involves “paper mills”: organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research articles. This form of fraud affects the integrity of academic publishing, with repercussions for science as well as the general public. How can fake articles be detected? And how can paper mills be counteracted?   In this episode of Unde...

How do you balance innovation and implementation, possibility and practicality? How do you resolve the tension between the lure of the crazy new thing and the safe haven of the tried and true? In her latest presidential column for the APS Observer, APS President Alison Gopnik, who studies learning and development at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about what makes children bad at ac...

Questions often emerge when researchers tend to engage in research on topics that are personally relevant for them. For example, when someone with depression also studies it, should they disclose their personal interest? How is this type of self-relevant research—“me-search,” as it’s popularly known— perceived by the academic and scientific community?    In a recent study published in Clinical Psy...

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 for Transformative Early Car...

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 Spence...

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 author, Olga Stavrova, a re...

Diagnoses often oversimplify complex mental health problems. How can researchers and practitioners avoid oversimplifications, improve research, and provide more effective and customized clinical practices?  A recent article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science presented the advantages of studying mental health problems as systems, not syndromes. The author, APS Fellow Eiko Frie...

Imagine that we designed a fully intelligent, autonomous robot that acted on the world to accomplish its goals. How could we make sure that it would want the same things we do? In her latest presidential column for the APS Observer, APS President Alison Gopnik, who studies learning and development at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about how looking at caregivers who raise human chi...

Do fetuses care about what their mothers eat? When do spouses cheat? Does the use of social media predict depression and anxiety?  How can we understand and address older adults’ loneliness? Some of the top articles published in the APS journals in 2022 explored these questions and much more. In this conversation, Ludmila Nunes talks with Amy Drew, who heads up APS’s journals team, for a countdown...

Can what we know about an object change the way we see it? Or the way we feel about it? If so, could that be because different brain areas process different features of any given object, such as what we know about its uses?   In this episode of Under the Cortex, APS’s Ludmila Nunes speaks with Dick Dubbelde, a recent postdoc and adjunct professor of psychology and neuroscience at George Washington...

Human innovation will always be the essential complement to the cultural technologies we create, including artificial intelligence. In her latest presidential column for the APS Observer, APS President Alison Gopnik, who studies learning and development at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about how psychology, and especially child psychology, will play a crucial role in creating and...

In the final discussion with social psychologist David Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, APS’s Ludmila Nunes talks with him about the third section of his book, in which he applies his psychological insights to the larger world around us.  Listen to the previous episodes featuring David Myers and his latest book, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the...

David Myers, a social psychologist and professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, joined us in the last episode to speak about his latest book, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind . In this episode, he and APS’s Ludmila Nunes discuss the second section of the book, which focuses on who we are, and takes a closer look at a chapter called “Why is everyone el...

Social psychologist David Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, is the author of seventeen books, including psychology’s most widely read textbook. But he doesn’t write only textbooks. For the last several decades, he has translated findings from psychological science for the general public as well, in books on topics ranging from the scientific pursuit of happiness to the...

What is the relationship between music and autobiographical memories?  Why do we like the music that we like? And what are the challenges that a psychological scientist studying music might face throughout their career?     Amy Belfi from the Missouri University of Science and Technology joined APS’s Ludmila Nunes to speak about her career as a neuroscientist studying music perception and cognitio...