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What Science Still Can’t Explain About Love
... It turns out they grapple with the same question as matchmakers, romance authors, poets, and many others. “The big mystery is — do you really know who you want?” says Dan Conroy-Beam, a University of California, Santa Barbara psychologist who studies relationship formation. The question seems simple, but it’s not trivial. A lot of time, energy, and heartache goes into finding solid relationships. “In a lot of senses, who you choose as a partner is the most important decision you’ll ever make,” Conroy-Beam says.
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Why Simple Is Smart
A few years ago, a young writer asked me if I had any tips for an aspiring journalist. My first instinct was to say no. My career has been full of hard work but also quirky luck, and I think everybody should distrust individuals who claim that the path to success is a highly specific set of circumstances that just happens to match, step for step, the story of their life. A rant about selection bias seemed misplaced, though. So instead I shared a few organizing principles that I’ve relied on for nonfiction writing, and I’m sharing them again, below. What follows is hardly Strunk and White, but some may find it helpful. Simple is smart. High school taught me big words.
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Eight Psychological Scientists Receive 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early-Career Contributions
The Spence Award recognizes APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science.
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Build Up Big-Team Science
Are some of science’s biggest questions simply unanswerable without redefining how research is done? This is the question that motivated the researchers who would later establish the ManyBabies Consortium: a grass-roots network of some 450 collaborators from more than 200 institutions who pool resources to complete massive studies on infant development (see, for example, ref. 1). Human infants are perhaps the most powerful learning machines on the planet — and understanding how that learning occurs could inform artificial intelligence, public policy, education and more. Yet a full understanding of infant learning seemed difficult (if not impossible) under the current research model.
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Childhood Health and Cultural Inequalities: Women Pay the Price
A culturally underprivileged childhood increases a person’s risk of being less physically active in adulthood. This risk is greater for women than for men, according to new research published in the journal Psychological Science.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on nonsuicidal self-injury, emotion, pregnancy and mental health during COVID-19, rumination and learning, psychopathology models, antisocial behavior, close relationships and COVID-19, and the use of personality traits to predict mental health.
