The Faces and Minds of Psychological Science

Research has documented that Americans with more money and education have improved health prospects compared to poorer people. Nancy Adler has been a pioneer in investigating how social, psychological, and biological factors associated with socioeconomic status (SES) act together to determine the onset and progression of disease. Adler has investigated why individuals engage in health-damaging behaviors and how their understanding of risk affects their choices. This research has primarily been in reproductive health, examining adolescent decision making regarding contraception, conscious and preconscious motivation for pregnancy, and perceptions of risk of sexually transmitted diseases. She also examines subjective perceptions of one’s own socioeconomic status and how these perceptions relate to health along with objective indicators. Her work has raised the study of health disparities all over the globe to a new level of sophistication. Adler is the recipient of a special 25th anniversary APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for her significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society at large.

Silvia Koller’s research focuses on children who have experienced homelessness, sexual abuse, or familial violence. Koller explores the impact of these circumstances on psychological development, and uses this information to better characterize the concept of resilience. Her hope is that understanding resilience, which she defines as a process rather than an individual trait, will lead to programs and policies that help children cope with adversity and prevent future generations from experiencing such hardship. Koller uses an ecological approach, viewing children’s development in the context of their family, community, school, and society. Using this framework to understand development and resilience, she has identified several factors, including a strong social support system and a high capacity for experiencing and expressing emotions, that aid the process of resilience. Her findings have helped shape child protection policies in Brazil,  changing how authorities investigate child maltreatment and help children cope with abuse, and informing child maltreatment prevention programs.

Emotions like anger, sadness, and fear have traditionally been thought of as innate, discrete entities, each with its own biological core: An event (seeing a snake) triggers a particular hardwired emotion (fear) and its corresponding behavioral and physiological responses (an adrenaline surge, screaming, running away). As Lisa Feldman Barrett has found, however, this view is not well supported by the scientific literature, and so she has developed a model that is more in line with the data. The Conceptual Act Model conceives of emotions not as the basic building blocks of the mind, but as complex perceptions, built from four basic systems – core affect, conceptualization, executive control, and language. Different emotions (e.g., the unpleasant fear of threat, the pleasant fear on a rollercoaster) are produced by combining these systems in different ways, the way that subatomic particles create atoms and molecules. Barrett is now focused on empirically validating this model using psychological and neuroscience techniques and achieving a deeper understanding of how the brain integrates our core affective and conceptual systems to form emotional constructions. She is a recipient of the US National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award and a member of theRoyal Society of Canada.

Why are children more successful at learning a new language compared to adults? Elissa Newport has devoted her career to studying human language acquisition, including the learning differences between children and adults. In her “less-is-more” hypothesis, she posits that children are better able than adults to learn languages because, paradoxically, they have fewer cognitive resources available to them. They naturally catch on to small parts of a language — sometimes making them even more regular than they were in the input language — and acquire its more complex or irregular aspects as they mature. In contrast, adults struggle to master a new language because they try to analyze the complexities from the start and do not as readily find the broad patterns. Newport’s most recent work uses functional MRI to examine how signed and spoken languages are represented in the brain and how language is reorganized after brain damage or disease.

Growing up in poor urban neighborhood, Carl Hart watched crack cocaine ravage the lives of his relatives.  Early in his research career, Hart set out to find a neurological cure for chemical addiction. But as he began studying addicts, he found that there was more at issue than the neurochemical properties of the illicit drugs. In groundbreaking experiments, he offered crack addicts a choice between a dose of the drug or a monetary reward.  When the dose was smaller, addicts often chose the money.  When the monetary reward increased, all the participants opted for financial gain over getting high.  A tenured science professor at Columbia University — and the first African-American to hold that distinction — Hart has leveraged his research to advocate for policy reforms. He argues that law enforcers focus too heavily on prosecuting drug users while ignoring poverty, racism, and other socioeconomic conditions that spur substance abuse and crime.

After being assigned to an academic externship at a unit in a London psychiatric hospital where violent and self-injurious patients were treated, Matthew Nock became interested in the question of why people intentionally harm themselves. Ever since that experience, Nock has pursued research to deepen scientific understanding of suicide and self-injury. His studies have approached self-injury behaviors from multiple angles to better understand how such behaviors develop, can be predicted, and prevented. Nock collaborated with Mahzarin Banaji to adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure suicidal thoughts in teenagers.

