Want to reach your goals? Start with your emotions, WashU experts say
Nate Eckland and Renee Thompson explore the role of emotional clarity in reaching everyday objectives, big and small.
News
Fighting the fading mind
Braver elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Barch wins major psychology prize from the National Academy of Sciences
What do our words say about our minds?
Psychologists at WashU are working with data scientists to develop AI tools to help psychologists uncover hidden cues to personality in language.
Study saying monthly cash won’t help children’s health is highly misleading — even irresponsible
There are three major issues with the Baby’s First Years study design
Isaacowitz wins mid-career award from the Society for Affective Science
Derek Isaacowitz, professor of psychological and brain sciences, has been named the 2025 recipient of the Mid-Career Trajectory in Affective Science Award. He will receive the honor at the Society for Affective Science’s annual conference in Portland, Oregon, in March.
Zacks installed as the Edgar James Swift Professor
At his February installation ceremony, the chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and professor of radiology presented his lab’s recent work and discussed how people’s memories perform better when they break longer events into shorter pieces, known as segmentation. The way our brains process and organize information can tell us a lot about human development, he said, especially when it is affected by diseases. “I’m in this line of work because I’m captivated by the bare, bald facts of human experience,” Zacks said.
New model from WashU scientists can improve understanding of human attention
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have created a neural network model to understand the mechanics of how humans concentrate in complex environments. With this task, participants face three distractions from a primary task, mimicking more natural conditions for human concentration. Instead of looking at simple colored words (Stroop task), participants are required to find a target feature among complex stimuli with varying shapes, colors, borders and motion directions. People respond slower when the target is mixed with many distractors. (Image courtesy of Control and Decision Making lab)
Brain structure differences provide clues to substance use risks
The main events: How scenes from life shape consciousness, build memories
Friedman Center grant to study experiences of ageism
Ageism is “prevalent, invisible and hurts older people and communities,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, the Bettie Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy at the Brown School, who leads the study with center co-director Brian Carpenter, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences.