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 Psychological Science, researchers found that more than 50% of participants had conducted self-relevant research. Those who had not engaged in self-relevant research made more stigmatizing judgments of it and its disclosure than did those who did engage in self-relevant research. We discuss these findings and their implications with the study’s lead author, Andrew Devendorf of the University of South Florida.

Unedited transcript:

[00:00:13.170] – Ludmila Nunes 

Do researchers tend to engage in research on topics that are personally relevant for them? For example, might someone with depression tend to study it? If so, do they disclose their personal interests? And how is this type of selfrelevant research or me search seen by the academic and scientific communities? This is under the cortex. I am Ludmila Nunes with the association for Psychological Science to speak about a study that analyzed how prevalent research is in psychological science in the United States and the attitudes toward this type of research. I have with me Andrew Devendorf from University of South Florida, co author of a recent article published in Clinical Psychological Science. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to under the cortex. 

[00:01:06.330] – Andrew Devendorf 

Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here. 

[00:01:09.750] – Ludmila Nunes 

So I’ve been following your research not just on me search, but on psychopathology and the outcomes of treatment. But today I want to focus on this article on me search. Would you like to share with us the main takeaway from this work? 

[00:01:29.390] – Andrew Devendorf 

Yeah. So in our study, we examined the construct of self relevant research, also more popularly known as me search. One reason why we use the term self relevant research is because it comes off as a more neutral term. Whereas in conversations with people I’ve had, research tends to be used a little bit more pejoratively. Like the research is all about the researcher can be selfish or more biased. And so self relevant research is the pursuit of research by researchers with the lived experience with or close connection to the research topic. And in clinical psychology, many of our field’s largest advancements have been made by people using their lived experiences as a strength. So one famous example is Marshall Inahan, who has talked openly about her experiences with suicidality self harm, emotion dysregulation. And she’s used her own mental health experiences to actually help with the development of dialectical behavior therapy, which is now a widely used and effective treatment for people with borderline personality disorder. And so aside from some select famous psychologists speaking openly about how their work connects to their own personal experiences, strangely, you don’t really hear many others talk about their lived experiences in connection to their research. 

[00:02:49.240] – Andrew Devendorf 

And so I just think that’s a little bit strange given that we’re in such a clinical and applied field where I personally know a lot of people who go into this field with their own connections. And so in our study, we asked three questions. The first was how common is self relevant research in clinical counseling school psychology? The second is what are the perceptions of self relevant research among psychologists? Is it viewed more negatively, like maybe more biased? Or is it viewed more positively as a strength? And lastly, do perceptions about self relevant research depend on the specific research topic at hand? For example, our researchers who have a history with mental illness, topics like depression, suicide, or schizophrenia are they viewed more negatively than researchers with the lived experience of cancer and who study cancer. And so that’s what our study set out to discover. 

[00:03:41.270] – Ludmila Nunes 

And what did you find? 

[00:03:43.530] – Andrew Devendorf 

Yeah, so what we did was we surveyed a representative sample of faculty and graduate students in clinical counseling and school psychology. And we surveyed approximately 1700 participants who came from APA and CPA accredited programs. Those are the accrediting bodies for those clinical oriented programs. And we administered a survey, and the survey asked a few questions like providing a definition of self relevant research and asking people, have you ever conducted this type of research? Do you currently conduct it? Have you conducted in the past, or have you never done it? And that gave us an assessment of how common this type of research is to assess attitudes. What we did is we actually constructed these vignettes. So basically, it gave a brief summary of a researcher who maybe they have depression and they are interested in studying depression, or a researcher who’s had a history of cancer and they study cancer. And we also had a condition with somebody who doesn’t have a personal connection to the research. And we asked respondents to read those brief summaries. Everybody was assigned to one and then report on their attitudes about that researcher. So we developed three different scales. 

[00:05:02.780] – Andrew Devendorf 

The first skill assesses more negative attitudes people might have. So, for example, to what extent do you view this researcher as more biased, selfish, or irresponsible? And we viewed that as more stigmatizing attitudes. Also, to what extent do you view this researcher as having more insight or motivation in their work, some more strengths based attitudes? And lastly, to what extent do you think it’s okay for a researcher to talk about why they’re pursuing the research topic across different contexts, like a personal statement for graduate school, a job talk, or publicly on a platform like a podcast like this one? 

[00:05:40.910] – Ludmila Nunes 

And this study was conducted in the United States. So there’s a caveat here. It might be different in other countries. So regarding prevalence in the United States, what did you find about prevalence of this self relevant research? 

[00:05:56.610] – Andrew Devendorf 

Yes. So we found that more than half of clinical psychologists and graduate students have conducted this type of self relevant research. So the exact number is 55% of our respondents had previously or currently conduct self relevant research. And we actually saw that graduate students were more likely to report currently conducting doing self relevant research. Perhaps more interestingly and more for applied discussions about why this work is important, we found people from historically marginalized backgrounds were more likely to conduct self relevant research. So this includes people from sexual orientation, minority backgrounds, so people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual, people who are nonwhite are more likely to do self relevant research, and people who have reported a history of mental health difficulties, are more likely to do self relevant research. And so when we consider self relevant research in that context and that many of these researchers might use their identities and be inspired to use their experiences, it kind of raises the question of why we might be more likely to view those people as more biased or negatively for doing that self relevant research. 

[00:07:10.730] – Ludmila Nunes 

And this takes us to your second research question. How is this type of research seen by others? 

[00:07:17.680] – Andrew Devendorf 

Yes. And so after giving these participants these vignettes and asking them to respond, we found that respondents who were clinical counseling and school psychologists, they were more likely to stigmatize a self relevant researcher who studies mental illness topics such as depression or suicide or schizophrenia. They were more likely to stigmatize those researchers compared to a researcher who studies physical illness topics like cancer. And so that kind of gives an indication that there’s some paradoxical levels of stigma toward mental illness or the pursuit of that self relevant research in clinical psychology. And in our discussion, we kind of tackle why that’s relevant and can have negative repercussions for our field. 

[00:08:08.350] – Ludmila Nunes 

I want to know more about those repercussions and those implications. But I’m also interested, you mentioned that you had different scales to measure attitudes towards this type of research. And so you found that negative attitudes were more prevalent for self relevant research and researchers. But did you find any differences regarding the positive attitudes? Did you find any differences? 

[00:08:35.950] – Andrew Devendorf 

Yes. So we basically segmented our analyses by looking at if you have done self relevant research before, how do you perceive somebody who does self relevant research? And so we actually found an interaction effect in the sense that people who have done self relevant research were actually more likely to view the pursuit of self relevant research more positively and view those researchers as having maybe more insight, motivation, passion compared to non self relevant researchers. On the flip side, people who have not done self relevant research, they were more likely to stigmatize that hypothetical self relevant researcher. So they were more likely to view those people as biased, irresponsible, selfish. It’s more likely that they’re not okay with them talking openly about their experiences. However, regardless of whether or not somebody has conducted self relevant research, we found that our full sample of clinical and counseling in school, graduate students and faculty, they viewed people who do self relevant research on mental illness topics. More negatively compared to physical illness topics, whereas they also viewed people who do self relevant research on topics like cancer more positively on that strength space item scale. So if you have a self relevant researcher on cancer, our sample was more likely to view those people more positively and they were more likely to approve of those researchers talking openly about how their research connects to their personal experiences. 

[00:10:12.490] – Ludmila Nunes 

So you mentioned talking openly about doing this type of research. And what I’m curious about is whether people disclose that they’re doing this type of research. And if you have any information about the implications of disclosure, how people feel about disclosing this, definitely. 

[00:10:34.490] – Andrew Devendorf 

So in our study, we found that there are actually mixed attitudes about self relevant research in our field, and so there are risks and rewards to disclosing self relevant research. For example, professionally, if you’re applying to graduate school, you might be asked to write a personal statement to discuss how you became interested in a research topic or for faculty positions or for grants. There are these diversity statements in Psychology Now which ask people to discuss how they can contribute to diversity in the field. And so if there are these mixed attitudes out there, there can be real professional repercussions if somebody discloses on one of those applications and it’s viewed negatively. Similarly, if somebody doesn’t disclose and somebody else discloses, and the committee has a positive reaction, maybe it’s more likely that that person gets it. And so there’s not really clear guidance, and it puts people who do self relevant research in this precarious ambiguous situation. And so every year, when hundreds of people per graduate program apply, I think faculty reckon with these questions behind the scenes of how do you deal with this and how do you vet out applicants? And whether or not it’s professional or not. 

[00:11:51.800] – Andrew Devendorf 

I think one recommendation I always have is when you’re asking people to write a personal statement, kind of clarify what you’re looking for in that statement, maybe not even using the word personal in the statement. Say it’s like a professional statement. Because when you use the word personal, of course a lot of us think of a more personal story. So there are definitely concrete steps, and I don’t have all the answers. I still just think we’re at the step of people openly acknowledging that this topic is important and has relevance for who we’re recruiting and keeping in our field. And I just hope that there’s more research and open discussion about how to kind of reconcile that ambiguity. 

[00:12:32.110] – Ludmila Nunes 

And it makes sense, if we think about the type of research we all do, that we have to feel some personal motivation to pursue it, because that’s part of what creates curiosity about a topic. 

[00:12:45.270] – Andrew Devendorf 

Exactly. And I like how you said that, because there are some experiences that are so rare that you don’t have a lot of people studying those topics because they don’t have those personal connections. I mentioned Marshall Inahan as a key example. Marshall Inahan, in her book Building a Life Worth Living, talks about how nobody in research really knew how to deal with the mental health difficulties that she was experiencing, the urge to attempt suicide or to self harm or the emotional dysregulation and the patterns of those things. And it was because she had those personal experiences that she became more invested to help others get out of that very same situation and she could provide those very same insights. I want to go into one other example of another person I’m a fan of. I don’t believe she’s a clinical psychologist, but Nev Jones studies schizophrenia and she’s talked about how she will get frustrated when she sits in rooms with people talking about what a symptom of psychosis or hallucination looks like. And they don’t have those personal experiences to kind of inform their definitions of them or people incorporating those people with lived experience. 

[00:13:52.860] – Andrew Devendorf 

And so we can learn a lot by cultivating acceptance around researchers with lived experience in our field to tackle those questions that maybe aren’t as popular or people just aren’t able to identify with in the first place. 

[00:14:11.470] – Ludmila Nunes 

And specifically about mental health problems. I would like to tie this with other of your research in which you show that optimal well being and optimal functioning is possible after psychopathology. So to show that people can be perfectly functional after a diagnosis of mental health issue, definitely. 

[00:14:33.540] – Andrew Devendorf 

So I’m really happy that you kind of connected this thread on my work because my broader work seeks to reduce stigma towards mental health difficulties. And one way we can do that is combating messages or negative stereotypes. And so there are these stereotypes out there that if you have mental illness like depression, anxiety or even a personality disorder, you’re not able to function or succeed either in academia. But in this other line of research that you bring up, we actually find that there’s a substantial segment of people who have a history of a mental health problem like depression, anxiety or substance use disorder. And they can go on not just to recover from that mental health difficulty, but exhibit really high levels of thriving. 

[00:15:19.360] – Ludmila Nunes 

So the presence of a mental health issue should not be a stigmatizing factor for judging any researcher. 

