Over the course of one’s life, hormonal changes alter behavior, mood, and cognition. Bruce McEwen has spent more than 40 years studying how hormones regulate the brain and nervous system, and his lab helped draw distinctions between the vital and toxic forms of stress. McEwen coined the term allostatic load More
Unconscious biases toward African Americans still produce major inequities in the criminal justice system. Using statistical analyses, Jennifer Eberhardt has documented how racially coded features, such as a defendant’s skin color and hair texture, influence jurors’ decisions and the sentences that judges hand down. For example, she’s shown that jurors More
People tend to proceed through life trying to act their age. But the pioneering research of Ellen Langer suggests that adopting the attitude of a younger person may actually have health benefits. In a classic 1981 study, she had old men live in a retreat that was retrofitted to look like More
The famous Bobo doll experiment showed that children learn through observation, not just through reward and punishment. In that classic study, Albert Bandura showed that children who had watched adults beat an inflatable clown doll learned to model the same aggressive behavior. This study marked an important shift in the More
Facial expressions and body language are among the most powerful forms of nonverbal communication, and can reveal a great deal about emotion. Beatrice de Gelder investigates the neuroscience of automatic, nonconscious responses we have to the unspoken, emotional cues we observe in others. De Gelder pioneered the neuroscience of body More
A half-century ago, psychologists considered the study of love and attraction unworthy of study. But Ellen S. Berscheid helped make the science of love one of the most vibrant areas of inquiry in modern social science. Berscheid and her collaborator Elaine C. Hatfield helped pioneer an empirical approach to understanding More