Humans are very emotional creatures. James Coan studies how our emotions are shaped by our social relationships. In particular, he is interested in how we use various emotional behaviors–such as facial expressions and verbal communication–to adjust our emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Coan is testing the theory that when we are alone, tasks we have to perform may seem more difficult and appear to take up more of our resources than when we are in the company of others. This “social baseline theory” suggests that human social interactions have evolved as a way to help us conserve energy. Coan's innovative work (integrating many disciplines and using multiple methodologies) will shape how research will be done for many years to come. In 2010, Coan was among the inaugural recipients of the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Q&A with James Coan

Common coding theory holds that seeing, hearing, or thinking about an action triggers the same cognitive processes that are activated when we actually perform the action. Experimental psychological scientist Wolfgang Prinz is the founder of that theory, which provided a critical foundation for advances in cognitive neuroscience. The discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys (neurons that fire both when the monkeys perceived another performing an action, such as grabbing a piece of food, and when they actually grasp the food themselves) provided some of the first neurophysiological evidence for common coding. Functional neuroimaging experiments in humans also indicate that the neural circuits involved in action execution partly overlap with those activated when actions are observed. Prinz’ work suggests that perception and action are integral and interactive features of overall cognition.

Daphna Shohamy researches learning, memory and decision making. Specifically, she tries to understand the underlying brain mechanisms of how we learn from experience and how we use what we learn to guide decisions and actions. She adopts an integrative approach that draws broadly on neuroscience to make predictions about cognition.  Her research provides a deeper understanding of the cognitive and neural processes involved for different aspects of behavior. In 2011, Shohamy received a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Q&A with Daphna Shohamy

Every employer wants to know the secret to employee motivation. Since the 1970s, Gary Latham has been investigating methods to boost employee performance. His primary interests lie in motivation, performance management, and training. Latham has also co-developed the theory of and conducted extensive research on goal setting, as well as ways employers can use goals to effectively increase job performance and job satisfaction. His studies have revealed that employees perform better when they are given specific, challenging goals compared to easy goals or no goals at all. Latham compiled the results from his goal setting studies and other research into a book for managers entitled, Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager: Making the Science of Management Work for You. He is the recipient of the APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for his  lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society at large. Watch Latham’s Award Address at the 23rd APS Annual Convention.

How do we get from thoughts to actions? David Rosenbaum’s research focuses on answers to that question. Using a range of research methods, including behavioral observation, brain-wave recordings, and computational modeling, Rosenbaum studies the planning and control of everyday physical activities. He and his colleagues have shown that physical actions reflect our surprisingly deep and subtle knowledge about the features of our bodies and our surrounding environment. His books include Human Motor Control, MATLAB For Behavioral Scientists, and It’s A Jungle In There: How Competition and Cooperation In The Brain Shape The Mind.

Hailed as one of the world’s most influential people, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker’s interests span all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. In his classic book The Language Instinct, Pinker argues that languages are learned but that language is an instinct — an evolutionary adaptation for the communication of complex ideas. Pinker has studied the meaning and acquisition of verbs, and what they tell us about concepts of causation, space, time, and intentions. He has also studied the forms of verbs, particularly the contrast between regular forms of the past tense, which are generated by the mental rule “add -ed” (talk, talked), and irregular forms (grow, grew), which have to be memorized. He also has studied the neural bases of language processing and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism, and in 2014 published a style manual applying psycholinguistics to writing. In addition to language, Pinker has written on vast stretches of the human mind, including emotion, vision, reasoning, and especially violence. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker presents data showing that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history, and seeks to explain why.

Giacomo Rizzolatti has a longstanding interest in how the cognitive functions of the brain are connected to movement. When he and his colleagues were studying neurons that control hand and mouth actions in monkeys, they noticed that the neurons would not only activate when the animal picked up a piece of food, but the neurons would also switch on when the monkey saw a person pick up a piece of food. Many researchers believe that these neurons could be important for imitation, language acquisition, and various forms of perception. The development of mirror neurons in humans is what allows us to learn through observation and communication and may play a role in how we understand the actions of others. Rizzolatti’s research on mirror neurons has inspired the development of “mirror treatments” to help stroke victims recover motor function as well as countless other publications that span various disciplines in psychology, neuroscience, and health. Among his many awards are the Golgi Prize for Physiology, George Miller Award of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Feltrinelli Prize for Medicine of Accademia dei Lincei, the Herlitzka Prize for Physiology, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, and the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.