[00:15:28.180] – Andrew Devendorf 

Obviously, I think it’s a dialectic in the sense that two things can be true. I think mental illness can be impairing and it is impairing. That’s how we define it. And that’s why people suffer and they seek help for it. And also just because somebody has that experience doesn’t mean that they can’t function professionally or they can’t get the help to eventually be able to function. But when we stigmatize mental illness, especially in academia, then people don’t talk about mental illness, then they can’t seek help for it, and then they can’t thrive in the long term. And so one reason why I’m really passionate about this work is because I’m trying to ignite these conversations that nobody is having. And I think it’s really hurting the well being of our field and who’s able to sustain and succeed in our field. That’s very competitive. It’s associated with high levels of burnout. And so I think silence begets silence, which begets stigma. And I think if we just have more open conversations, we can reduce the stigma and we can help people function and hopefully flourish long term. 

[00:16:32.990] – Ludmila Nunes 

Yeah, I completely agree. So you basically summarized the practical implications of this research that you’re conducting and its importance for the entire field. 

[00:16:43.250] – Andrew Devendorf 

I just hope people that if they have a negative association with me search, I just ask them to reflect on that bias and to ask themselves, what is the implication of having this bias and viewing these researchers so negatively? And I want people to imagine what clinical psychology would look like if we did stigmatize researchers with lived experience. We wouldn’t have people like Marsha Linnahan developing DBT. Thomas Joyner, a famous, renowned suicide prevention researcher, he’s talked openly about losing his dad to suicide. Or Steven Hinshaw has talked about how his own mental health experiences with stigma motivated him to want to study stigma. And so if we’re stigmatizing people with mental health difficulties or who do self relevant research, we are excluding very important voices who offer a lot of unique perspectives in our field. I want to caveat that by saying I’m not saying that we need to require people to have a lived experience. I’m just saying right now the pendulum seems to be on the side of stigmatizing this type of experience. And I think there just needs to be more balance that we get that true diversity of people with lived experiences and people without lived experiences tackling these important phenomena. 

[00:18:01.130] – Ludmila Nunes 

This is Ludmila Nunes with APS, and I’ve been speaking to Andrew Devendorf from the University of South Florida. Andrew, it was a pleasure speaking with you. 

[00:18:11.880] – Andrew Devendorf 

Thank you so much for having me. It was great. 

[00:18:14.970] – Ludmila Nunes 

If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. 

In an age of ChatGPT, computer algorithms and artificial intelligence are increasingly embedded in our lives, choosing the content we’re shown online, suggesting the music we hear and answering our questions.

These algorithms may be changing our world and behavior in ways we don’t fully understand, says psychologist and behavioral scientist Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Previously director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, he has conducted research over decades that has helped shape understanding of how people make choices when faced with uncertainty. 

I’m Shayla Love, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. We’ve been talking about love this week, and so far we’ve maintained a pretty basic assumption: that love is good, that love makes us happier. But does it? And if so, does it bring the same amount of happiness to everyone? 

…

Harry Reis: I’ve been studying relationships for about 40 years. 

Love: That’s Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. He told me that decades of work has found that partnered people are just, well, better off than un-partnered people.

As you move through the world, it’s inevitable that your way of seeing things won’t always align with the people around you. Maybe you disagree with the way your neighbor raises her kids, or find your brother’s politics to be troubling. But you may not realize how much your core beliefs shape your perception of the world. This week, we talk with psychologist Jer Clifton about how our beliefs shape our reality — and how we can use this knowledge to live happier and more harmonious lives.

Rational Choice in Context
Shlomi Sher, Craig R. M. McKenzie, Johannes Müller-Trede, and Lim Leong  

Human decisions are context dependent, violating classical norms of rational choice. However, these norms implicitly depend on assumptions that are often unrealistic, such as the assumption that information is constant across contexts. Sher and colleagues review recent evidence that some important context effects reflect dynamically coherent belief and preference updating in response to ecologically valid cues (embedded in frames, procedures, or menus) to which human decision makers can be highly sensitive. This evidence, which supports the idea that human decision makers are not mere puppets of the choice architecture, might foster a richer view of rational choice in context. 

The Nature and Nurture of Callous-Unemotional Traits
Luke W. Hyde & Hailey L. Dotterer

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, a risk factor for psychopathy, are usually found in youths with relatively low empathy and guilt and tend to identify youths with high risk for chronic and severe antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression). Hyde and Dotterer describe research identifying nature and nurture influences on the development of CU traits, indicating that this development might be influenced by nurture but is not solely a product of the environment. They also clarify the relationship between CU traits and psychopathy, highlight potential misinterpretations of findings on influences of “nature” versus “nurture,” and discuss treatment implications. 

Pride-and-Prejudice Perspectives of Marginalization Can Advance Science and Society
Tiffany N. Brannon

Research that conceptualizes marginalization as tied to pride and prejudice—or as simultaneously a source of strengths and stigma—is well positioned to address social problems and foster progress for science and society, Brannon writes. Focusing on marginalization associated with race-ethnicity, social class, refugee status, and gender identity and sexual orientation, the author highlights growing research that harnesses pride-and-prejudice perspectives to advance psychological theory and application linked to (a) inclusion among marginalized groups and (b) intergroup attitudes among more dominant or privileged groups. Brannon suggests policy directions that can foster inclusion and facilitate positive intergroup attitudes.   

Brain Reward Circuits Promote Stress Resilience and Health: Implications for Reward-Based Interventions
Janine M. Dutcher 

From the COVID-19 global pandemic to persistent racial injustice and the continued impact of climate change on communities across the globe, the past couple of years have demonstrated the need for a greater understanding of how to protect people from the negative consequences of stress. Dutcher outlines a perspective on how the brain’s reward system might be an important protective mechanism for stress outcomes. The author describes research suggesting that engagement of the reward system inhibits the stress response and is associated with improved health outcomes. 

Impacts of Learning One’s Own Genetic Susceptibility to Mental Disorders
Woo-kyoung Ahn and Annalise M. Perricone

Ahn and Perricone review the possible consequences of knowing one’s genetic susceptibility to mental disorders. Upon learning of elevated genetic risks for a mental disorder (e.g., depression), people may become more pessimistic and misremember their symptoms as being more serious. Why? Because they misconceive genes as immutable and defining of their identity. In contrast, upon learning that they are not genetically predisposed to a mental disorder (e.g., alcohol use disorder), people may underplay symptoms even when they experience them. The researchers suggest that further research should study ways in which genetic feedback can be misunderstood and redress genetic misconceptions. 

A Prosociality Paradox: How Miscalibrated Social Cognition Creates a Misplaced Barrier to Prosocial Action
Nicholas Epley, Amit Kumar, James Dungan, and Margaret Echelbarger

Behaving prosocially can increase well-being among both actors and recipients of prosocial acts, but failing to fully appreciate prosociality’s positive impact may discourage more prosocial behavior. Epley and colleagues review recent evidence suggesting that miscalibrated social cognition may create a psychological barrier that keeps people from behaving prosocially. That is, those performing prosocial actions tend to underestimate how positively their recipients will respond. These miscalibrated expectations result partly from a divergence in perspectives: Prosocial actors tend to focus on whether their actions are efficient, whereas recipients focus on the warmth conveyed by the actors’ actions.   
 
Related content from APS: suggested teaching plan and coverage of similar research by the authors.   

Metacognitive Myopia: A Major Obstacle on the Way to Rationality
Klaus Fiedler, Johannes Prager, and Linda McCaughey 

Metacognitive myopia, or poor quality control of memory and reasoning processes, can be a major obstacle to rational judgment and decision making. One example occurs when people consider samples of information and uncritically accept their validity when they make decisions. Fiedler and colleagues illustrate this phenomenon concerning biases (base-rate neglect, misattribution, perseverance). They explain why it is difficult to effectively monitor biases resulting from information sampling in an uncertain world and why the lack of volitional control over mental actions restricts the control function in metacognitive myopia.   

What Do We Know About Threat-Related Perceptual Decision Making?
Aprajita Mohanty, Frances Jin, and Tamara Sussman

People may detect threats faster and more accurately than nonthreats because of their salient features (e.g., bright colors in a venomous snake)—a bottom-up process. In the real world, however, threats are often encountered in familiar environments in which cues signal their arrival—a top-down process. In this review, Mohanty and colleagues review how psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms help people integrate information from threatening stimuli with prior knowledge from cues and surrounding contexts to guide their perceptual decision making. The researchers highlight some of the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms by which threat enhances perceptual decision making generally but impairs it when anxiety levels are high.   

Life Detection From Biological Motion
Nikolaus F. Troje and Dorita H. F. Chang  

Biological-motion point-light displays have been widely used to study both the information contained in life motion stimuli and the visual mechanisms that make use of it. Humans and other animals can use life, or biological, motion—the active movements of other living beings—to quickly identify the presence of other living beings. Troje and Change review recent research on behavioral, neurophysiological, and genetic aspects of life detection from biological motion and discuss its functional significance. Their review suggests that the visual mechanism that detects biological motion is present in early developmental stages and may lead to the maturation of an important tool for social perception later in life. 

How Children Develop Healthy Behavioral Choices to Promote Illness Prevention
Vanessa LoBue, Elizabeth Bonawitz, Lauren Leotti, and Nina Fefferman

When faced with the possibility of getting sick, children might learn adaptive behaviors and make healthy behavioral choices. LoBue and colleagues examine various theories regarding the pathways for acquisition of healthy behaviors by children, including rule-based learning, disgust, and causal knowledge. By examining these pathways’ strengths and weaknesses, the researchers develop recommendations for designing interventions aimed at teaching children about contagion and illness. They highlight the importance of understanding how children learn to use adaptive health behaviors in real-world situations for public health, potentially limiting disease spread in schools.  

The Development of Perpetration and Tolerance of Sexual Harassment
Christia Spears Brown and Sharla Biefeld

Why is sexual harassment of girls and women so common and widely tolerated? Brown and Biefeld provide an explanation using the bioecological theory of sexual harassment of girls. They discuss that perpetration and tolerance are built on a foundation of gendered socialization, media consumption, peer interactions, and permissive school environments that encourage girls’ passivity and objectification and boys’ aggressiveness and dominance. They outline how this process begins in infancy and continues throughout development, ultimately fostering an environment in which the sexual harassment of girls and women becomes usual and accepted.   

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Concert halls, movie theaters, and museums are home to a kaleidoscope of art forms, but one thing they all have in common is the potential to inspire feelings of awe. This humbling perspective has been shown to motivate adults to set aside their own problems to focus on the needs of others, and new research in Psychological Science suggests that awe can encourage generosity in children too. 

“Awe, an aesthetic and moral emotion, helps societies flourish by making children more generous,” wrote Eftychia Stamkou and colleagues Eddie Brummelman, Rohan Dunha, Milica Nikolic (University of Amsterdam), and Dacher Keltner (University of California, Berkeley). “Our research is the first to demonstrate that awe-eliciting art can spark prosociality in children, even encouraging them to donate tangible resources, and this effect concurs with physiological processes associated with social engagement.” 

Humans experience feelings of awe when we encounter a conceptually or physically vast entity that makes us feel small, humbling us by positioning our sense of self within a larger social context, Stamkou explained in an interview. Children have been found to develop a sense of self—an essential component of awe—by the time they are 5 years old, but until recently it was unclear how this might relate to their capacity to experience awe, she continued. 

