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How Jerome Bruner Transformed Psychological Science
Legendary APS William James Fellow Jerome Bruner passed away at the age of 100 on June 5, 2016. His groundbreaking contributions to cognitive, educational, and perceptual psychology have had transformative effects on the field as a whole, as well as effects on fields such as anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. Often considered a founder of the cognitive revolution, many of Bruner’s ideas seem almost intuitive now, but at the time, they challenged the basic principles of scholarship and education.
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How Collectivism Protects Against Contagious Fear
An outbreak of Ebola in the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that began in 2014 made headlines around the world, as the number of individuals affected continued to climb. Ebola is a viral disease that can be transmitted to humans through animal and insect bites, but can also be spread from person to person through bodily fluids. The severity of the outbreak in West Africa, combined with the knowledge that the virus could spread through human contact, led many people in parts of the world that were actually at low risk of an outbreak to express xenophobic attitudes.
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Neuroticism Predicts Anxiety and Depression Disorders
The personality dimension of neuroticism -- characterized by an individual’s tendency to experience negative emotions, especially in response to stress -- has been shown to predict several forms of psychopathology, including substance abuse, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders. But does it predict one type of disorder more strongly than the others?
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Science Develops New Data- and Materials-Sharing Requirements
In June 2015, a committee sponsored by the Center for Open Science developed a set of guidelines offering “a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices” named the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. Now, scientific publishers are putting these guidelines into action: The journal Science has announced that it has used these guidelines to revise its standards for articles that it publishes. The TOP guidelines invite journal editors to consider transparency and openness as they pertain to eight different parts of the research process.
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It’s About Time
From reminiscing about the past, to scurrying to work to be on time, to planning for retirement, time affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on a variety of levels. In a cross-cutting theme program, "The Meaning of Time," at the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago, psychological scientists shared research on the ways humans think about the past, present, and future. APS Fellow Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, presented findings emanating from her socioemotional selectivity theory, which maintains that as time horizons shrink as we age, we become increasingly selective about our social networks and our experiences.
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Memories of Spence
APS Past President Janet Taylor Spence, who died in March 2015 at the age of 91, loved the pursuit of psychological science and inspired all who worked with her. In a special symposium chaired by another APS Past President, Kay Deaux, and APS Fellow Lucia Albino Gilbert, scientists shared their perspectives on Spence’s wide-ranging contributions to psychological science. Spence’s contributions to the field, first in the area of anxiety and later in the realm of gender, have been far-reaching. Her research on anxiety included the development of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, a method for relating dispositional levels of anxiety to performance.
