When writers craft metaphors such as the “warmth of friendship,” they aren’t just making an arbitrary connection between temperature and social bonds. Behavioral scientists have shown that certain metaphors, called embodied metaphors, describe physical experiences that are connected to an individual’s thought processes. The researchers in this symposium were specifically More
People go to great lengths to avoid pain. And that avoidance, ironically, may be a cause of chronic pain. When a person is injured, they begin to associate the injury with the activity that caused it, and they will avoid that activity, as well as other activities. In the short More
In the digital age, when we have something to say we tweet, text, email, post, and blog our hearts out. Researchers have taken note and are recognizing that phone and web-based technology has the potential to be a useful research, treatment, and education tool. One may ask why researchers would More
Watch APS Past President Robert A. Bjork explain his theory on long-term memory in this series of interviews. Bjork is a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His lab, the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab, investigates human learning, memory, and the implications of such More
The United States Air Force is taking a page from an iconic comic. As an intern in the Human Performance Wing at Wright Paterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, psychological scientist Andre Garcia, from George Mason University, worked on the BATMAN team. Though Garcia tends to think of team More
Four days left, 4 more psychological science highlights: Counting down to the Olympic Opening Ceremony, with research insights on sports and performance. #4. In Olympic competition, the margin between winning the gold and sitting in the stands often comes down to fractions of a second. Olympic athletes will be doing More
