academicmemories

Ask someone what loneliness feels like and they will usually describe an absence: an empty apartment, a phone that doesn't buzz, a Friday night with nowhere to be. What they are less likely to describe is what loneliness is doing, quietly in the background, to the way their brain processes the world. Loneliness is not simply the felt experience of missing people. It is a measurable neurobiological state, one that changes how the brain allocates attention, how it interprets ambiguous social cues,

Innocent people confess far more often than the public realizes, and these confessions are not random or irrational. They emerge from identifiable psychological processes that occur under specific conditions. False confessions represent a serious problem within the criminal justice system. They have contributed to wrongful convictions, contaminated investigations, and long-term harm to individuals who were never guilty.

One of the largest areas of research in social psychology is intergroup relations, where researchers aim to build theory and develop interventions to improve the ways that different groups of people interact in a diverse world. Within this area, researchers have taken various perspectives to better understand group interactions and attitude formation. One approach that scientists interested in social cognition take is to study “mentalizing.”