Under the Cortex

Exploration is a fundamental human behavior. Exploring our environment can promote the acquisition of knowledge by exposing us to novelty. Adolescence is a prime time to explore, take risks, and learn, but why is exploration so enticing—and so rewarding—in the lives of teenagers and young adults?    The role of exploration and risk taking in sustaining adolescent well-being and establishing social...

Can birds be as intelligent as chimpanzees or dolphins? Can they communicate and use language like a child would? Can they even outsmart undergraduate students?  A line of research started more than 40 years ago continues to reveal new findings about parrots’ intelligence and even their ability to use English speech to communicate with humans.  Irene Pepperberg, an APS Fellow and adjunct research...

What determines how we feel about new technologies? Can an existential approach help us deal with apocalyptic fears about the climate crisis? And does having brothers or sisters influence our personality? New research in APS journals explores these questions and much more, including what makes a joke funny and how social support can prevent depression in breast-cancer survivors. In this episode of...

How did attitudes about race, sexuality, age, or disability change in the last decade or so? In the United States, it appears that bias decreased across all explicit attitudes, but implicit biases decreased only for certain attitudes, including sexuality and race. Moreover, biases have remained stable for variables such as age or disability. What can these patterns of change tell us about our soci...

Anywhere between 17% and 38% of adolescents and young adults engage in behaviors of nonsuicidal self-injury, defined as “the deliberate, self-inflicted damage of body tissue without suicidal intent.” These behaviors, which might include cutting, scratching, head-banging, and burning, sometimes help people cope with negative emotions or even serve to keep them from attempting actual suicide, but th...

Adverse early experiences, quite literally, can kill. 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 the growing moral and scientific case for early childhood policies that can mitigate or prevent the effects of experiences such as poverty, physical or emotional neglec...

How people judge others’ bodies might be influenced by what they are used to seeing in magazines, TV, or social media. Recent research suggests that women’s judgments about other women’s bodies can be biased by an overrepresentation of thinness.   In a recent study published in Psychological Science , young women were more likely to judge bodies they had previously considered “normal” as overweigh...

How have our biases and attitudes changed in the last decade? Are there sex or gender differences in verbal skills? And do the impressions of personality we form from someone’s face depend on our culture? New research in APS journals explored these questions and much more, including ADHD, and cognitive control in lemurs. In this episode of Under the Cortex, cognitive psychologists Ludmila Nunes an...

It’s been estimated that at least one third of the population will experience mental disorders and difficulties in their lifetimes, from anxiety to depression. Those affected can be helped by people working in applied fields of psychological science, such as clinical psychology, counseling, or school psychology. But what do we know about the prevalence of mental-health difficulties among psycholog...

What gives away a deceitful 911 caller who might have committed a crime? From a cross-cultural spin on the classic “marshmallow experiment” to deceitful 911 homicide calls to what true smiles do, new research in APS journals explores a broad range of topics, including visual memory and success. In this episode of Under the Cortex, APS’s Ludmila Nunes and Andy DeSoto—both of whom are psychological...

Life history—the transformations that occur throughout the lifespan—shapes the human mind. This idea cuts across all the subdisciplines of psychology and underlies the answers to the two main questions that drive psychological scientists: What is universal about human minds and what is special and particular about specific minds? In her inaugural presidential column for the APS Observer , APS Pres...

While the past several decades can rightly be called the “information age,” the rise of social media platforms makes is seem like the past few years could be considered the misinformation age. The viral nature of alternative facts, rumors, and planned disinformation campaigns has taken its toll on global politics, the economy, and healthcare. If only we could be told when we were reading “misinfor...

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 what captures human...

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 foundatio...

Being rational is an often-admired quality. After all, a rational mind allows us to calmly and carefully evaluate  situations based on the facts rather than letting emotions cloud our thinking. There are times, however, when irrational thought has its advantages. Shedding some light on the human propensity for delusion thinking is psychologist, writer, and APS Fellow and Charter Member Stuart Vyse...

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, Neil Lewis Jr. (Cornell University) talks about how the unequal nature of the society that...

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, Kai Chi (Sam) Yam (National university of Singapore) tells us about his research on human-n...

New research covering tens of millions of U.S. traffic stops found that Black drivers were more likely than White drivers to be stopped by police in regions with a more racially biased White population. Pierce Ekstrom, a researcher at the University of Nebraska and lead author on one of two concurrent papers in the journal Psychological Science talks about how these studies shed new light on how c...

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, Jason Okonofua (University of California, Berkeley) tells us about his research on empathy a...

The winners of the  2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award  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 Oriel FeldmanHall (Brown University) tells us about her research to disentangle the cognitive and neural processes behind the complex choic...

The winners of the 2022 APS Spence Award 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 Brett Ford (University of Toronto) who is examining the basic science and health implications of how individuals think about and manage their...

The winners of the 2022 APS Spence Award 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 Antonia Kaczkurkin (Vanderbilt University) who is researching the neurobiological mechanisms of how we internalize disorders.

There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, though only about 5,000 are visible to the naked eye. Under ideal conditions and far from city lights, you can see about half of them on any given night. Cultures the world over see similar shapes in the night sky--the Big Dipper, Orion, and the Pleiades are just a few. New research, as discussed by Charles Kemp and published in the journal Ps...

During the pandemic and when other natural disasters strike, governments may curtail certain liberties in an effort to save lives. These compromises also happen in everyday life, from seatbelt laws to food-safety regulations. A paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science , however, suggests that restricting freedoms may have other unintended negative consequences for behavior and heal...

You hear them so often they must be true! Or are they? Popular myths about the human brain include old chestnuts like people only use 10% of their brains, too much sugar sends kids into hyperdrive, and there are left-brain and right-brain personalities.  How did these beliefs get started and why are they so widespread? Charles Blue and Ludmila Nunes take a skeptical deep dive to explore some the m...