Through their research, Stamkou and colleagues found that viewing scenes from awe-inspiring films can encourage children as young as 8 years old to prioritize other people’s well-being. 

In the first of two studies, Stamkou and colleagues had 159 online participants ages 8 to 13 years old view one of three film clips shown to elicit feelings of awe, joy, or neutrality in the researchers’ previous pilot studies. After viewing the video, participants reported how they were feeling and then completed two additional tasks. In the first task, the children were asked to count items in a spreadsheet to help determine what had been donated to a university food drive for local refugees. In the second task, the children were presented with the opportunity to donate their reward for completing the study—a ticket to a nearby museum—to a refugee family or to keep it for themselves. 

Children who watched the awe-inspiring video chose to count 50% more items for the food drive than children who watched the joy-inspiring clip and more than twice as many items as children who watched the neutral clip. Children in the awe-inspiring condition were also 2 to 3 times more likely to donate their museum tickets than children in the joyful or neutral conditions. 

“Children led to feel awe were more likely to forgo self-gain to help refugees,” Stamkou and colleagues wrote. 

In their second study, the researchers measured the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) of 384 children while they watched mood-inducing videos. RSA is a term for the way in which the vagus nerve, part of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), regulates our breathing and heart rate to covary with one another—for example, by simultaneously decreasing in response to meditation and increasing in response to going for a jog. 

Related research on prosocial behavior >

Unlike in the previous study, children who watched the awe-inspiring video did not count more items for the food drive than children in the joyful or neutral conditions. They were, however, significantly more likely to donate their reward for participating in the study to a food drive for refugee children. 

Children’s RSAs were also found to increase in response to the awe-inspiring video and to decrease in response to the joyful and neutral videos. These findings align with previous research with adult participants in which experiences of awe have been found to increase activity in the PNS, which supports emotion regulation and social engagement, Stamkou and colleagues observed. 

“These physical benefits of awe have downstream consequences on individuals’ social relationships,” the researchers wrote. 

The new findings not only demonstrate that children as young as 8 are able to experience awe, but that it may be possible to foster prosocial behavior in children by constructing more awe-inspiring environments, Stamkou explained. In future work, she plans to explore how physiological measures like RSA can be used to measure experiences of awe in even younger children. For example, a 1- or 2-year-old toddler may not be able to comprehend the concept of awe, but their responses to singing and music could be deeper than previously imagined, Stamkou suggested. 

Reference 

Stamkou, E., Brummelman, E., Dunham, R., Nikolic, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe sparks prosociality in children. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221150616  

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LEILA FADEL, HOST:

Here’s an enduring legacy. Pink Floyd’s album “Dark Side Of The Moon” was released 50 years ago today, and it’s still on the Billboard charts. It’s the longest charting album in history.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “BRAIN DAMAGE”)

PINK FLOYD: (Singing) And if the dam breaks open many years too soon, and if there is no room upon the hill.

FADEL: “Dark Side Of The Moon” can be enjoyed for its far-out sonic landscapes or its inventive production. You can also study the lyrics. Much of Roger Waters’ writing was inspired by a former member of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett. He was forced to leave the band he created when his behavior became too erratic. Some say it was a psychotic break.

PINK FLOYD: (Singing) The lunatic is in my head.

FADEL: Author and cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin is a Pink Floyd fan, and he studied these lyrics from a psychologist’s perspective. He joins us now.

How much do you remember about the past three years of pandemic life? How much have you already forgotten?

A lot has happened since the “Before Times.” Canceled proms, toilet paper shortages, nightly applause for health workers, new vaccines, waitlists for getting the first jab, and more.

Covid disrupted everyone’s lives, but it was truly life-changing for only a sizable subset of people: those who lost someone to covid, health-care workers, the immunocompromised or those who developed long covid, among others.

…

“This is a very fundamental memory phenomenon,” said Suparna Rajaram, psychology professor who researches the social transmission of memory at Stony Brook University. “Even for such salient emotional events and salient life-threatening events, that the more you have of it, the more you will have trouble capturing all of them.”

Misinformation can feel inescapable. Last summer a survey from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies found that 62 percent of people regularly notice false or misleading information online. And in a 2019 poll, almost nine in 10 people admitted to having fallen for fake news. Social psychologist Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge studies how and why people share such information and how it can be stopped. He spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas to discuss this work and his new book, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, which offers research-backed solutions to stem this spread.

In the ICPS 2023 opening keynote, Susan Michie (University College London) presented the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology.

AI and algorithms, sustainability and climate anxiety, individual agency and group stereotypes, active learning and productive failure—and those are just a few of the topics covered in day one alone of the 2023 International Convention of Psychological Science, underway now in the historical and cultural heart of Brussels.

From March 9 to 11, the event brings more than 1,500 psychological scientists from at least 70 countries to share integrative research drawing from psychological science, neuroscience, genetics, sociology, economics, linguistics, and related fields to advance scientific progress and societal well-being.

ICPS 2023 is the Association for Psychological Science’s fourth global convention focused on integrative research. Designed to surmount artificial disciplinary boundaries that can impede scientific progress and to highlight areas of investigation in which those boundaries have already been overcome, ICPS was held for the first time in 2015 in Amsterdam, with subsequent events in Vienna (2017) and Paris (2019).

In all, ICPS 2023 comprises three keynote addresses, six integrated science symposia, and dozens of workshops, symposia, and poster presentations across multiple subdisciplines, along with opportunities to network professionally, learn new research methods, and build practical skills.

Prefacing ICPS 2023 Thursday morning was the Teaching Institute, cosponsored by the APS Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science and the Society for the Teaching of Psychology. Manu Kapur, who directs the Future Learning Institute at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, kicked things off with insights on how, when, and why “productive failure” outperforms direct instruction in helping students learn novel concepts.

In other invited sessions and poster presentations, researchers discussed a wide variety of new research related to the teaching of psychology, including best practices for helping students identify misinformation and use self-control, new perspectives on disseminating psychological science via massive open online courses, and why student evaluations of teaching are “higher education’s highway to hell.”

The full ICPS program began Thursday afternoon with more than 30 sessions covering cutting-edge innovations (e.g., virtual reality-based mental health research), cross-cultural research (e.g., well-being and mental health around the world), and innovative methods and tools (e.g., for analyzing data from social networks). In one of the most popular sessions, attendees learned about advancements in person-centered methodologies in psychological research, chaired by Bart Wille (Ghent Universities) and Joeri Hofmans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).

Thursday evening was highlighted by the opening of the exhibit hall, the first of nine poster sessions presented by students and other researchers, and the “official” opening keynote featuring Susan Michie, director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London and a principal investigator on the Human Behaviour Change Project.

Introduced by APS President-Elect Wendy Wood (University of Southern California), Michie presented the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology, an ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration within the project that leverages advances in natural language processing and machine learning to largely automate the process of collating, synthesizing, and interpreting evidence from the vast and growing literature on behavior change intervention evaluations.

“Human behavior is at the heart of so many global challenges involving behavior change,” Michie said, citing examples such as pandemics and climate change. “And human behavior is at the heart of preventing and getting out of them.” But the existing evidence can be “messy,” hamstrung by inconsistent reporting guidelines and other factors, which “means slow accumulation of knowledge, when we desperately need fast accumulation. What’s the point of churning out all this research if we’re not making use of it?”

Over the course of six years, this ambitious project has brought together dozens of researchers—in teams from behavioral science, computer science, and systems architecture—to synthesize and organize those complex data sets into useful scientific insights. “We need to unpack the reasons for heterogeneity in intervention effectiveness,” Michie said. “And we want to be able to generate new, testable hypotheses.”

Stay tuned for much more coverage of ICPS 2023. Follow events in real-time on Twitter—@PsychScience, hashtag #icps23.

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment. Interested in writing for us? Read our contributor guidelines.

Imagine you’re back in high school — fluorescent lights humming, hard plastic chairs, a classroom stuffy with hormones and anxiety — and you’ve just aced a test. Do you think to yourself, “I guess I got lucky today?” Or does your internal monologue say, “Damn, I’m good!”?

Now imagine that you’ve failed the test. Does the voice inside you whisper: “Of course. You’re so bad at this.” Or does it say, “Ugh — you just didn’t study hard enough.”

And which of these responses might brand you as an optimist?

You might think, for example, that the first response — crediting luck for a good outcome — is a sign of optimism, since it suggests good times ahead. (After all, you’re lucky!) But the belief that a good result is thanks to elements out of your control actually indicates a pessimistic outlook.

And while the self-critical response to the bad outcome (you didn’t study hard enough) might seem like a downer, it’s actually a product of positive thinking — since it suggests you believe that, if you take a different approach to future tests, you can expect a better result.

…

Work contributes significantly to mental health. Based on everything from assignments and responsibilities to relationships with leaders and colleagues, work makes a difference in how people feel physically, cognitively and emotionally.

You can enhance your own mental health and your company can play a role as well by ensuring you have a sense of purpose, performing as well as you can and seeking opportunities for growth. But another way to nurture and sustain mental health is through something unexpected: gratitude.

You can foster gratitude for yourself, and organizations can cultivate cultures of gratitude—and these will have positive effects for people as well as for business.

Gratitude can be defined broadly in a few different ways. You can think of it as an overall attitude of appreciation or a way of being—a focus on what’s positive in life. Gratitude is also an emotion—when you feel thankful for a situation or toward someone for something they’ve done, for example. And gratitude is an expression as well—when you demonstrate your attitude or your feeling through actions and the things you say or do.

…

We humans seem to have an on-again, off-again relationship with facial hair.

Prehistoric cave drawings reveal the myriad tools our ancient ancestors used to shave: shark’s teeth, sharpened flints and even clam shells. Nowadays, beards are back in style and people are taking a razor to their brows, instead.

But is there a reason we evolved to have these hairy baubles in the first place? And, if so, what evolutionary advantage might we be throwing away for the sake of staying on trend? 

Turns out, researchers have a lot to say on the matter. Get their answers to why we have eyebrows, what eyelashes are for and why we grow beards.

…

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 Career Contributions joined Ludmila Nunes to talk about their research and careers. In this episode, the second of two, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Emily Fyfe, and Calvin Lai discussed reading and sharing minds, the development of learning and its practical applications, and the importance of studying the gap between what people value (for example, racial equality) and what people do (for instance, racial discrimination) and assessing and creating better diversity training for police officers. 

Read more here. 

Unedited transcript:

[00:00:11.970] – Ludmila Nunes

Every year since 2010, the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award has recognized a select group of APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science. Awards recipients reflect the best of the many new and cutting edge ideas coming from our most creative and promising investigators who together embody the future of psychological science. I am Ludmila Nunes, and this is Under the Cortex. In two special episodes of the podcast, I talk with the six awardees of the APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early career contributions about their remarkable research and careers thus far. In this episode, the second of two, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Emily Fyfe, and Calvin Lai join me to discuss reading and sharing minds, the development of learning at its practical applications and the importance of studying the gap between what people value and what people do, which may reflect implicit biases, as well as assessing and creating better diversity training for police officers.

[00:01:47.870] – Ludmila Nunes

I have with me Julian Jara-Ettinger, who is an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. He got his PhD in 2016 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And right now, in his computational Social Cognition lab, his team and himself study the computational basis of humans capacity to reason about each other’s minds, to share knowledge, to communicate, and to cooperate in order to achieve what no person can achieve alone. Thank you for talking to me, Julian. Welcome to under the cortex.

