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APS 2021 Virtual Convention News Highlights: Annual ‘Meeting of the Minds’ in Psychological Science
The latest news and discoveries from the field of psychological science will be featured at the 2021 Virtual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), held May 26-27. Researchers from around the globe will
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Cats Take ‘If I Fits I Sits’ Seriously, Even If The Space Is Just An Illusion
If you've spent any time around cats, you've probably noticed that they love to curl up in small, cozy boxes. What you may not know is that they'll also go sit inside the two-dimensional outline of a square box on the floor. What's more, a new study has found that pet cats will also spontaneously sit inside an optical illusion that merely looks like a square. Believed to be the first of its kind, the study enlisted volunteers to observe cats in their homes, a strategy to avoid what has historically been the main impediment to studying feline cognition in the lab — cats' notoriously uncooperative nature. "Cats are funny, cats are weird and quirky, and we love them for it.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on COVID-19 prevention, state of mind, learning about images, judged emotions, the fetal origins of psychological development, emotional memories, privacy in a digital world, parent education, and shared reality.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on saliency effects in visual working memory, collective action and radicalization, retrospective assessment of quality of parenting, body ownership and motor functioning in stroke patients, age-related changes in spatial navigation, jealousy in dogs, trust and academic cheating, and aging and prosocial motivation.
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Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion
At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects. Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community. He was gathering evidence to bolster a controversial hypothesis: that all humans exhibit a small number of universal emotions, or affects, that are innate and the same all over the world.
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Pandemic-related trauma is real. We need resources to help people through emotional pain.
An 11-year-old patient of mine changed abruptly from an outgoing, confident boy to an anxious, fearful one after his father developed COVID-19. He now wakes in the middle of the night crying and follows his mother around the house all day. A Catholic priest, who contracted COVID-19 during the first weeks of the pandemic, is a “long-hauler” who wakes each morning with the simple hope he’ll be able to smell a lemon slice in his tea. Like scree, the broad field of rocks, rubble and broken trees left behind as a glacier recedes, we’ll now have to contend with the emotional and social damage left behind by the pandemic.