Michael Gazzaniga, a Past President of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the field of cognitive neuroscience, founding the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and serving as Editor-in-Chief of The Cognitive Neurosciences – considered to be the sourcebook for that field. He is credited with being the first researcher to examine split brain patients in order to understand whether some cognitive functions are predominantly performed in one brain hemisphere or the other. Gazzaniga’s examination of split brain patients and his contributions to the field have greatly enhanced our understanding of lateralization of cognitive function within the brain, and how the two brain hemispheres communicate. Gazzaniga is a member of the National Academy of Sciences a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Watch Inside the Psychologist’s Studio with Michael Gazzaniga. Watch Gazzaniga's Keynote Address at the 25th APS Annual Convention.

Shelley E. Taylors research explores our ability to perceive some stressful situations in ways that have both psychological and biological benefits. Taylors research shows that in some circumstances, we can develop “positive illusions” – such as an illusion of personal control or unrealistic optimism about the future – to handle stressful situations. Taylors tend-and-befriend model illustrates how people, especially women, will come together support one another in stressful situations. Her lab is examining the genetic, early environmental, and neurocognitive origins of these coping mechanisms and their benefits. Taylor is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) William James Fellow Award for her lifetime of significant intellectual achievements to the basic science of psychology.

Scott Lilienfeld is both a researcher of and advocate for psychological science. His clinical work has primarily focused on psychopathy; he developed the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI-R), a 154-item personality test developed to be taken by general, rather than clinical, populations. The PPI-R provides an indication of traits associated with psychopathy without linking them to specific behaviors. Additionally, Lilienfeld has devoted much of his work to correcting the widely misunderstood nature of psychopathy, which is still commonly — but falsely — believed to be a signifier of violent tendencies and psychotic disorders. He has expanded this pursuit to include debunking pseudoscience and common psychological myths of all kinds, such as the idea that “opposites attract” or that people only use 10% of their brain, in addition to providing guidance for people so they can recognize a bogus psychological claim when they see one. Lilienfeld has also examined the related issue of why the general public often views psychological research as an unscientific pursuit, and he has made recommendations for how individuals and institutions can convey the scientific rigor of psychology to general as well as clinical populations.

How exactly do we learn to speak? Patricia Kuhl has spent her career developing answers to that question. Kuhl is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and for her studies that show how young children learn. She is co-director, with her husband Andrew Meltzoff, of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. Kuhl’s lab investigates how infant and adult brains process speech. She has also conducted research on language development in autism. Kuhl is widely known for her theories that account for the developmental change by which infants’ ability to discriminate speech sounds becomes increasingly specific to their native language as they age. This model shows that babies use their computational abilities to “crack” the speech code and that their social skills play an important role in learning. Her research has played a major role in identifying critical periods in development. Kuhl is a recipient of a 25th anniversary APS William James Fellow Award  for her significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. Read more about Kuhl’s research here.

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 1959, while they pretended that they were living in that year. She and her colleagues found that the men experienced improvements in vision, strength, and other abilities, and that they actually looked younger as well. Langer’s mind-body research indicates that just as social cues can make us feel old, other social cues can make us feel and act young.

Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger, III has spent a career studying human learning and memory, particularly processes of memory retrieval. His recent research has focused on the power of retrieval as a mechanism for improving learning and retention and in applying this work to educational settings. His research has demonstrated that students retain more material when they retrieve it via tests than from restudying it, and Roediger and his collaborators are conducting field studies to determine whether their test-enhanced learning intervention is effective under actual classroom conditions. (It is). Roediger is also interested in illusions of memory. Through his investigation of false memories, Roediger and his team have demonstrated that people can incorporate aspects of present events into their memories, leading to very vivid — but untrue — memories. Roediger has also studied how false memories can be created by remembering in groups and how older adults generally show a greater propensity to false memories. His research includes the development of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, which demonstrates that when people are given a list of words strongly related to a central (but not presented) word, there is a high probability of falsely remembering the associated word that was not presented. Roediger’s earlier research was concerned with implicit memory, or how past experience can be expressed in ongoing behavior with little or no awareness of memory processes being involved; with hypermnesia (how memories can be recovered over time without intervening study); and with how retrieval of some information can impair retrieval of other information (a process now referred to as retrieval induced forgetting). Roediger is a Past President of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). He is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) William James Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant intellectual achievements to the basic science of psychology. See http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/ for more information. Watch Roediger’s Award Address at the 24th APS Annual Convention. Watch Roediger’s Bring the Family Address at the 26th APS Annual Convention in May 2014.

