News

Mohammad Atari discusses how often conversations about morality occur in everyday life

two women talk together

Assistant Professor Mohammad Atari discusses his research about the frequency at which morality gets talked about in everyday conversations. “The answer was surprising...while many people think they talk much about morality, we did not find that in our naturalistic observations of everyday life,” he says. “People don’t talk about moral issues much in their everyday lives (they might still think about them, though).”
PsyPost

Rebecca Spencer comments on research about the impact of sleep deprivation on learning

woman sleeping on bed

Professor Rebecca Spencer comments on research about the impact of sleep deprivation on learning. “Sleep plays a very active role in memory consolidation,” she says. She describes the hippocampus as a desk where papers get piled up throughout the day. “When you sleep, those ‘papers’ are filed away into a long-term filing cabinet to be retrieved as needed.” That “filing cabinet” is the cerebral cortex. “While memory consolidation can happen while awake, this process is stronger or greatest during sleep.”
National Geographic

Tara Mandalaywala Gives BU Symposium Keynote Address 'Children’s Awareness of a Racist World: Unveiling their Reality'

Tara Mandalaywala
Tara Mandalaywala

PBS faculty member Tara Mandalaywala, an acclaimed expert in the role of social essentialism on racial prejudice in young children, gave the keynote address "Children’s Awareness of a Racist World: Unveiling their Reality" at the Developmental Science Emerging Scholars Symposium sponsored by Boston University (BU).

UMass Social Psychologists Create Toolkit for United Nations Group To Facilitate Social Mixing Programs That Promote Migrant Inclusion

icons of people's faces connected with arrows

Social psychologist Linda Tropp and social psychology graduate student Liora Morhayim have developed a toolkit, in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), to provide practitioners around the world with an accessible and practical overview of theory and research on social cohesion and intergroup contact.

To Make Science and Engineering More Diverse, Make Research Socially Relevant

female student smiles in biology lab

In an article in Issues in Science and Technology, Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta argues that science and engineering face two mutually reinforcing problems. First, people think that STEM research is disconnected from societal problems in the real world. Second, these fields struggle to attract and retain diverse students in STEM higher education and careers. Dasgupta offers compelling evidence showing that solving one of these challenges can remedy the other.

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