[00:02:23.720] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Thank you for having me.

[00:02:25.870] – Ludmila Nunes

So I would like to start by asking you, what can you tell us generally about your research? I know you use behavioral studies, which are more traditional experiments, and you combine those with mathematical models and even computer simulations to develop and test cognitive theories.

[00:02:44.490] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Yeah. So kind of at a very high level. I work in the field of social cognition, and you can think of it. Our long term goal is to understand human social intelligence. So that means studying how humans do all of these really complex things that it looks like only humans are able to do, right? So those are things like language. We can talk to other people, and we can do pretty sophisticated things like express sarcasm or be ironic or imply things indirectly. We can do things like moral reasoning where we can see how other people are acting, and we can decide if we think their behavior is okay or not. And we can do things like social learning, right. So most of the things that you know, you’ve learned from other people, and that’s one of the key capacities that allows humans to build these huge intergenerational bodies of knowledge and to create culture. So the way that we approach this problem is by trying to ask, well, what are the most basic capacities that humans have that allow us to do all of these things, to talk to other people, to think about moral reasoning or to share knowledge efficiently.

[00:03:45.840] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

And we think that one of these capacities is the ability to think about what other people are thinking, right? So when you think about it, is this kind of a crazy thing that we can simulate what’s happening in other people’s minds? And there’s the question of what is our brain doing when we have a simulation or, like, some kind of representation of another person’s mind? And so the way we approach that is by saying, well, it’s kind of difficult to have a good theory of how we think about other people’s thoughts. But one thing we can do is we can try to implement our theories as computational models and then run simulations and see if they start behaving in a human like way. So essentially, a lot of what we do is we have experiments that we run with humans, and then we also have computational models basically kind of participate in simplified forms of these experiments. And that way we can test if they start doing kind of like the things that we ultimately want to explain. So the use of computational modeling for us is a little bit of a tool to kind of, like, make sure that our theories are really well specified and to kind of probe them and figure out in which cases they work, in which cases they don’t.

[00:04:49.070] – Ludmila Nunes

Really interesting. And I know you work a lot with developmental theories and you’re looking at younger people to test these social cognition processes, right?

[00:05:03.150] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Yeah, that’s right. So the problem when you’re studying something like social cognition is that ultimately we want to explain how adults are able to develop these things. But the system is incredibly complicated. We just know so much about how other people’s minds works, and we use it in very sophisticated and rich ways. So one way to try to make this problem simpler is to ask, well, what are the parts of our social cognition that we learn from experience? Which are the parts that are affected by a culture and which are the parts that seem to be working very early in life? And we care about these parts that are working very early in life because we think that means that’s probably the core that we’re using to represent other minds. And also, it’s what we know that young children must be using when they’re learning all of the things that they learn, right? We know that a lot of very complex learning happens in early childhood. That’s why we’re learning languages and we’re learning so much about the world. So what we try to do is we use our computational models, try to break down these kind of complicated ideas into little components, and then we go and we try to test them in early childhood to try to figure out which parts are already working and which things don’t work yet.

[00:06:12.940] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

And that allows us to figure out which kinds of things even young children find very intuitive or what kind of sophisticated things they can do and which things might require a lot of experience and a lot of social interactions to develop.

[00:06:24.090] – Ludmila Nunes

So you can isolate what’s easily acquired and what has to be learned. And it’s learned through exposure to social interaction.

[00:06:32.150] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Yeah, that’s right. And we work often with preschoolers or four and five year olds, so sometimes we can also find things that as young as we go, we can’t find any evidence that they’re acquired. And so in that case, my work doesn’t speak to this directly, but then this opens research for people working in infancy to try to figure out if some of these capacities are even working in infants, which then pushes the question to asking how quickly are they acquired? Or is it possible that there are some constraints that when babies are born, they already have some types of social knowledge?

[00:07:05.430] – Ludmila Nunes

Really interesting. So I have to ask you, why did you start studying these social cognitive processes and using these methods? What sparked your interest in this?

[00:07:16.410] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

From the first time I learned about this field, the technical concept is theory of mind. And the idea that we can represent another person’s mind in our minds. It’s something that we technically do all the time. And I was kind of amazed that I had never explicitly thought about it. Right. We go throughout our lives and have time. We’re thinking about things like, oh, what does this other person want? Or what were they thinking? Or we’re thinking about the minds of our friends and of our families and our loved ones. And it had never occurred to me how much we do that. And when you think about it, it’s kind of a complicated process because we can’t actually see what’s happening in other people’s minds. But, Sampa, we’re really good at just getting a sense of, you know, people’s, maybe their facial expressions, their body language, how they behave, and even very subtle things like when someone’s talking to you and they pause for a little bit. We can use all of these cues to try to figure out what’s going on in the other person’s mind. And that’s just a very sophisticated ability. So it’s kind of like the first reason.

[00:08:14.350] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

I just think it’s fascinating. I would love to know the answer to this. The second one is just that I was interested in a lot of things. I was interested in language and moral reasoning and social learning. And I came to become convinced that ultimately, all of these things, it’s really hard to make progress in them unless you first try to solve the most basic question, which is what does it even mean to represent another person in social interactions?

[00:08:37.910] – Ludmila Nunes

Because the ability to be a mind reader kind of underlies all the language and all the communication, right?

[00:08:46.460] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Yeah, that’s right. We think so. There’s some debate, some things not everyone agrees, but that’s something we’ve been working on and trying to find cases where we think that it’s really hard to explain the data without accepting that we’re representing something about the other person’s mind.

[00:09:01.150] – Ludmila Nunes

And looking to the future. What are the main challenges that you see for this type of research?

[00:09:08.750] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

Yeah, so my field usually talks about this problem, as you call it yourself, mind reading. So the idea is that when we’re interacting with others, we really want to know what’s happening inside of their minds, and it’s our job to figure it out. But in reality, we’re often really motivated to make ourselves understood. It’s not a one directional problem. We also often want to make sure that people can understand their behavior and that they know what we’re thinking. So we think a whole other part of the puzzle might be something that you might call something like mind sharing, where we’re not just good at reading other people’s mental states, but we’re also good at knowing how to behave and how to move and how to talk in ways to make other people understand our mind more easily. So this is something that my graduate student, Amanda Royka, has been working a lot on and trying to explore what mechanisms we use for that. On the methodological side, I think one of the challenges is that, again, because social cognition is so complicated and so rich, to study it and figure out what are the key representations, we often need to simplify everything as much as we can.

[00:10:12.120] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

But then once you do that, there’s always a problem of asking, okay, if we can explain social behavior in some simple context, how can we push those theories back and explain how they work in the real world when it’s like, really messy in real time. And you’re walking around the street and there’s just people walking all over the place and you need to make rapid predictions and all these things. So I think that’s one of the key challenges trying to then distill our experimental work to very simple paradigms, but then bring them back to the real world and make sure they can explain real world social cognition.

[00:10:44.590] – Ludmila Nunes

And finally, I would just like to ask you if you have any advice for graduate students or other early career researchers, since you are clearly an example of success in this field and you’re doing this groundbreaking research.

[00:11:01.890] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

I think a lot of it is luck, but research, it becomes a very big part of your life because I think we have the privilege of thinking about really interesting problems, but then it’s really easy for the academic world to just take over in the stressful parts of publication and so on. So I think it’s always good to try to keep track of what are the parts of the scientific process that you really enjoy and try to find ways to maximize your time spending those things that you really like. The second advice, the way that I try to do my research is by constantly trying to think that whatever we come up with, there’s a very good chance that we’re wrong and we haven’t figured it out. And we try to have very explicit conversations in my lab of saying, well, here’s our theory. Let’s assume that it’s wrong, and eventually someone’s going to point out that it’s wrong. Let’s try to anticipate in what way is it wrong and what’s the next thing? So instead of getting two ties to our theories, we try to do some work and then assume that they’re wrong and try to figure out what’s going to be the next thing.

[00:12:02.060] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

That’s going to be a better theory than what we currently have.

[00:12:05.930] – Ludmila Nunes

That’s great advice, because, yes, we are testing theories not to prove that we are right, but we are trying to prove ourselves wrong and pushing our boundaries. Thank you so much for joining me.

[00:12:19.580] – Julian Jara-Ettinger

 Thank you for having me.

[00:12:32.050] – Ludmila Nunes

Emily Fyfe is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington. She received her PhD in 2015 from Vanderbilt University. Her research is primarily concerned with cognitive development, with an emphasis on how children think, learn, and solve problems in mathematics. She is also director of the Learning Education and Development Lab, which houses a team of researchers doing experimental research both in the laboratory settings and classroom settings on the science of learning and trying to help people to learn better. Emily, it’s my pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you so much for joining us at under the Cortex.

[00:13:18.760] – Emily Fyfe

I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:13:22.690] – Ludmila Nunes

I briefly mentioned and tried to describe your research, but I would like you to tell us more about it. What did we miss there?

[00:13:31.380] – Emily Fyfe

Yeah, I’m broadly interested in the science of learning, so doing experimental research to understand student cognition, so how they’re thinking about different problems and also things in our environment, whether that’s something the teacher does or something in the materials that can change that cognition, hopefully for the better to develop sort of deep and transferable knowledge. And we do this in lots of ways. I tend to work with children in sort of the early primary school years, so ages four to ten, but my work spans sort of the full developmental range where we do some work with older students and also with adults.

[00:14:09.430] – Ludmila Nunes

And you’ve done a lot of studies on the development of mathematical abilities.

[00:14:15.490] – Emily Fyfe

Yeah, so a lot of times in our lab, what we try to think about is a particular topic in mathematics and how children are thinking about it. So I collaborate with a large number of people, just as an example, on children’s understanding of the equal sign and not just children’s understanding. Actually, more recently, we’ve been asking adults the same question to think about what comes to mind, what do they associate with the equal sign. And so we’ve done all sorts of research to just document their understanding, find ways to improve their understanding, test theories that suggest why they might have misunderstandings. And so, yeah, the topics within mathematics, whether it’s the equal sign or patterns or more advanced algebra, really also drive the research questions in fun ways to think about how the specific topic might be changing the child’s or the students association. Yeah.

[00:15:11.010] – Ludmila Nunes

And I understand your research has a very strong applied value. Could you describe any important insights you got from your research that could be used in a classroom directly?

[00:15:24.050] – Emily Fyfe

Sure. So some of the work we’ve been doing more recently has been focused on children’s early patterning skills. So you can think of something really basic like red, red, blue, red, red, blue, what comes next? And I started this work in graduate school and sort of continued it here at IU in my current position. And what’s fascinating is we’ve been thinking about how children actually have a much greater capacity to do these tasks than we might have thought, especially a more challenging, complex way. So thinking about that red, blue, blue as a BB. So not only are we again documenting children’s knowledge of these topics early on, but actually this work has really important practical implications because there was sort of this big controversy over the math standards, especially in the United States, about whether patterns should be included or not. And in 2010, when the Common Core State Standards were rolled out, patterns were not included in the early grade. So kindergarteners and first graders were not encouraged to have to know something about those patterns. And the work that my group has been doing and and many other groups has sort of shown that, oh, actually, this basic skill really matters and is predicting lots of formal mathematics achievement.

