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Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Erik Simmons about his journey from a postdoctoral research fellow to a behavioural designer.
An artificial boundary is often drawn between research and activism, but scholar activism can be good for science and for society when it centres the needs of people who are multiply marginalized — especially during the current climate crisis.
Rhythmic elements including beat and metre are integral to human experiences of music. In this Review, Snyder and colleagues discuss leading theories of rhythm perception and synthesize relevant behavioural, neural and genetic findings.
Declines in adolescent mental health over the past decade have been attributed to social media, but the empirical evidence is mixed. In this Review, Orben et al. describe the mechanisms by which social media could amplify the developmental changes that increase adolescents’ mental health vulnerability.
Emotional memories can be vivid and detailed but are prone to change over time. In this Review, Wardell and Palombo detail the malleability of emotional autobiographical memories, the role of narrative and the use of these memories in future thinking.
Changing behaviours might be central to responding to societal issues such as climate change and pandemics. In this Review, Albarracín et al. synthesize meta-analyses of individual and social-structural determinants of behaviour and the efficacy of behavioural change interventions that target them across domains to identify general principles that can inform future intervention decisions.
Humans have a unique capacity for objective and general causal understanding. In this Review, Goddu and Gopnik describe the development of causal learning and reasoning abilities during evolution and across childhood.
The EU commission’s Digital Services Act aims to protect children and adolescents from psychological harm on social media platforms. This initiative needs to be carried out in close cooperation between the EU commission and independent academics.
Environments shape reward learning, which can result in individual differences in behaviour. In this Perspective, Nussenbaum and Hartley consider the development of reward learning through the lens of meta-learning models, in particular meta-reinforcement learning.
Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Deepti Ramadoss about her journey from research scientist to director of graduate studies.
Experiences of objects and features are biased to appear more like previously seen stimuli than they really are. In this Perspective, Manassi and Whitney describe this phenomenon of positive serial dependence and propose continuity fields as the underlying mechanism.
A priori sampling decisions often constrain which age groups are tested in particular developmental studies, which can profoundly shape inferences about developmental change. Thus, it is important to pull back the curtain on what drives these decisions.
Theories of how human cognition differs from that of non-human animals often posit domain-specific advantages. In this Perspective, Cantlon and Piantadosi posit that differences in domain-general information capacity underlie uniquely human capacities.