Throughout his career Steele has been interested in processes of self-evaluation, in particular in how people cope with threatening self-images. This work has led to a general theory of self-affirmation processes. A second interest, growing out of the first, is a theory of how group stereotypes—such as stereotypes about African Americans in academic domains and women in quantitative domains—can influence intellectual performance and academic identities. Third, he has investigated addictive behaviors, particularly alcohol addiction, where his work with several colleagues has led to a theory of “alcohol myopia,” in which many of alcohol's social and stress-reducing effects are explained as a consequence of its narrowing of perceptual and cognitive functioning. Steele is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) William James Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant intellectual achievements to the basic science of psychology. Watch Inside the Psychologist’s Studio with Claude Steele and Elizabeth Phelps.

Morton Ann Gernsbacher's research has for 20 years investigated the processes and mechanisms that underlie language processing. She empirically challenged the view that language processing involves language-specific mechanisms by proposing that, instead, it draws on general processes. During the past few years (motivated by personal passion) Gernsbacher's quest has been to answer the fundamental question of why some individuals with autism cant speak. In this pursuit, Gernsbacher has already made a highly significant discovery: Some individuals with autism cant speak because of motor planning challenges. This discovery has begun a paradigmatic shift in revealing the basis of speech impairment in autism. Watch Gernsbacher's Bring the Family Address from the 25th APS Annual Convention.

Gabriella Vigliocco investigates how our brains integrate language and cognition, examining a variety of languages, both spoken and signed, and using tools from several disciplines, including neuroscience and experimental psychology. Over the years, her work has contributed to our understanding of how we represent meaning, how cognition shapes languages and how language shapes cognition. She has challenged many traditional ideas about language, like the notion that language is a modular and purely symbolic system that does not entail direct links with our sensory-motor and affective experience. She has developed theoretical and computational models of how meaning is represented and how sentences are produced that account for language performance in terms of interactions among different types of linguistic and non-linguistic information. She is now using these models to tackle questions like how abstract concepts such as justice and courage are formed and processed in our brains.

Jeansok Kim investigates how stress influences behavior. His work has shown that stress likely affects learning and memory by changing electrical activity in a section of the brain called the hippocampus. Research in Kim’s lab has also revealed that these electrical changes are mediated by N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors that are found in the brain. Kim’s laboratory also uses behavioral animal models to test what forms of learning are affected by stress and to study the processes that allow animals to learn. He is the recipient of a James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship.

Statistics has been called “the grammar of science.” Few understand this idea better than Geoff Cumming, whose research explores statistical cognition, or how we use and interpret statistical methods. He is particularly interested in replication, and much of his work has examined the difference between using p values and confidence intervals, two statistical methods for evaluating differences between experimental groups (like a drug vs. a placebo), to assess statistical uncertainty and study repeatability. Though reporting statistical significance with p values is more common in most scientific disciplines, Cumming has found these values to be unreliable, varying greatly between repetitions of an experiment, while confidence intervals often provide better insight into a study’s results and their replicability. He has used these findings to urge psychological researchers in fields ranging from giftedness to clinical psychology to report confidence intervals and effect sizes, and also to use meta-analysis, in order to improve the reliability of their statistical analyses. He refers to these better techniques as 'the new statistics': www.thenewstatistics.com. He is author of Understanding The New Statistics.

