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The Rare Disease That Stops People From Feeling Fear
Imagine jumping out of an aeroplane and feeling nothing. No rush of adrenaline, or quickening heartbeat. ... "In that situation, SM and other individuals with amygdala damage will go nose-to-nose with relatively unfamiliar experimenters, which is something that healthy control participants with an intact amygdala would essentially never do," says Alexander Shackman, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, US. The finding suggests that the amygdala may play a role in organising how we respond to the social world.
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Exposure to Bright Light Can Help Fend Off Winter Blues. The Time to Start Is Now
Our bodies can be quite sensitive to changes in daylight because we rely on it to regulate our circadian rhythms and our sleep-wake patterns. And because our internal body clocks don't keep a perfect 24-hour cycle, the master clock in our brains needs a daily reset. "Light through the eyes" is the cue for the reset, explains Michael Terman, a retired professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University. That's why exposure to morning light is so important. "What we are doing is resetting that drifting circadian clock to synchronize with the outdoor world," Terman explains.
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APS Comments on U.S. Government Shutdown and Science
Read APS President-Elect Pam Davis-Kean’s full statement on the potential government shutdown.
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Good Conversations Don’t Require Everybody to Agree, Neuroscience Shows
... All of this work hints that our interactions might be more harmonious if we were more in sync with one another. But evidence from a new technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) hyperscanning, which can track brain activity during real conversations, complicates that idea. This method is exciting because it allows researchers to observe two brains in action at the same time. With hyperscanning, we can see how people’s brains respond to one another during real-time conversation.
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Is Overconfidence Avoidable?
New research examines overconfidence among tournament chess players to investigate if it is prevalent in an environment that should discourage it.
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Member Townhall 3: Bylaws and Your Future APS
Friday, October 3, 2025, 1:00 p.m. ET (17:00 UTC) The Association for Psychological Science is engaged in an organization-wide effort to modernize and improve how we serve psychological scientists and continue to advance psychological science around the world in the years ahead. One part of this effort is to review and update our bylaws, which have not fundamentally changed since our founding in 1988. The Board of Directors, with input from past presidents and board members, current and past committee members and journal editors, and staff, are proposing these new bylaws. The Board of Directors invites additional comments and feedback from all APS members.
