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How to Get Through the Rest of Winter
The tail end of winter can be a bit rough. In the Northeast, I’ve had enough of extreme cold, gray skies and piles of snow that refuse to melt. The holidays are a dim memory. I’m sick of my giant parka. Spring doesn’t arrive until March 20. “By this time of year, winter can feel like it drags,” said Mark Seery, a professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo who studies coping and resilience. But telling yourself that “this is going to be crap for the next month,” is not the best strategy, he added. Instead, Dr. Seery recommended “finding things you can control around the edges.”
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What You Have in Common With a Pigeon and Why It’s Causing Problems for You
Today nearly everyone in America has become just as silly. People are “exactly like the pigeons,” says Peter Balsam, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. Because, he says, we carry around a device that elicits this bizarre behavior: our phones. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Tap, tap, tap. ... Neuroscientists have found that the brain chemical dopamine draws us to these signals. Dopamine was once believed to encode pleasure, but a vast amount of evidence accumulated over recent decades suggests that’s not quite right. Instead, it plays several roles. It triggers motivation for and wanting of fundamental needs.
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Six Psychological Scientists Receive 2026 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award
Each recipient has led trailblazing research, including on how our environments shape cognition, the brain’s ability to build models of the world and ourselves, and psychology’s interaction with technology.
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Even Nonmusicians Pick Up on Music’s Context
“Our brains can use the information in the music that’s in front of us in really cool ways. Even when we aren’t specifically trained to play music, we still pick up enough of it just walking around, listening.”
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Winners Announced for the APS Share Your Science Competition
The winning videos included research on economic stressors, language processing in bilingual speakers, interactive learning, and more.
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The Evolutionary Brilliance of the Baby Giggle
My son was 14 weeks old when he made his first unmistakable whole-body belly laugh. In the months that followed, his laughter was accompanied by playful provocations — grabbing my hair and shrieking with delight, blowing mouthfuls of mashed bananas skyward and squealing when they landed on the floor. These incidents signaled something more than laughter: An early sense of humor was emerging, initiated by him, months before the other milestones that parents await in the first year. For me as a mother, this was delightful, but as a developmental psychologist, I was perplexed. Despite my Ph.D., I’d never come across research on infant laughter or humor.