Mahzarin Banaji studies how our minds make decisions without awareness, intention, and control. She analyses how one human being judges another and the extent to which social groups (such as nationality, gender, race, physical attributes) enter into choices. She studies both behavior and the brain, she analyzes the minds of both adults and young children, and she conducts her experiments in the traditional laboratory as well as on the web. With two colleagues she hosts an educational and research site (www.implicit.harvard.edu) at which the Implicit Association Test (IAT) is used to teach people about the associations in our minds of which we are unaware. By exposing people to their own unconscious bias, and by speaking publicly about her own biases, Banaji works to increase awareness with the hope of changing minds through psychological science. Watch Inside the Psychologist’s Studio with Mahzarin Banaji and Rebecca Saxe. Watch Banaji's Keynote Address at the 26th APS Annual Convention.

On a daily basis, infants and toddlers encounter a plethora of items ranging from animals to appliances their parents use. Despite their limited abilities to process information, even very young children are remarkably capable of learning the names of these objects. Ellen M. Markman conducted some of the pioneering research on the reasoning skills that infants and young children use to figure out the meanings of words. When someone points to an object and labels it, how do children conclude the label refers to the object itself, rather than its color, size, shape, texture, activity, attractiveness, and so on? Markman has postulated that by the time children begin to acquire their vocabulary, they have a set of default assumptions that together enable children to quickly zoom in on some hypotheses and rule out others. Through extensive experimental research, Markman has challenged the traditional theories of word learning and provided new insights into the nature of language acquisition.

Gordon Bower is one of the premier experimental psychologists and learning theorists. Bower’s research focuses on the ways that various cognitive processes – such as imagery, emotion, and reading and language comprehension – relate to memory, learning and reasoning. Bower was one of the first researchers to examine the effects of mood on memory, and his research has greatly contributed to our knowledge of state-dependent memory and learning.  Bower’s service as Chief Scientific Advisor to the NIMH Director and his appointment as leader of an NIMH task force commissioned to review the state of mental health knowledge and research have positively impacted the direction of psychological science. His pioneering work earned him one of the United States’ highest scientific honors, the National Medal of Science. A Past President of the  Association for Psychological Science (APS), Bower is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal, the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, the Wilbur Cross Medal for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, and the APS William James Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. Watch Inside the Psychologist’s Studio: An Interview with Gordon Bower.

For advice on love, you’re probably better off going to Elaine Hatfield than Dr. Drew.  In her more than 40 years of research, Hatfield has taken an empirical approach to understanding different facets of romantic relationships, including physical attraction, relationship satisfaction, sexuality, and emotional intimacy. She pioneered the theory that there exist two types of romantic love, passionate and companionate. Though intense, irrational passionate love differs greatly from deeply affectionate and stable companionate love, Hatfield has found that both have an impact on relationship satisfaction and longevity. She also designed the Passionate Love Scale to quantify components of passionate romance; today this scale is used everywhere from psychology labs to online dating sites. Her research extends beyond romantic relationships, however; she has also studied extensively the idea of equity, or fairness, in social contexts, as well as the influence of gender on sexual motivation and behavior. Hatfield is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) William James Fellow Award for her  lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. Watch Hatfield’s Award Address at the 24th APS Annual Convention (introduction by Ellen Berscheid).

Suparna Rajarams research focuses on memory and amnesia, particularly how we recall past experiences and acquire and retain new knowledge. She investigates the differences between implicit (unconscious) memory and explicit (conscious) recollection as well as the components of episodic (i.e. autobiographical details, times, places) and semantic (i.e. meanings, concepts) memory, and familiarity. Rajaram is also interested in how attentional demands in our environment lead us to ignore salient information, thus inhibiting expression of new memories. Rajarams new line of research focuses on how collaboration with others may improve memory.

Cognitive neuroscientists study people at two explanatory levels: the brain and behavior. Using psychometric models and brain imaging tools, Rogier Kievit explores how theoretical psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind can be used to understand the links between the brain and behavior. His current research relates brain function and structure (using MRI) and cognition in aging populations using structural equation models and network analysis. With the goal of increasing health in older populations, Kievit’s particular interests are in models that effectively capture how cognitive changes across lifetime relate to brain reorganization, adaptation and compensation.

Larry Jacoby is one of the world’s foremost researchers on memory — specifically on the difference between conscious and automatic memory. The distinction is useful for better understanding age-related differences in memory performance. His studies reveal, for example, that our ability to recall specific events declines as we age, spurring us to rely on unconscious, automatic memories. These unconscious influences can be misleading, often tricking people into remembering events that never really occurred. In addition to further refining theory about memory, one of Jacoby’s fundamental research goals is to develop procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits.

