If you’re anxious about work, finances, the state of the world or anything else, you might try a moment of mindfulness. Paying close attention to the present moment without judgment — the basic idea behind all mindfulness techniques — can help calm anxiety and improve focus, said Resh Gupta, a postdoctoral research associate with the Mindfulness Science and Practice research cluster at Washington University in St. Louis.

Social media can be an emotional minefield: the vitriol, the unrealistic portrayals of seemingly perfect lives and the doomsday scenarios. Some corners of the internet seem designed to make people feel worse about themselves and their world.

But there’s another side to social media: puppies, recipes, “Severance” recaps and meaningful connections.

Good parenting can make all the difference as newborns learn to communicate and process information, and an increasing amount of early-childhood development research has shown that parent training is a worthy investment to improve childhood outcomes.

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.

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)

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.

A transdisciplinary team funded by TRIADS discovered an unexpected behavioral pattern when they asked humans to train an AI bot.

A survey by researchers in The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences found that children were more likely to report major discrimination if their parents had experienced something similar.

Researchers in The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences are using cutting-edge techniques to help us weather the challenges of everyday life.