By Janna M. Gottwald

Executive functions are processes that help us to focus on what is important, to remember things, and to plan our daily activities. Finding early markers of executive functioning could help researchers develop interventions for children with impaired executive functioning (Diamond, 2013), but early executive functioning and its emergence in infancy are not yet sufficiently understood.

Dear SPSP community,

By Melissa J. Ferguson, Cornell University and Clayton R. Critcher, University of California, Berkeley

At hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, thousands of students are in the midst of the fall semester, trying to manage the academic tasks of studying, exams, papers and lectures. A lot is riding on their academic performance – earning (or just keeping) scholarships, landing summer internships, gaining employment and of course acquiring new skills and knowledge.

By James A. Russell

Humans everywhere easily read each other’s emotions from their faces – facial expressions of basic emotions are universally recognized -- or so we are told in our textbooks.  A new series of studies raises doubts about this claim.

by Cory Clark

When determining whether someone did something intentionally, should it matter whether the action had positive or negative consequences? Logically, the downstream consequences of an action should be irrelevant to such judgments, but research reveals that U.S. Americans are far more likely to see actions with harmful side-effects as intended than identical actions with helpful ones.[1]

Consider the following example:

This week on the blog, Eric D. Knowles, and Linda R. Tropp, discuss the Rise of White Identity in Politics in this week’s post. Our "Posts Not to Miss" section includes the answer to the question, can images of watching eyes increase generosity? Other posts look at the cultural aspects of smiling and the role of political ideology in reasoning.               

By Eric D. Knowles, New York University and Linda R. Tropp, University of Massachusetts Amherst

By Stefanie Northover

By Thomas Talhelm

Several years ago, I was traveling in Thailand. They call it “the land of smiles,” and that sure seemed true to me. I remember seeing a passenger on the back of a motorbike make eye contact with me and smile. I smiled back.

Two days later, I landed in Kunming, southwestern China. Thailand had gotten me into the habit of smiling at people, so as I walked in a local market, I smiled at anyone who made eye contact with me. What happened in response is what I’d call confusion, mild negativity, and sometimes a furrowed brow.