It’s human nature to categorize people. When we meet someone for the first time, we make instant judgments about their social status and their personality. Susan Fiske has devoted her career to examining the role of these kinds of judgments in stereotypes and bias. Her research shows that we favor people whom we see as warm and competent, and snub those we view as cold and inept. These perceptions are heavily influenced by race, age, gender, and disability, which can lead to stereotyping and discrimination. With the help of brain imaging, Fiske has found that our social perceptions and prejudices have neural components. But while prejudice may be an inevitable part of the human condition, Fiske’s research shows that it also is surmountable.

Using basic neural and computer models, Michael Frank studies how we learn and make decisions. He hopes to shed light on how these pathways lead to more complex cognitive functions, such as working memory and cognitive control. Franks theoretical work has important clinical applications, and may help us understand, for example, how brain disorders such as Parkinsons disease alter cognition. Frank is also analyzing individual differences in cognition, in other words, why we all think in different ways. He uses a variety of techniques, including theoretical modeling, genetic analyses, and electrophysiological studies. In 2010, Frank was among the inaugural recipients of the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Q&A with Michael J. Frank

Thomas Griffiths developed mathematical models of higher level cognition. He focuses on the abstract computational problems that underlie inductive human cognition, such as probabilistic reasoning, learning causal relationships, acquiring and using language, and inferring the structure of categories. He researches the ideal solutions to those problems using ideas from probability theory and Bayesian statistics, used to calculate the likelihood of a hypothesis. These statistical tools allow him to analyze human learning and link computer science research to artificial intelligence and machine learning. His innovative research won him a 2011 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Q&A with Thomas L. Griffiths

Where we come from and the cultural environment we were raised in has a big impact on many aspects of our lives. James Jackson's research focuses on how culture influences our health (both mental and physical) during our lives, attitude changes, and social support. Jackson has contributed enormously to our understanding of race relations and racism, not just in the United States, but around the world. For example, his research has highlighted how racial discrimination can affect physical and mental health and treatment. He has conducted very comprehensive social, political behavior, and mental and physical health surveys on African American and Black Caribbean populations. Among the goals of these surveys was the documentation of the physical, mental, emotional, and economic conditions of African Americans at the start of this century. Jackson is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a founding member of the Aging Society Research Network of the MacArthur Foundation. He is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research. Watch Jackson’s Keynote Address at the 24th APS Annual Convention.

We make decisions all the time and often in uncertain circumstances. Elke Webers research focuses on how we judge those choices, the decisions we end up making, and individual and cultural differences in risk-taking. Specifically, her research examines behavioral models of decision making and how to measure and model risk-taking behavior. Her work has tied together psychology and economics, by examining risky financial decision making. Additionally, she studies environmental decision making, for example, how people respond to climate change and ways in which policymakers can present programs to the public to make them most effective.

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, a concept that explains how stress systems that help the body survive can cause problems when overworked. This work has led to a realization that stress hormone effects are protective in the short term and potentially damaging in the long term.

Geraldine Dawson’s research has contributed greatly to the growing body of evidence about autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially in young children. Dawson has approached ASD from all angles, from conducting studies of early brain and behavioral development to genetic research.  She pioneered the use of event-related potentials to study early brain function in very young children with ASD.  Her main focus, however, lies in early diagnosis and intervention. She was one of the first researchers to demonstrate that autism symptoms could be recognized in young infants. Recently, with Sally Rogers, Dawson helped develop the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) for behavioral intervention for toddlers with autism. She empirically validated this model in the first-ever randomized, controlled trial of a comprehensive behavioral intervention for toddlers with autism, and the results revealed that children who received ESDM showed significant improvements in IQ, language, and adaptive behavior. Dawson is a recipient of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for her lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research. Watch Dawson’s Award Address at the 24th APS Annual Convention.

Richard McFall’s work has spanned several areas of research including social competence and information processing, psychopathology, and classical conditioning. Throughout his career he has demonstrated a commitment to the use of scientifically valid techniques and treatments. In his Manifesto For A Science of Clinical Psychology he outlined his views on the importance of the integration of science and practice, both in the field, and in the training of the next generation of clinicians. His Manifesto was an instrumental call to action that led to the creation of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS) and McFall served as its founding president. His is also the founding executive director of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS), a non-profit body which provides accreditation to PhD programs in psychological clinical science. McFall is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and a recipient of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology’s Distinguished Scientist Award.