[00:16:38.340] – Emily Fyfe

And so this work really has the grounds for shaking up some what we might call math standards or math policy to think about what it is that children should be focusing on in their early math classrooms.

[00:16:52.950] – Ludmila Nunes

There’s one article that you published in an APS journal Amps in 2021, in which you assess the generalizable effect of immediate feedback versus delayed feedback across many college classes. Many researchers come together to test a big question that in this case has an impact in the classroom. So you’re the lead author in this article, and I thought it was a really interesting one that shows exactly how you are testing something that we know that helps students. We know that giving feedback is always helpful, but there’s always the question, should we give this feedback immediately after they do a test or should we delay this feedback? And in this research, you show that this is difficult to analyze and might depend on the context, might depend on the course. There seems to be a slight benefit for delight feedback, if I understood correctly.

[00:17:50.330] – Emily Fyfe

Yes. So I’m so glad you brought up this paper because it’s one of my favorite projects to talk about because it covers so many parts of what I love about my job. So one, it really emphasized the team aspects of all the work that we do because it is a large group of researchers collaborating with a large group of teachers. So that part I love. And it also sort of epitomizes the methods that we use, where we can be experimental psychologists and rigorously test things, but in authentic classroom settings, which is not always easy to do. But yes, the third thing it does is epitomizes this sort of theory versus practice that we’re always trying to aim for. So thinking about what theories would suggest immediate feedback is better, or delayed feedback is better, but also in practice, what should we be telling instructors? And you are correct that the results were not quite as easy to interpret as we might like. There wasn’t sort of one large giant effect of this one was always better and this one was always better. But yes, you interpret it correctly. We did generally find trends that there are certain situations where delayed feedback might actually be more effective.

[00:19:00.350] – Emily Fyfe

And this was usually in the context of sort of quizzes or homework assignments done throughout these college courses. And so the question is, yes, I’m giving these, say I give a weekly quiz in my class, what should I be doing? And potentially with longer delays. So the longer you wait, so you give them the assignment and you wait to give them feedback until, say, I don’t know, five days later. It gives them a chance to really wrestle and think about that material for a second time. And so that’s one potential reason why that delayed feedback might be better. But yes, certainly this is always the case, but once we do one study, we always say, and now we need to do another one to really figure out when that delayed feedback is going to be more beneficial and in what types of classes.

[00:19:49.690] – Ludmila Nunes

And this is an article from 2021. So now I would like to ask you about your future projects.

[00:19:56.090] – Emily Fyfe

Yeah, so I am still in touch in collaboration with that sort of many classes team. And so we’ve been thinking about ideas for what sort of study strategies or learning techniques to test next. So that’s been going on particularly in heavy collaboration with my colleague here at IU, Ben Motes. So that’s one of the directions that my work is trying to do, is to keep expanding this mini classes methodology. And another big area that my team and I have been working on is this notion of early patterning skills and what in the world they’re tapping into. One of the questions we always get is what is it about patterns that seems so important? Is it just some sort of general skill that kids are getting, thinking about predicting things and structure? Or is it really specific to math. So those are two of the areas of work we’re doing. The third one I wanted to highlight is really driven by some of my students. And that’s always a fun thing, to have new ideas inspired by graduate students, but to think about not only performance based metrics of learning, but also sort of motivational and effective components.

[00:21:04.630] – Emily Fyfe

Right? So we’ve been doing a cool line of research on how feedback influences children’s problem solving, but coding things like how their facial expression and how they’re feeling when they get feedback and how they’re either motivated or not motivated to keep going. So those are some of the fun things that we’ve been working on more recently.

[00:21:24.970] – Ludmila Nunes

Super interesting. And finally, I just have one final question. Do you have any advice for grad students and maybe even undergrads who are trying to get into a research career?

[00:21:38.990] – Emily Fyfe

So my number one thing is that it’s always about these people. I feel like I got connected with some amazing researchers really early on, starting in my undergraduate experience. So getting into a research lab as an undergraduate student really did change the trajectory. I said, what is this job you have, and how do I get it? But all the way through having a really amazing graduate advisor and mentor, I did a one year postdoc and had a wonderful advisor there. Here at IU, I’m surrounded by colleagues who not only support me, but want to work with me and share ideas. And so, yeah, sometimes it’s more about the people you’re working with than the physical place you’re at or the name of the school. And of course, the other thing is always to find something that just really is fascinating to you. Right? So the more you love what you’re doing, the less it feels like work.

[00:22:32.050] – Ludmila Nunes

Emily, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

[00:22:36.100] – Emily Fyfe

It was wonderful. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:22:48.690] – Ludmila Nunes

I have with me Calvin Lai, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Calvin received his PhD in 2015 from the University of Virginia in his studies how people create, interpret, and maintain social group distinctions, focusing specifically on implicit biases, which are automatic or unconscious mental processes that end up creating a gap between what people value, for example, racial equality and what people actually do, like racial discrimination. He’s also involved in Project Implicit, which is a global project with scholars from around the world that tries to study what implicit biases people have and also educate the public about biases. Calvin, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:23:52.190] – Calvin Lai

It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:23:54.330] – Ludmila Nunes

Thank you. So you’re a recipient of the Spence Award, which means you are doing groundbreaking research. Can you tell us generally about your field of research? I already gave some hints, but I’m sure you can explain this way better.

[00:24:09.390] – Calvin Lai

Yeah. So the big thing that our lab is really interested in is taking all that we know about how prejudiced, stereotyping, and discrimination works and then trying to figure out how to develop interventions to prevent or at least mitigate discrimination in the real world. And so some of that has looked at trying to reduce these implicit biases as we swirl around in our minds, trying to educate people about the social science so that they’re less likely to discriminate, or just kind of getting people more motivated to kind of speak up when something racist or sexist happens.

[00:24:46.170] – Ludmila Nunes

And the great example of your work is a recently published article in Psychological Science Actually. It was published last week in which you and Jacqueline Liznick looked at the effectiveness of an implicit bias oriented diversity training on police officers beliefs, motivations, and actions. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that research?

[00:25:11.090] – Calvin Lai

Yes. So we partnered with a nonprofit called the AntiDefamation League, which trains kind of thousands of officers every year on diversity education. And we wanted to see if this program was doing what we would hope that it would do. That is changing what officers were thinking, what they’re feeling, what they’re motivated to do, and what they ended up doing. And we found that in some ways, the findings are completely unsurprising. If you teach people about bias and discrimination, they learn what you teach them. And so officers who took this particular diversity training were reporting belief in the existence of bias and the fact that it could personally affect them for at least one month later. But the kind of somewhat depressing fact that we found was that when it came to what they were actually reporting, that they were doing the job. So in these particular trainings, we teach them a bunch of evidence based strategies based on the social psychological literature. Officers were often reporting, yeah, I really want to do this. They have these kind of strong intentions to use these social psychological strategies after the training, immediately afterward. But when you looked one month later, there wasn’t that kind of follow through playing into this kind of classic problem in research and behavior change, that gap between what our intentions are and actually following through on our intentions.

[00:26:31.860] – Calvin Lai

Right. There’s a big difference between saying that you want to do something and then actually ending up doing it. And so that’s where we think a lot of the next research is headed how to close that gap between offices really being motivated, but not finding ways to kind of follow through in using some of these bias mitigation strategies.

[00:26:48.850] – Ludmila Nunes

And this intervention was a one day long intervention oriented specifically to implicit bias. Do you have any ideas about what might make an intervention more effective than these and maybe with results that last longer?

[00:27:06.310] – Calvin Lai

Yeah, so there’s a couple of things, and I’m going to focus on kind of themes that we saw that I think are going to be true for many forms of diversity training, whether you’re doing it with police officers, in companies, or even in academia. And so one big thing that we often see across industries is that a lot of times these diversity trainings are totally compartmentalized. Right. You get them annually, maybe through an HR module as part of required training, and then you don’t hear about it again for another year. And so even a really good training could die on the vine because there’s no additional reinforcement to help it persist. And so a kind of broad thing to kind of think about is how these trainings ought to be better integrated into the actions of the organization, that ideally, you would get these types of lessons in the training. It would be reinforced in promotion and evaluation, it would be reinforced from messaging from bosses and so on. Another thing that we thought a lot about was that oftentimes these trainings were not practical enough right. That they weren’t necessarily speaking to what you could do very concretely on the job.

[00:28:11.240] – Calvin Lai

And one of the things that we’re finding is that there might not be these great onesizefitsall solutions for combating bias at work that a lot of times we need to think very concretely and specifically about what are the types of places in your daily work activities where you may be discriminating and giving super tailored strategies for that specifically. So those are two things that we saw as potential rooms for improvement.

[00:28:32.350] – Ludmila Nunes

So basically, implicit biases have similar mechanisms in the same routes, let’s say in police officers as in academia. But those are two completely different contexts. So when we are trying to create strategies to actually reduce bias, those strategies are going to be different and we need interventions that are tailored to those different contexts, right?

[00:28:57.210] – Calvin Lai

Exactly. And I think this speaks to a classic cognitive educational psychology issue known as the inert knowledge problem. The things that you learn in one context often don’t generalize other contexts. And part of what’s going on is that you can learn some abstract knowledge, like here’s how prejudice works generally or here’s how people tend to discriminate. But oftentimes in teaching, we’re not given the specific tools to use them in our day to day work, whether it be teaching students or walking around on patrol.

[00:29:26.700] – Ludmila Nunes

Exactly. This is a fascinating field of research, but I’m guessing that sometimes you find challenges not only conducting this research because it seems that you’re applying it to real world settings, but also maybe how it is received. Do you want to tell us about that?

[00:29:45.050] – Calvin Lai

Yeah. So I think that particularly in the context that I’m working, within US. Policing, there’s a kind of double edged sword where, just like school districts in the US. You’ve got thousands and thousands of law enforcement agencies that have a lot of freedom in what they can do or they have a lot of flexibility. Right? So one. Major city department is going to be really different from another one. And that’s really great because there are all these places where we can test or experiment with new reforms, but it can also be a real struggle in terms of standardization and getting everyone up to speed about some of these kind of relatively straightforward best practices because it takes a lot of time for information to kind of diffuse and spread and convince people compared to, say, certain other types of government agencies or sectors where things are much more top down.

[00:30:37.450] – Ludmila Nunes

And do you have future plans for your research?

[00:30:41.450] – Calvin Lai

Yeah. So some of the things that we’re trying to do is to take some of these kind of hard lessons that we learned from this. What we thought at the time was a kind of best case scenario for training this kind of eight hour long training conducted by this major nonprofit and try to make it more practical, trying to kind of play with delivering these trainings over time, almost kind of like booster shots to help build some of these habits that might not really kind of stick around if you’re just giving one kind of intensive experience. So that’s some of what we’re trying to do now. We’re also trying to use stronger designs such as randomized controlled trials across many departments to really make sure that we’re also getting a generalisability.

[00:31:20.490] – Ludmila Nunes

And finally, I would just like to ask you if you have any advice you’d like to give to graduate students, to other researchers, early career folks like you.

