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Member Spotlight: 2025 Spence Awardee Mark Thornton on the Dynamics of the Social World
Learn about 2025 Janet Taylor Spence recipient Mark Thornton, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Social Computation Representation and Prediction Laboratory.
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The Nurturing Effects of Nature: Meet Ecospiritualism
Teaching: This lesson plan sets up discussions about ecospiritualism and encourages students to be mindful.
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Beyond Focus: How Attention Shapes Learning Differently for Children and Adults
Podcast: This episode explores whether children’s weaker selective attention is a hidden strength by addressing findings on attention, memory, and childhood learning.
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Examining How Personality Type Influences Symptoms of Depression
Unique personality traits could be affecting how individuals manage their experience of depression.
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The Psychology of ‘Shared Silence’ in Couples
A couple sits together on a sunny park bench. He appears to be studying the passing clouds; she’s absorbed in a novel. Some passersby might think, How sweet. Others might see them as bleak. ... Weinstein and colleagues “are really looking at a topic that has received not nearly as much attention as it deserves,” says Northwestern University psychological scientist Claudia Haase, who wrote a 2023 article in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology on how couples become better at managing their emotions as they grow older. In her current work, she studies couples interacting in a lab.
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Which Knot Is Stronger? Humans Aren’t Great Judges
Humans are pretty good at guessing whether a towering stack of dishes in the sink will topple over or where a pool ball will go when a cue hits it. We evolved this kind of physical reasoning to navigate our changing and sometimes dangerous environments. But a new study highlights one area of intuitive physics that’s deceptively difficult: judging how strong a knot is. ... If you’re surprised, you’re in good company. Researchers recently asked volunteers to look at photographs of these knots and decide which would take more force to undo.