Hearing voices in one’s head is a hallmark symptom of schizophrenia. Those auditory hallucinations are caused by overstimulation in the brain regions that process sound. But when the inner voices start talking, the brain fails to respond to real voices. Biological psychological scientist Kenneth Hugdahl and his research team identified this paradox when they had hallucinating patients listen to sounds through headphones and measured their brain activity using neuroimaging technology, in addition to psychological measures. They found that the heightened brain activity that is associated with vocal hallucinations simultaneously douses the perception of real sounds. This explains why schizophrenia patients seem shut off from the outside world. Hugdahl’s team is testing ways to help schizophrenia patients focus on outside voices when the inner voices are active.

Aggressive and antisocial behavior (e.g., fighting, destroying property, stealing) among children and adolescents comprise one of the most expensive mental health problems in the United States and the most frequent basis of referral to clinical services for children. Alan Kazdin has drawn on basic and applied research in learning and cognition to develop two effective evidence-based interventions for these children that improve child functioning at home, at school, and in the community. He has conducted randomized trials with inpatient and outpatient children to develop these interventions, evaluated treatment processes that contribute to therapeutic change, and examined the role of child, parent, and family factors that influence and are influenced by treatment. Kazdin’s current focus is on models of delivering treatment that can reach the majority of children in need of treatment but who do not receive any services. His work also seeks to help redress disparities in care among diverse groups. Kazdin is the founding editor of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) journal Clinical Psychological Science and a recipient of the APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research.

Understanding behavior through Mathematical Modeling has been used to simulate everything from climate patterns to population growth, but Dirk Helbing uses them to examine something even more complex, namely human behavior. Drawing on his background in physics, Helbing developed the “social force model” to simulate the movement of pedestrians, whose behavior can depend on variables such as desired velocity and the distance between a pedestrian and other people or objects. He has also used mathematical methods to study a variety of behaviors including cooperation, social norms, conflicts, and revolutions, traffic flows, and the self-organization of groups.  Helbing is currently leading an ambitious project called FuturICT with its Living Earth Simulator, a computer simulation that aims to model life on Earth, with a focus on techno-socio-economic systems. He hopes to one day use this computer-modeled world to understand current global economic and societal activity, and prevent or mitigate crises.

Adolescence is widely seen as a period of moodiness and risk-taking. Much of that stems from uneven development in the brain during the teenage years. Eveline Crone has used brain imaging technology to identify this imbalance, and to study how it effects teenagers’ sensitivity to emotional stimuli. Her work has shown that during adolescence, the brain regions that respond to pleasure and sensation-seeking develop discordantly with regions associated with reasoning. That can explain some of the impulsive behavior typically associated with teenagers. But Crone has also found that adolescents are extremely creative, due to an overproduction of grey matter in certain areas of the brain. Her work is helping parents, educators, and society at large better understand this special phase in human development.

One of the early advocates of using quantitative methods in psychology, James McKeen Cattell studied under William Wundt, the “father” of experimental psychology, in Germany. Cattell, the first professor of psychology in the United States, was interested in the quantitative measurement of intelligence. His goals led him to pursue classic studies looking at differences between individuals’ reaction times during simple mental tasks, such as naming colors. Although Cattell’s “mental tests” have been replaced with more reliable intelligence measures, Cattell was a tireless advocate for experimental psychology and his work helped convince the academic world that psychology was not just a “pseudoscience.” He said that knowing certain things (i.e., what we can remember or someone’s reaction time) are facts of science which must be translated into an understanding of what we can learn from those traits and “disentangle the complex factors of heredity and environment.” To foster his interest in applied psychology, Cattell formed The Psychological Corporation to market psychological tests and related materials to educational, corporate and government clients. Cattell was also known for his work in scientific publishing. He founded the journal Psychological Review, Popular Science Monthly (which later became Popular Science), and from 1894 until his death also owned the preeminent journal Science and established it as the journal of the Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1942, Cattell established the James McKeen Cattell Fund to provide researchers with financial support to extend their university sabbatical to conduct scientific research and promote the dissemination of psychological science. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) established the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award to honor individuals for their lifetime of significant intellectual achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on a critical problem in society at large.