[00:31:31.390] – Calvin Lai

I think that one piece of advice that at least has served me well is that if you have this ambitious idea or this is the kind of dream project that I want to run, don’t talk yourself out of doing it because you don’t think that you can do it right. Really kind of jump for it and then worry about paying the cost of how much work it will be later. And I think that served me really well where I’ll have these doubts about some really hard projects like this police diversity training stuff. And I’ll just kind of tell that nagging thought in my head to kind of shut up for a couple of months and just try to jump into it head first and learn as I go. Because I think that sometimes we can sell ourselves short by not doing the thing that we know is ambitious, important.

[00:32:15.370] – Ludmila Nunes

Thank you so much. It was great speaking with you. And yes, I hope we have you back into the podcast to talk more about your research.

[00:32:23.410] – Calvin Lai

It was a pleasure stopping by. Thank you.

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 Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions joined Ludmila Nunes to talk about their research and careers. In this episode, the first of two, Riana Elyse Anderson, Ed O’Brien, and Hengchen Dai discussed how to study and improve the well-being and functioning of Black families, the importance of time in how people perceive progress, and how fresh starts can feel motivating. 

Read more here.

Unedited transcript:

[00:00:11.650] – Ludmila Nunes

Psychological science research contributions can be transformative in various ways, such as by establishing new approaches or paradigms within a subfield of psychological science or developing or advancing boundary crossing research. Every year since 2010, the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award has recognized a select group of particularly creative and promising APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science. I am Ludmila Nunes and this is under the Cortex. In two special episodes of the podcast, I talk with the six awardees of the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for transformative early career contributions about their remarkable research and careers thus far. In this episode, Riana Elyse Anderson, Ed O’Brien, and Hengchen Dai join me to discuss how to study and improve the wellbeing and functioning of Black families, the importance of time in how people perceive progress, and how fresh starts can feel motivating.

[00:01:51.810] – Ludmila Nunes

I have with me Riana Elyse Anderson. She’s an assistant professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Health Education at University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. She is also a 2022 2023 fellow at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2015, she earned her PhD in Clinical and Community psychology at the University of Virginia. Her work uses mixed methods in clinical interventions to study racial discrimination and socialization in black families. So racial stress and trauma can be reduced and the psychological wellbeing and family functioning can be improved. Hi, Riana, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:38.530] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Thanks so much for having me.

[00:02:40.390] – Ludmila Nunes

So I described your trajectory somewhat and a little bit about your research, but can you talk to us about your current field of research and why you got the interest in this field?

[00:02:52.380] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Sure, and I love to actually take it back to me growing up in my childhood. And so anyone who’s met me knows that the word Detroit is a central part of my being. It’s where I was born and raised and where I returned to for the past four years at the University of Michigan and would make the commute to Ann Arbor. So Detroit is a place where we saw so much of the early racial flight. And what happens when you have tension among races within our urban space? What happens when sprawl occurs? What happens when folks leave out of communities and there is intentional disinvestment? So I grew up with that as my backdrop. So when I think about why I study racism today and why I think about the mental health and well being of folks of color, it’s because that was my backdrop. I grew up with it every day. And now I’m really committed to figuring out how can we have more equitable communities? How can the next Rihanna, who grows up in Detroit, see a place that is full of promise and is full of reward and strength based perspective rather than deficit or challenge?

[00:03:58.190] – Riana Elyse Anderson

So that’s what got me to this point. And what I’m working on now here at Stanford is an app for youth of color when they experience racism, to be able to go to this app, get knowledge, awareness, and skills to support themselves, and to be able to have conversations more competently with those caregivers around them.

[00:04:18.130] – Ludmila Nunes

And is this connected to the Embrace program that you run?

[00:04:23.240] – Riana Elyse Anderson

So embrace or engaging. Managing and bonding through race is a five session therapeutic intervention. So if we had all the time and all the resources in the world, or if someone is really requiring a higher level of care, we would ensure that they would have a program like Embrace to go to. But what we recognized, especially during the pandemic, was that folks needed very quick hands on resources, and often they didn’t have time to wait to see a clinician. Sometimes their parents didn’t have the answer. And more increasingly, as we’re seeing what’s going on with anti CRT initiatives, some of the people in classroom settings or in schools are unable, very literally, to talk to them about race. So we wanted to make sure that we had a resource that young people could access directly. So what we’ve learned from Embrace and studies around Embrace helped to inform a more rapid and applied approach in this application.

[00:05:19.430] – Ludmila Nunes

Yes, I think that’s really cool and interesting. So what main challenges do you see right now and in the future?

[00:05:27.190] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Yeah, well, the first week of March 2020, where IRB gave us the green light to go ahead in our community and do the work, and my team, who had been training for half the year, was ready to go into our Detroit neighborhoods, and then the subsequent week got the email that everything was being shut down. You’d never anticipate a global pandemic shutting your work down for years, but in that challenge comes opportunity and comes the ability to pivot. And that’s where we took our work directly to Zoom, and we said, how can we get our intervention online? All right, let’s get into the lab. Let’s figure out how to make this app so that we can give it to young people really quickly.

[00:06:06.890] – Ludmila Nunes

So it actually sounds to me that you turn this challenge into the opportunity to reach even more people beyond the specific community, because now you’re creating something that can be used globally.

[00:06:20.970] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Absolutely.

[00:06:22.730] – Ludmila Nunes

And do you have more exciting plans for the future? I know you’re focused in developing this app right now, but are you thinking long term what you’d like to be doing?

[00:06:32.110] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Oh, my gosh. That question is really a tough one, especially again, because in the development of a business, there is a beautiful balance that you have to strike. You have to say, let me find proof of concept on this thing that I’m doing right now. But then you see the world of opportunity beyond that. So, yes, we’re creating this app for just teens, but I work with family, so I definitely want to add a parent component. Another person on the team works with teachers, so we want to add that component. All of us are clinicians, so we want to be able to train clinicians more effectively in this work. So there’s so many other elements in this galaxy that we’re seeing beyond just the child that we want to build onto. So we certainly see the galaxy. It’s there. We want to be able to support young people in all of the spaces that they inhabit. And I think it’s going to be more important for me in this moment to say, let’s just focus on the youth. Let me make sure that this works, because that’s actually harder for me to do than to think about the future.

[00:07:31.900] – Ludmila Nunes

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Finally, I would like to ask you if you have any advice you would give to graduate students, other researchers, or in your case, even people looking into creating a business and translating these basic research into real world applications.

[00:07:50.230] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Absolutely. So you can’t think about the rewards inside of the A Academy. You can’t think about, to me, tenure as the goal. You have to set your North Star early on. You have to ask yourself, for whom am I doing this work? Why is this important? What are the outcomes that I want to see in the world? It requires a change from how a lot of us were trained to really stay super focused, to keep our head down, to only look at one small area of our work, and to write a paper to write this grant. But for me, that is not central. So I really just want to make sure. I’m going back to that story of Detroit that I talked about at the beginning. How can I ensure that the next generation of Detroiters are supported with love and with wholeness and with the best data that we have to support them? And by doing that, those other income of rewards within the system may come.

[00:08:54.650] – Ludmila Nunes

Thank you so much for joining me and speaking to our listeners.

[00:08:58.490] – Riana Elyse Anderson

Thank you.

[00:09:00.190] – Ludmila Nunes

So I have with me Riana Elyse Anderson, one of the Spence Awards recipients.

[00:09:16.750] – Ludmila Nunes

Ed O’Brien is an associate professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth’s School of Business. He was named an APS Rising Star in 2016, only two years after completing his PhD at the University of Michigan. His research examines the power of situations, specifically temporal contexts, over how people understand themselves and the social world. Current topics of interest include experienced enjoyment, time, use, and wellbeing, and differences in how people respond to improvement versus decline. He’s one of the Spence Awardees of this year, and it’s a pleasure to have Ed with us today. Welcome to Under the Cortex.

[00:10:01.880] – Ed O’Brien

Thank you so much, Ludmila. I appreciate it.

[00:10:04.130] – Ludmila Nunes

So I gave a very brief overview about your research topics but we would love to know more about what you’re interested in and what motivated these interests.

[00:10:14.850] – Ed O’Brien

Yes. So as you said, my background is in social psychology, and I kind of focus on social cognition, about temporal contexts. So I’m really interested in this idea of how people make sense of how they’ve changed over time, how somebody else has changed over time, how the world has changed over time. Have things gotten better? Have things gotten worse? I’m interested in this because there’s often not an obvious right answer. So for some matters of change, it’s just obvious and uncontroversial. When things have become different, like when January 1 comes, that’s when the new year happens. That’s kind of obvious. But a lot of those richer kind of changes in self and others, when somebody has reformed from a bad state to a good state, or are they officially happy or unhappy in their relationships, it’s really kind of a judgment call. And so I’m really interested in that judgment process, how people come up with answers and how those answers affect their behavior.

[00:11:08.710] – Ludmila Nunes

And what have you found in some of your research? Do these change over time? What factors are basically changing? How people make judgments and their memories, even, I would guess.

[00:11:20.380] – Ed O’Brien

Yeah, so the interesting thing I think, is people often come up with answers about how things have changed that are independent from the actual evidence. So you can show them evidence of happiness fluctuating or health fluctuating over time, and they do something else beyond just responding to the evidence. Like, okay, based on this, I think things are getting better or things are getting worse. There’s kind of other judgment processes at play. So, for example, one thing I found is people are really attuned to signs of decline versus improvement. So even if you kind of hold the objective quality of the evidence constant, people kind of dismiss the improvement side. They think, Well, I don’t think things are officially getting better just yet, but based on the same exact evidence, on the negative end, they’re quick to think, based on this, I think all hope is lost. Things are officially declining in a lasting way. Another thing I found is, again, that kind of influences behavior in interesting ways. So to the extent you think that things have officially declined even when they haven’t, you might prematurely give up. And that’s kind of a problem for present behavior if you think things have improved over time and that actually doesn’t track with reality, you might think, for example, I don’t need to invest resources in moving this thing along anymore, right?

[00:12:36.000] – Ed O’Brien

We’ve already fixed the problem, so we can worry about something else. If the problem is not actually fixed, that’s also going to create challenges.

[00:12:43.830] – Ludmila Nunes

Okay, so your research is really interesting, and recently there was an article you wrote in Psychological Science called Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress. People lump in these missimprovement efforts that fall short of categorical change despite improving. And this is kind of related to what you were explaining to us, right?

[00:13:06.520] – Ed O’Brien

Yeah, it’s another kind of form of that negativity dominance. The decline pops out to us faster than improvement. So there we found people often have good intentions in setting clear improvement goals. So we try to be concrete about how much better we need to get. So we set these goals. And one potential problem with that is when we work to improve or somebody else out there is working to improve towards that goal, when they fall short of that concrete mark, we often kind of dismiss it as it wasn’t worth it at all. Even when there are distinctions in how well you could still do under that goal, So some people could still have improved more than others, but when they all fall under the categorical threshold, we kind of dismiss them all as all the same. Again, another form of thinking. Things have declined greater to a greater degree than they might have.

[00:13:54.280] – Ludmila Nunes

And this has practical implications. When we think, for example, about attempts to eradicate major problems like climate change, when these attempts fail, or they seem to fail, people tend to dismiss the small but critical steps that could have helped address this problem. Right?

[00:14:14.180] – Ed O’Brien

Exactly. So when we miss a big target, which we might often do with these big important world changes that we’re working towards, we might not have the ideal goal met, but there’s still as important progress to be made. So there’s still distinctions in even if we miss the climate change goals that we have, we still want to live in a relatively better world than not. And the risk here is people kind of check out and they say, well, if we miss that main target, then what’s the point? The world is coming to an end anyway and that’s just not true. There’s still gradations there that we should work towards.

