Refusing to forgive, versus inaction, can make people feel empowered, principled, and courageous. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Analysis of mouse-tracking data reveals support for both dynamic competition and impulse inhibition accounts of self-control, thought inhibition is relatively rare. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Telling problem drinkers that there's no safe level of alcohol consumption helps them recognize their problem, but it also freaks them out and they dislike the message.

Mouse cursor tracking contributes to the psychological validation of the drift diffusion model: https://osf.io/74rjv

Check out this new preprint from our lab, led by @brownwt.bsky.social and the Bluesky-less Sydney Kavanaugh. We found that psychopathy, especially its antagonistic and disinhibited facets, is more linked to low self-reported levels of **positive** than negative empathy. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A truly Strong Test™ of attachment theory, longitudinally testing whether infants' early caregiver relationships explain variance in their adult attachments. Fortuitously for our field, they do (though effect sizes are much smaller than I would've imagined). psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

A reminder that I’m accepting applications for PhD students!

So that is why you don't prompt people once a day for an entire year... #OpenESM - data from openesmdata.org/datasets/001...

Such a precious gift! Thank you for this resource.

A neural signature for self-focused thinking. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

We have a new tutorial out in Social Cog methods issue, a resampling tool we made in R that basically tells you when some average is "stable" and can be used to guide data collection or test hypotheses related to variance. Quick explanation here 1/n guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/...

Perceptions of men seem to have become more negative over the past 50 years.

Can AI ever become conscious? It will depend on whether consciousness can only arise from the electrochemical processes inherent to biological entities. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Positive emotions are bouba and negative emotions are kiki. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

VCU is hiring two TT Assistant Profs in Psychology (Open area)! Please reach out to me if you have questions. vcujobs.com/jobs/assista...

A conceptual analysis of hundreds of participants' descriptions of humiliating experiences. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Adversarial collab shows conservatives are less likely to update their beliefs based on evidence than libs. Authors could not have gone more out of their way to express that these effect sizes are small, but I find them to still be of a meaningful size. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I love this paper so goddam much. In well-researched areas, we don't need new questionnaires. We need to take stock of what we have and refine it. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

The importance of benchmarks and 'magnitude estimation' techniques for accurate modeling of moral judgments. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it? datacolada.org/129

Nails it.

People don't just avoid those who reject others and approach those who accept others, but they also avoid and approach their friends, respectively. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Uri's response to the JASA p-curve critique: datacolada.org/129

The classic Dot Probe is trash, but this new version shows some early signs of promise as a valid behavioral measure of attentional bias to threat. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

AI recruiting AI participants to do AI-designed studies for AI-written manuscripts that are accepted to AI journals that produce AI content for AI views to make AI stats go up. They won't even notice when the academics die out. That's the dead ivory tower aliens are one day going to find.

Interesting deep dive into why and how the phrase 'women and children' as victims elicits heightened moral outrage. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Expressions of outrage may undermine White people's motivations for reparative actions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Attempts at reducing online aggression (ie, cruel Reddit comments) by increasing empathy (eg, "There is a human being on the other side who might be hurt by your words") tended to backfire. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Don't claim "full mediation". journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being. -Martin Amis

To test mediation in an experiment, it's not enough to just randomly assign participants to X. Manipulating both X and M is ideal, but if you can't, this paper shows you how to perform sensitivity analyses that quantify how much confounders fucked up your model. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Counter to plasticity claims, cortical representations of limbs remain remarkably stable after amputation. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Leaving a religion predicts a subsequent increase in liberal political orientation. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Power analysis is a catch 22. If you know what you needed to know to do it right, you wouldn’t have to do it. So if you do one you know it’s wrong. SO, the goal is to do one well even if not perfectly. This paper is a huge help for doing that in a realistic way. I recommend it.

Incredible work highlighting the long-lasting consequences of redlining for violence exposure.

Dads' midline cortical responses to their own infant's cries were positively correlated with dad-infant bonding. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

"starting a new job, becoming the victim of a crime, and losing a family member were all associated with a relative increase in psychopathy" journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

This is a harrowing analysis of what existing IPV measures miss, in which participants reported on how well/poorly the items mapped onto their own experiences of being abused. It's a hard read, but so important to incorporate the perspectives of those we study. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A helpful way to think about traits (a la Whole Trait Theory) is that they are within-person density distributions. This paper examined how these density distributions varied by different kinds of situations. A really nice way to quantify person-situation interactions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A new-ish measure of reactive and proactive forms of gun violence perpetration finds that these two forms correlate at r = .84 and have a profile similarity with other traits at ICC = .95. The empirical grounds for the proactive-reactive distinction is soft. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

More from HBS' Amended Complaint. They claim to have evidence that Gino backdated a fabricated file to exonerate herself.

I reiterate my perennial call to make the number of reviews that scholars complete (not what they recommend or even what outlets they review for) a matter of public record.

Evidence for potential cross-species altruism in killer whales --- dozens of documented events in which orcas presented food items to humans (often multiple times when the people didn't take it). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40587288/

Artificial selection on dogs has served to expand cortical regions and reduce subcortical/insular regions of the brain. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

On this July 4, liberate the field from cross-sectional “mediation analysis” - check out this new paper discussing an alternative. I bet it’s an instant classic. My sense is that folks continue bad practices bc they don’t know what else to do. This solves that psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Taxonomic Graph Analysis --- a new technique that does a bass-ackwards-esque hierarchical representation of scale items but also deals with independence violations + wording effects and estimates the robustness of the hierarchical structure. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Massive empirical overlap between nine self constructs: self-efficacy, -competence, -confidence, -esteem, -worth, -value, -regard, -liking, and -respect. Better captured by one or two factors. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Meteorological "resonance events", in which storms and heat domes stagnate in a single region for an extended period of time, have tripled in their frequency over the last 70 years. www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat...

Am I completely stupid or does representational similarity analysis seem like a good supplemental approach to estimating psychometric invariance?

Towards the end of our trip, we were walking towards a beach in Cairns and noted that it was the one beach that didn't have a huge warning sign. As we did, a local walked up and told us not to go there. I asked if it was because of sharks and he said, "no, crocs ate all the sharks."