News

Evan Owens ’25 conducts linguistics research to uncover the inner workings of languages and studies biases people may hold against certain languages or ways of speaking.

Davies will be using her fellowship year to further enhance her pedagogy and work on redesigning her 241 Methods of Inquiry course to make it even more impactful for students. 

The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding APS Members in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD.

On April 5th, the Developmental Disabilities and Human Services specialization and the Boltwood Project hosted the second annual Neurodiversity and Disability Studies Summit.

Linda Tropp, professor of psychology, writes that most Americans want to bridge the gaps that divide us, but don’t know how to do this. Tropp, who contributed to the new report, “The Connection Opportunity: Insights for Bringing Americans Together Across Difference,” writes, “In order to close this connection gap, we need to stop thinking about bridging our divides as a political issue and start thinking about it as a human one.”

• The Links Between Executive Function, Negative Affect, and Sensation Seeking During Adolescent Substance Use Development
• AI Moral Stereotyping — The Context of Moral Psychology
• The ViTAL Lab Examines Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Young Adult Mental Health
• 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award: Gale Sinatra

The PROPEL (Promoting Research Opportunities for Equity in Learning) mission is to ensure equitable access to academic and research opportunities for all undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Sophia Deligiannidis, a Psychology and Economics undergraduate student, working on behalf of PROPEL is researching how those with disabilities are impacted by the typical research recruitment environment, and how to avoid any discrimination within the new process that PROPEL is innovating.

Offering a science-driven approach to achieving social change, a newly-published debut book by Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, provost professor of psychological and brain sciences in the College of Natural Sciences, argues that small changes to the “wallpaper” – the local cultures around us – are far more effective in producing structural change locally than seeking change through bias awareness training, symbolic acts or relying solely on good intentions.