[00:14:45.530] – Ludmila Nunes

And looking to the future, do you see any major challenges with your research?

[00:14:52.830] – Ed O’Brien

Yeah, I mean, thinking about how people navigate their changing selves in a changing world, it’s a complicated story for people to figure out. One thing I think moving forward is how the role of technology could affect this process. Technology is amazing for lots of reasons. One thing it’s doing is it’s preserving our pasts in ways that are kind of unprecedented. So even thinking about the photos we share, the posts that we share, the videos that we share, it’s almost unprecedented in how much of that stuff is now going to live forever online, kind of bits and pieces of our past. On the one hand, you might think that could help people make sense of change. We have a good record of how we used to be and that should help us figure out moving forward how things have actually changed. On the other hand, I think this is going to present challenges because it often preserves only half the story. So ten years from now, you can look back on all of your past moments in very clear ways, but a lot of the context is gone. We only kind of remember bits and pieces, so certain things are going to live forever and certain things are kind of lost.

[00:15:56.840] – Ed O’Brien

And so I wonder how technology might end up causing other kinds of problems down the line and figuring out this change thing by making us think we know how we’ve changed over time. We’re kind of confident about that because of the past traces to a greater degree than warranted. Maybe it’s more confusing than we think, seeing that, like smiling vacation photo from ten years ago. We think, well, we must have been so happy back then, but it’s missing all of the unhappy contexts that might have actually been back then.

[00:16:23.600] – Ludmila Nunes

Yeah, really interesting to study in the future. Ed, it was great speaking with you. Thank you so much for your time.

[00:16:31.570] – Ed O’Brien

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

[00:16:43.570] – Ludmila Nunes

Hengchen Dai received her PhD in 2015 from the Wharton School, university of Pennsylvania. She’s currently an associate professor of management and organizations and behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research has made key contributions to our understanding of what motivates behavior change, and she has also identified important factors that shape motivation and self control. From the policy perspective. Her work seeks to understand the effects of managerial interventions beyond their immediate impact. So what are the longlasting effects of these managerial interventions and what are their positive and negative effects? Hengchen, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome to under the cartex.

[00:17:39.490] – Hengchen Dai

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

[00:17:42.290] – Ludmila Nunes

So I’m very interested in your research. I already gave some hints to our listeners about what you study, but I really want you to talk about the fresh start effect and your research in general.

[00:17:56.630] – Hengchen Dai

So in general, my research looks at factors that shape individuals motivation and self control capacity. I take three angles to understand motivational factors. The first one is the interpersonal angle. I try to understand when people would have higher motivation than usual and when their motivation would come and go. And then the second angle is more social, just to understand what are the social forces that shape motivation. And the third angle is about policy. It’s about how we can design interventions to change people’s motivations so they would engage in behavior that would be beneficial for themselves in the long run and will be beneficial for the society. In terms of the fresh start effect. That fits into the first angle where I look at the interpersonal conflict when people have to decide whether to do something that’s beneficial for the long term, such as eating healthy food and exercising versus doing something that’s more fun and easy in the moment, such as eating delicious but unhealthy snack or sitting on the couch and watching TV. And the First Story Effect identifies situational factors that would make people more or less motivated to pursue their goals. In particular, I find that at the beginning of a new time period, such as the beginning of a new year, new month, a new week, new season, or for students, would be the beginning of a new school year, people experience greater than usual motivation to pursue their personal and professional goals.

[00:19:32.690] – Hengchen Dai

And partly it is because people now feel psychologically distinct from the past self. So the past itself may fail to pursue the goal that’s the old me, I’m different now. I have a change this time. I can do better. And that type of old me and new me contrast and the psychology that I’m different now partially can motivate people to pursue their goals even though they have failed in the past. And another reason that First Story Effect may exist is the beginning of a time period may also be associated with bigger picture thinking. People tend to take a step back and review their progress and think about goals that are worthwhile pursuing. So both psychological process self efficacy, the contrast with pastel and flash, the big picture thinking, may contribute to the elevated motivation people experience at the beginning of a new time period.

[00:20:32.330] – Ludmila Nunes

So could this Fresh Start effect be used artificially induced with interventions to make actually people become more motivated to pursue behavioral change?

[00:20:44.590] – Hengchen Dai

That’s a great question. Something that we have tried is to highlight the salience of Fresh Start moment, especially moments that people may not naturally think about. So, for example, in the lab, we actually highlight a future date as either the first day of spring or the third March. Sorry, either the first day of spring or the third Thursday in March, and it’s actually the identical day. But we label it differently. And people do not automatically naturally think about a given day as Spree Aginox. So by highlighting it, we actually make it silly to them that this is the beginning of a new season and we see elevated interest in beginning pursuing goals on that day if we frame it as Spring Aginox on the first day of Spring. And also in the field, we conducted an experiment in collaboration with four universities involving thousands of employees, and we encourage them to sign up for retirement savings plans. And there we also manipulated whether or not a future date was framed as just a few months later, like a random day a few months later, or framed as after the first day of Spring. And we also find that people are more motivated to sign up to save after a future date that is associated with the first of Spring than that is associated with an ordinary day in a few months.

[00:22:21.070] – Ludmila Nunes

Do you want to tell us about any projects you’re currently working on or your future plans for research?

[00:22:28.830] – Hengchen Dai

Yeah. So Fresh Start Effective represents a lot of work that I have had since I was a PhD student. But actually my current work looks at more broadly how to design behavioral interventions to change people’s motivations. So it goes beyond the fresh start effect. And some of my recent interest is in understanding the reproducibility and scalability of behavioral interventions. Sometimes we see that a promising intervention that is identified by some scholars fails to generate the same effect, either failed to produce statistically significant results or failed to produce failed to produce any effects of a similar magnitude as the prior research. And that is puzzling. And that discrepancy we observe across studies may lead some people to question the value of behavioral science for policymakers. And the perspective I’ve been taking in my recent research is that it’s less about whether behavioral interventions work, it’s about when it works, among whom, and on what type of outcome measures. So in some of my recent research, I try to systematically understand how the effectiveness of behavioral interventions varies with the way we assess. The efficacy varies with the baseline motivation of the subpopulation that we are examining and it also varies with the psychological construe of the population we’re examining.

[00:24:06.650] – Hengchen Dai

Right? So how people actually infer the design, how people actually interpret why certain interventions are implemented and that inferences could influence people’s response to the intervention. So I’m taking a more holistic approach to understand when behavioral interventions would work, what outcome measure for what individual, in what context, versus it may fail, even though it’s basically the same behavioral intervention.

[00:24:41.850] – Ludmila Nunes

So basically the variables that might determine whether an intervention fails or is successful.

[00:24:49.220] – Hengchen Dai

That’s a great succinct way to explain what I’m excited about.

[00:24:53.550] – Ludmila Nunes

That’s great. Do you think that you’re going to encounter challenges to this type of research in the future? Or if you want to tell us about any challenges you’ve been encountering?

[00:25:09.410] – Hengchen Dai

I think for this line of work you do need a multi method approach with a particular emphasis on field experiment. Because for behavioral science to actually inform policy, I think it’s important for us to test the robustness of evidence in the field rather than just from online experiments or using evidence from laboratory experiments. As a result, it’s always going to be a challenge. But it’s also exciting undertake for me to look for field partners who would be willing to test different behavioral interventions in their field context across policy relevant behaviors. And also I need to have large scale field experiment in order to have rich data about individual members so I can conduct a nuanced analysis about heterogeneous responses to my intervention. And my hope is to generate some sort of framework that allow us to better predict when people would respond better to an intervention. And that does require that I have reached data sets at an individual level so that combination like both field experiments and large scale and access to reach individual level data would be a challenge. But again, I think it’s a very exciting undertake. And also, how can we go from those idiosyncratic heterogeneous treatment effects to actually synthesize a framework?

[00:26:39.190] – Hengchen Dai

That’s another challenge. But again, I think that would be a way for me to make a key contribution, is to go beyond heterogeneous treatment effect that I have been idiosyncratically documented in prior research and then try to synthesize a more coherent framework to predict those sources of heterogeneity and can.

[00:26:58.810] – Ludmila Nunes

Be very helpful for any type of interventions across fields, I’m sure.

[00:27:03.860] – Hengchen Dai

Totally. And in order to test the genius ability, ideally I would actually apply the framework in different field context.

[00:27:11.530] – Ludmila Nunes

Finally, I just want to ask you if you can give some advice to graduate students, or even undergraduate students about how to create a successful and impactful line of research.

[00:27:27.230] – Hengchen Dai

I think my number one suggestion would be tenacity. I was told when I was first year students that tenacity is probably the number one important quality for a great researcher. And I personally have experienced the value of tennisity, and in particular, when you want to conduct a field experiments, it does require that you try many times, so many times in terms of convincing a field partner to run experiments and actually successfully launching a field experiments. And I think in order to do impactful work, obviously, I don’t think doing impactful work can only be achieved in the field, but at least for the type of research I do, field work is important, but it’s also high risk and it requires persistence. And be willing to open yourself up to many field partners and eventually expecting only one or two would actually work. And that require just try an error persistence. So that’s one thing that I really want to highlight.

[00:28:31.810] – Ludmila Nunes

Henshaw, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It was great having you.

[00:28:38.550] – Hengchen Dai

Thank you. Thank you for your time.

What explains persistent racial disparities in policing, despite police departments’ repeated investments in bias-training programs? A wide range of data indicate that police in the United States tend to stop, arrest, injure, or kill more Black people than White people. Calvin K. Lai (Washington University in St. Louis) and Jaclyn A. Lisnek (University of Virginia) analyzed the effectiveness of a day-long implicit-bias-oriented diversity training session designed to increase U.S. police officers’ knowledge of bias, concerns about bias, and use of evidence-based strategies to mitigate bias. Their findings, recently published in Psychological Science, suggest that “diversity trainings as they are currently practiced are unlikely to change police behavior.” 

Immediately after these trainings, police officers have strong intentions to use the strategies they’ve learned, explained Lai in a forthcoming interview on Under the Cortex, the APS podcast. But “one month later there wasn’t that kind of follow through.” 

In 2020 and 2021, Lai and Lisnek evaluated 251 training sessions (in-person or remote) in which 24 different educators taught the Managing Bias program—developed by the Anti-Defamation League to reduce the influence of biases in the behaviors of police officers, improve the relationship between the community and the police, and increase safety—to different police departments with a history of Black–White racial disparities in policing. This day-long training consists of an interactive workshop, led by two educators, that uses activities to educate officers about the origins and differences between explicit and implicit bias, how biases may affect their behavior, and gaps in understanding between police and the community. After learning about biases, officers were trained on strategies and skills to reduce biased behavior.  

Lai, a recipient of the APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Early Career Contributions, and Lisnek surveyed police officers immediately before the training to establish a baseline, assessing knowledge and concern about bias, usage of strategies to manage bias, and characteristics relevant to police training (e.g., centrality of police identity, expectations of respect from community members). A second survey, administered immediately after the training, evaluated knowledge and concern about bias plus the intention to use the strategies to manage bias.  

