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A Neurobehavioral Approach to Addiction: Implications for the Opioid Epidemic and the Psychology of Addiction
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 20, Number 2) Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) In recent years, heroin and other opioid fatalities have escalated to crisis proportions, intensifying the need for evidence-based recommendations for educational and policy campaigns to prevent abuse of opioids and other substances. Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying drug-seeking behaviors is vital to creating these prevention campaigns. To fully provide a neurobehavioral view of addiction, it is important to answer two major questions: (a) why do people seek drugs in the first place?
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Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 20, Number 1)Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Faces offer information that helps us navigate our social world, influencing whom we love, trust, help, and even judge as guilty of a crime. But to what extent does an individual’s face reveal the person’s emotions? And to what extent can we accurately interpret an emotion or intention from a raised eyebrow, a curled lip, or a narrowed eye? Understanding what facial movements might reveal about a person’s emotions has major consequences for how people interact with one another in the living room, the classroom, the courtroom, and even the battlefield.
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Beyond Willpower: Strategies for Reducing Failures of Self-Control
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 19, Number 3)Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Nearly everyone at one time or another has engaged in overeating, excessive spending, procrastinating, or falling into other self-defeating behaviors. These behaviors reflect a failure of self-control — pursuing an option that is the most tempting right now instead of the option with longer-lasting value. Self-control failures have negative consequences for educational achievement, retirement savings, health, and well-being, and they’re the focus of increasing attention by psychological scientists, policymakers, and philosophers.
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Advancing the Science of Collaborative Problem Solving
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 19, Number 2) Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) In the modern world, most problems—whether they be at work, at home, or in communities—require that teams work together to find solutions. Combining idiosyncratic knowledge of people to achieve common goals is the very essence of collaborative problem solving (CPS). But education and training in CPS—both in schools and the workplace—has not kept up with the demands for those collaborative skills. Analyzing this gap and the characteristics of CPS provides an opportunity to identify strategies to improve CPS education and assessment, with psychological scientists playing a critical role.
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Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert
Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Volume 19, Number 1) Read the Full Text (PDF, HTML) Reading is a fundamental necessity for acquiring knowledge and many of the skills that facilitate social, cultural, and political engagement. Illiteracy and insufficient literacy have many social and economic costs. Insufficient literacy might prevent people from having access to basic information about health and safety or social rights, and it is a major contributor to inequality. Thus, improving literacy is a critical challenge that has generated strong public interest on how children learn to read and how they should be taught to read.
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Increasing Vaccination: Putting Psychological Science Into Action
Research on vaccination behavior shows that the most effective interventions focus directly on shaping patients’ and parents’ behavior instead of trying to change their minds.