One of the biggest challenges psychotherapists face is deciding on the appropriate treatment for individual patients. Wolfgang Lutz is an internationally recognized researcher on psychotherapy, and is leading the field in collecting important data about treatment effectiveness and results. He has pioneered the concept of expected treatment response (ETR), which involves an individualized log of each patient’s progress in relation to their expected response to the therapy. His work is helping providers to deliver proven and individually tailored treatment plans and to pre-emptively spot patients at risk for treatment failure.

Ed Diener has focused his career on uncovering the essential ingredients to subjective well-being, a term that includes positive feelings and life satisfaction. Nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” Diener developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and other measures of psychological well-being. In one noteworthy study, conducted with Martin E.P. Seligman, he found that students with the highest levels of happiness and fewest signs of depression had strong ties to friends and family. Another important finding is that there are some universals in what predicts happiness around the globe, such as trust and respect, but there are also some culture-specific causes as well. For example, self-esteem is more predictive of subjective well-being in individualistic cultures, and religiosity is more predictive of life satisfaction in highly religious societies. According to Diener’s research, even the majority of disadvantaged people, including those with disabilities, report greater-than-neutral levels of happiness. A new direction in Diener’s research is examining the outcomes of subjective well-being, and he has found that in general it leads to better health and social relationships, to greater work productivity, and to better citizenship. His empirical examination of happiness has contributed enormously to the understanding of human well-being. Diener is the recipient of a 25th anniversary APS William James Fellow Award for his significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology. Read more about Diener’s research here.

  Traumatic stress not only affects our brains, but can also strike us at the cellular level. Iris-Tatjana Kolassa explores the biological, particularly the molecular, changes that occur after situations of extreme stress. She is also studying whether therapeutic interventions can reverse such alterations. Kolassa’s work has been of increasing influence on an international scale as it signals a paradigmatic breakthrough, creating the scientific sub-discipline of “molecular psychology,” which employs molecular biology for the advancement of psychological science. It uniquely demonstrates how molecular methods may be incorporated into the system sciences of clinical psychology and behavioral neuroscience. Additionally, she investigates genetic risk factors that contribute to the development of a fear network in which memories of traumatic events are stored.  As part of her work, she collaborates intensively with partners from molecular biology, molecular toxicology, immunology, genetics, and molecular medicine. She is the recipient of an APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Q&A with Iris-Tatjana Kolassa  

Karen Matthews, renowned for her many contributions to the formation and growth of health psychology, helped set the stage for expansion of the field through her editorship of Health Psychology, advisory roles at National Heart Blood Institute, and through her participation in the landmark National Working Group on Education and Training in Health Psychology. At the University of Pittsburgh, she initiated an innovative Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine training program that provided multidisciplinary training to many individuals who later became leaders in the health psychology field. Matthews’ research accomplishments have included seminal work on childhood antecedents of coronary heart disease risk, women's health and menopause, and the effects of socioeconomic status on health. She is the recipient of a 25th anniversary APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for her groundbreaking research in health psychology. Read more about Matthews’s research here.

Most kids refuse to eat their vegetables. Coming up with strategies to get kids to eat more of the green stuff is just one question Julie Mennellas lab is tackling. However, Mennellas research focus is not just on picky eaters. Her main research interests involve various components of food and taste preference, including how weve evolved to enjoy certain flavors over others. She investigates how we develop taste and flavor preferences. For example, she currently studies how a new mothers diet, via changes in amniotic fluid and breast milk, may affect a childs food preferences. In addition, Mennella is trying to determine if there are sensitive periods for flavor learning and food preference as well as the effect of alcohol and smoking on the types of food and flavors that we prefer.

Kathleen McDermott’s recent work focuses on comparing the human abilities of remembering the past and envisioning specific future scenarios. Her research shows the neural substrates of these two actions to be interrelated, suggesting that envisioning the future may be impossible without a recollection of the past. Earlier work by McDermott included development of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, which demonstrates that when given a list of related words there is a high probability of one falsely remembering an unlisted associated word. Additionally, using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques McDermott studies why retrieval practice is beneficial in promoting retention of information over the long term.