Science and religion are typically thought to be at odds with one another, but Francis Collins doesn’t see it that way. The former director of both the National Institutes of Health and National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins is also a man of devout faith. Looking at the distrust and increasingly fractious divide between scientific […]

The Create ceramics studio in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood is a tapestry of gentle, sturdy neutrals. Earthenware pots, bowls and teacups awaiting paint jobs rest on light gray shelves; white drop cloths and stone potter’s wheels take up most of the wood floor, all of it bathed in low afternoon sunlight gushing through storefront windows. But […]

A new offering for the spring 2024 semester, PSYC-4660 is a seminar in cognition, a subset of psychology that covers how people encode, represent and process information from the environment in the brain, according to Coley, a psychology professor with a dual appointment in environmental science. Humans & Nature zeros in on how those things […]

Jack Groothuis’ life was at risk from the moment he was born to two Jewish parents during the Holocaust. To protect her son, his mother, Helen, placed him into hiding with a Christian family in Vught, a town about 59 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Jack spent the first two years of his life being raised […]

When Ashleigh Chiwaya was a freshman at an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, she realized that Black students there had a unique challenge — limited access to hair care products.

Some people begin playing Christmas music the moment the clock strikes 12 on Dec. 1 (or on Nov. 1 if they’re really spirited). Usually included on that playlist? Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

In a paper published in Nature Mental Health, Northeastern psychology professor Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli advises policy makers to consider turning to the low-cost, readily available practice of mindfulness meditation to change brain activity associated with mental illness.

Search for a “brain training” application on your smartphone or computer and you will get dozens of suggestions. They all claim to improve memory, attention, problem-solving or other cognitive skills via playing games.

Ajay Satpute, assistant professor of psychology, remembers the first question he ever asked at an academic conference. “It was about the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and theory of mind, basically mentalizing about other people,” he says.

Alexandra Rodman wants to understand why “75% of all mental health diagnoses occur during the adolescent years.” What makes us, as humans, so vulnerable to social stressors in the years following puberty?

When Stephanie Noble, a new assistant professor of psychology in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health, says that psychology and neuroscience are facing a “reproducibility crisis,” what she means is that the scientific method itself is at risk.

For many of us, our first word was either “dada” or “mama.” A concept known as “statistical learning” likely played a role in helping us reach that milestone. Statistical learning, or SL for short, is a foundational theory of language development used to explain the process by which a person gains the understanding to detect, […]

While Lace Padilla’s data visualization forecasts are intended to appear simple, the research and psychology behind their designs are anything but.

What is nature? When Northeastern University researchers asked a sample of undergraduate students this question last spring, many of their responses included “the outdoors,” “flora and fauna that exist without human interference” or “natural environment.”