Results indicated that before the training, officers showed low understanding of and concern about bias, but the training immediately increased their knowledge and concern about bias. Right after the training, officers reported feeling empowered and motivated to use the strategies they learned to manage bias. However, another survey one month later found that officers’ concerns about bias had returned to pre-intervention levels and their use of these strategies had declined compared with their reported intentions immediately after training. Nevertheless, their general understanding of biases remained as high as immediately after the training. 

Future research, Lai said, will attempt “to close that gap between officers really being motivated but not finding ways to follow through using some of these bias mitigation strategies.”  

The researchers also identified characteristics of diversity training that might affect its efficacy. For instance, previous literature has suggested embedding such efforts with other organizational initiatives, having managers reinforce them, and evaluating expected behavior as a part of job performance. The training examined in this study was implemented and administered by an external organization. Adding booster sessions instead of a one-and-done training model could also increase effectiveness, Lai and Lisnek said.  

Finally, the strategies taught could have had low applicability outside of a lab in real-world policing, another factor that can also undermine training effectiveness. “One of the things we’re finding is that there might not be these great one-size-fits-all solutions for combating bias at work,” said Lai. It may be necessary “to think very concretely and specifically” about the daily work activities where police officers may be inclined to discriminate—and then provide “super-tailored strategies” to mitigate those behaviors. 

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Reference  

Lai, C. K., & Lisnek, J. A. (2023). The impact of implicit-bias-oriented diversity training on police officers’ beliefs, motivations, and actions. Psychological Science. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976221150617 

Climate Change and Substance-Use Behaviors: A Risk-Pathways Framework
Francis Vergunst, Helen L. Berry. Kelton Minor, and Nicholas Chadi  

Vergunst and colleagues suggest that climate change could increase harmful substance use through five pathways: psychosocial stress arising from the destabilization of social, environmental, economic, and geopolitical support systems; increased rates of mental disorders; increased physical-health burden; incremental harmful changes to established behavior patterns; and worry about the dangers of unchecked climate change. Also, young people appear to face disproportionate risks because of their high vulnerability to mental-health problems and substance-use disorders and greater number of life years ahead in which to be exposed to current and worsening climate change.   

Improving the Generalizability of Behavioral Science by Using Reality Checks: A Tool for Assessing Heterogeneity in Participants’ Consumership of Study Stimuli
Evan Polman and Sam J. Maglio

How to more effectively test effects in psychology when a study’s scenarios and decisions are particularly relevant to participants in their lives outside the lab? By measuring (and creating) mundane realism, Polman and Maglio suggest. An experiment is said to have mundane realism if its stimuli are familiar to . Polman and Maglio propose that stimuli will vary in their relevance to experiment participants (for instance, based on how much they consume the stimuli outside the lab) and can be assessed using reality checks. They found that accounting for a study’s mundane realism can significantly alter a study’s results. 

Clinical Psychologists as T-Shaped Professionals
Michael Vriesman et al.

Clinical psychologists often work within multidisciplinary teams and in settings outside of traditional mental health. To be competent and effective in these contexts, clinical psychologists could benefit from skills outside of psychology. The T-shaped training model allows individuals to simultaneously acquire the depth of knowledge required for their discipline (e.g., assessment, intervention, supervision) and the breadth required to work effectively in multidisciplinary contexts (e.g., by including training in areas such as medicine, public health, and computer science).   

An Ethics and Social-Justice Approach to Collecting and Using Demographic Data for Psychological Researchers
Christine C. Call et al.

The collection and use of demographic data in psychological sciences has the potential to aid in eliminating inequities brought about by unjust social conditions, Call and colleagues propose. Although some methods now used reduce others may perpetuate harmful stereotypes, invalidate minoritized identities, and exclude key groups from research participation or access to disseminated findings. To help stakeholders in psychology make ethical and socially-just decisions about the collection, analysis, reporting, interpretation, and dissemination of demographic data, Call and colleagues review ethical and social-justice dilemmas inherent to working with demographic data and introduce a framework positioned in ethics and social justice. 

A Review of Multisite Replication Projects in Social Psychology: Is It Viable to Sustain Any Confidence in Social Psychology’s Knowledge Base?
Roy F. Baumeister, Dianne M. Tice, and Brad J. Bushman

Baumeister and colleagues reviewed all 36 multisite social-psychology replications and three articles reporting multiple ministudies. Four of the 36 (11%) provided support for the original hypothesis, and five (14%) had mixed results. The remaining 27 (75%) did not support the original hypothesis. Baumeister and colleagues assessed the evidence for multiple explanations for the generally poor replication record. Besides evidence for the possibility that the original hypothesis was wrong, they also found evidence for operational failure, low participant engagement, and bias toward failure. Low engagement emerged as a widespread problem, reflected in high rates of discarded data and weak manipulation checks. The researchers offer recommendations for improving future multisite projects. 

Threshold Resistance: Adding a Historical Perspective to Hodson’s (2021) Observations on the “Microaggressions Pushback”
Keon West 

In 2021, Hodson identified three trends in psychological science that are coinciding with the academic pushback against research on microaggressions. Concept-creep is the idea that racism once referred to a real problem but now refers to insignificant things. The expansion of right-leaning values in moral judgments is known as moral foundations theory. And an emphasis on prejudice symmetry says the political left is as biased against right-leaning targets (e.g., the rich, police) as the right is against left-leaning targets (e.g., Black people, women, LGBT+ people). Here, West expands on Hodson’s view by situating the current microaggressions pushback within a repeating historical context: research into subtle forms of prejudice followed by pushback that uses very similar, if not the same, arguments to undermine that research. 

Clarifying Eudaimonia and Psychological Functioning to Complement Evaluative and Experiential Well-Being: Why Basic Psychological Needs Should Be Measured in National Accounts of Well-Being
Frank Martela and Richard M. Ryan

The measurement of well-being at a national level usually includes three separate dimensions: evaluative well-being, experiential well-being, and eudaimonia. Whereas there are relatively standard ways to measure the first two dimensions, the third category lacks consensus on how to define and operationalize it. Martela and Ryan propose that eudaimonia should focus on psychological functioning and the identification of key psychological factors humans need to live well, such as the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Among the basic psychological needs, the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness have received broad empirical support. Being able to measure them might improve understanding of citizens’ well-being. 

The Role of Subjective Expectations for Exhaustion and Recovery: The Sample Case of Work and Leisure
Victoria Schüttengruber and Alexandra M. Freund

Schüttengruber and Freund propose a new model of exhaustion and recovery that posits that people evaluate an activity as exhausting or recovering on the basis of their subjective expectation about the activity. The researchers assume that an activity related to a life domain associated with exhaustion (e.g., work) leads people to monitor their experiences and selectively attend to signs of—and thus to experience—exhaustion. In contrast, an activity related to a life domain associated with recovery (e.g., leisure) leads people to preferentially process signs of—and thus to experience—recovery.   

A New Way to Think About Internal and External Validity
David Trafimow  

Trafimow proposes that there are more and less important ways in which researchers can interpret internal and external validity, and these can be integrated with a taxonomy that includes theoretical, auxiliary, statistical, and inferential assumptions (TASI taxonomy). The integration suggests that an internal–external validity trade-off is false for more important ways of internal and external validity. Instead, internal and external validity increase or decrease together when there is an emphasis on underlying theories. The integration also implies the desirability of some changes in typical research advice and practice. 

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Deaf homesigner from Guatemala, © The Author(s) 2023.

Languages may seem different on an instinctual level—“hello,” for example, does not sound like “ni hao.” But the work of many psychological scientists suggests that the thousands of languages spoken throughout the world draw on many of the same fundamental linguistic abilities and reflect universal aspects of how humans categorize events. Some aspects of language may also be universal to people who create their own sign languages, according to new research in Psychological Science. The researchers compared how young homesigners—deaf children without access to an established sign language—and English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking adults describe the use of tools such as paintbrushes and knives. 

“We found broad similarities across these groups, indicating ways of thinking about the world—and describing the world through language—that are common to all people,” wrote researchers Lilia Rissman, Laura Horton (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and APS William James Award recipient and former APS President Susan Goldin-Meadow (The University of Chicago). “These results help us understand which aspects of our thinking and communication are a product of being human rather than a product of our particular cultures and experiences.” 

Most children learn to speak their first language through immersion in the linguistic culture around them, but this is not the case for deaf children without access to an established sign language. 

”[Deaf homesigners] give us a unique window into this question of ‘are there universals for how people use language to talk about ideas,’” said Rissman in an interview. That’s “because homesigners are creating language from the ground up through their gestures; they aren’t learning an established linguistic system from a community.” Rissman and colleagues dug deeper into the universal constraints on language by comparing the tool-related language use of 43 hearing adult speakers of Chinese, Spanish, and English and 10 deaf homesigners ages 3 to 11 from Guatemala, Nicaragua, the United States, Taiwan, and Turkey.  

Because there are relatively few children with these unique circumstances, it took Rissman and colleagues several decades to collect data from the homesigning children. Each child was filmed during one to four sessions while looking at a picture book with a researcher, family member, or friend and being asked to describe what was happening in different scenes using their own version of homesign. The illustrations included images of tool events, such as a pig painting and a rabbit cutting fruit, as well as stand-alone images of tools like paintbrushes and knives that were not being used. 

Upon reviewing the footage, the researchers coded the homesign for each tool-related action or object according to whether it was an instrumental sign that reflected the shape of the tool, a handling sign that reflected the shape of the hand holding the tool, or an ambiguous sign.  

A group of 24 online participants were also tasked with judging how well, on a scale of 1 to 5, the instrumental signs most commonly used by the deaf children to describe each event reflected the shape of the tool being used. For events that the children described with handling signs, the participants were asked to rate instrumental signs from various global sign languages. 

The English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking adults completed a similar task online in which they were asked to describe what was happening in the tool-event images and, for the images of stand-alone tools, to indicate the action most commonly associated with each tool. A separate set of online reviewers fluent in each language judged the verbs the participants used in their descriptions to determine if the verbs used highlighted the tool or the action in question. For example, 97% of English-speaking online respondents perceived “cut” as tool-oriented because of its close association with tools like scissors and knives. But just 3% of online reviewers had this perception of the more general verb “make,” which any number of tools (or none at all) can do. 

Overall, Rissman and colleagues found that when online reviewers perceived the verbs that English, Spanish, and Chinese-speaking participants used to describe an event as more tool-oriented, the homesigning children were also likelier to use instrumental signs to describe the same actions. 

“This correspondence suggests universal constraints on the interface between conceptual event knowledge and language because we observed this common pattern across children and adults, across different cultures, and across individuals who had learned a conventional language from birth and individuals who had not,” the researchers wrote. 

On the other hand, when describing stand-alone images of tools, hearing participants’ use of tool-oriented verbs did not predict deaf children’s use of instrumental signs. This suggests that these findings are specific to universal constraints on how humans describe tool-use events, not tools in general, Rissman and colleagues wrote. 

Similarities in how people describe tool-use events may reflect the extent to which a tool is perceived to “mold” the object it is being used on, such as when a shovel leaves a similarly shaped indent in the ground, the researchers suggested.  

In future work, Rissman would like to explore the extent to which universal constraints on how people describe tool use may influence the perception and recall of those events.   

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Reference 

Rissman, L., Horton, L., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2023). Universal constraints on linguistic event categories: A cross-cultural study of child homesign. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221140328  

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