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Breaking Free From Bad Behaviors
Many people try their best to eat healthy and exercise regularly. Others strive to be good environmental stewards, cutting down their usage of electricity and water. And still others intend to treat everyone fairly, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. But those efforts require a level of self-control that can easily be drained. Old habits die hard. In a cross-cutting theme program sponsored by the NIH Common Fund Science of Behavior Change and titled "Breaking Free — Intersecting Perspectives on the Science of Behavior Change" at the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago, psychological scientists shared cutting-edge research on halting and reversing destructive behavior.
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Deploying Technology to Revolutionize Science
The technology revolution is raising new questions for both the science and the applications of psychology. Can mental health care be delivered remotely over the Internet? Can we use neuroimaging technology to adaptively control our own brain activity? How can technology be used to study people in settings far more natural than a lab? In a cross-cutting theme program, "Advancing Psychological Science Through Technology," at the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago, leading researchers opened a window into the future role of technology in psychological science.
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Bower Reflects on Integrating Two Theoretical Frameworks
As a Yale university graduate student back in the mid 1950s, APS Past President and William James Fellow Gordon H. Bower was being indoctrinated into the then-dominant learning theory of Clark Hull, who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. But he became a devotee of William K. Estes’s statistical theory of learning after meeting him at a 1957 workshop. At the APS-Psychonomic Society W. K. & K. W. Estes Lecture at the 2016 APS Convention in Chicago, Bower delivered a 60-year retrospective on his attempts to integrate or translate Hull’s theory into Estes’s statistical framework.
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Workshop Shows How to Make Open Science an Everyday Practice
How can we carry out research that is credible and useful in solving social problems? What are the interventions, tools, and techniques that will improve the daily practice of psychological science? These are the questions that motivate researcher Brian Nosek, Courtney Soderberg, and the rest of the team at the Center for Open Science (COS) in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Ariely Packs Address With Jokes, Anecdotes, and Lots of Science
True to form, Dan Ariely packed his Fred Kavli Keynote Address with plenty of jokes and humorous anecdotes in the opening night of the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago. But his 40-minute speech still incorporated plenty of the behavioral science that has made him famous. Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, discussed his years of research, involving tens of thousands of study participants, showing how people cheat or lie just a little — in a way that still allows them to view themselves as generally honest and decent people.
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Kraut to Lead PCSAS as New Executive Director
The Board of Directors of the Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS), the new system that began with one program in 2009 and now has accredited 30 of the best clinical programs in the United States and Canada, has announced that Alan G. Kraut will be its new Executive Director. Kraut previously served for 27 years as the founding Executive Director of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The PCSAS Board announced Kraut’s appointment today in Chicago, where PCSAS was meeting in conjunction with the APS 2016 Annual Convention.
