Elizabeth Canning

🚨 New paper! Think of a place you feel deeply attached to. When you're in that place, do you feel like your life is more meaningful? New work from @ashleykrause.bsky.social suggests you probably do!

Just accepted at Journal of Environmental Psychology, we find places can give our life meaning 🧵

📊 Sometimes belonging comes down to a checkbox. Our new paper in PSPB led by Brenda Straka finds that the way Latino identity is formatted on demo forms, especially the traditional two-question census format, can subtly undermine feelings of inclusion and belonging

news.illinois.edu/study-demogr...

It was puzzle box day again and I'm very relieved that the 2nd group of students also had fun!!

Resources at osf.io/q2zk3/files/...

If someone paid you $4.75 every night you slept 7+ hours, would you sleep more?

And--more importantly--would that increase in sleep change your behavior in other meaningful ways?

This new paper ran an experiment to find out.

“I Felt Like I Completely Belonged in That Class”: Gender and the Development of Sense of Belonging in K-12 STEM Education - Educational Psychology Review Educational Psychology Review - Sense of belonging is an important motivational belief that represents individuals’ sense of fit within an environment. However, many women report feeling a...

🚨New paper alert!🚨 Super proud of the work that went into this one, which includes a systematic review and MEGA-ANALYSIS of the development of sense of belonging in STEM education across Grades K-12, with special attention to gender differences. (1/N)
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Details for the SLAM summer fellows program

🚨 📣 Summer Fellows Program Call for undergraduates interested in education research: What are the barriers to effective learning in college? How can we support motivated learning?

For more details, visit: sites.edb.utexas.edu/slam/fellows/

#cogscisky #edusky #academicsky #psychscisky

🎉 My PhD work has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com!

How do we learn who caused what - and how much control we had - when outcomes depend on multiple people? We studied how humans do so using a new social learning task, computational modelling and fMRI.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵👇

Screenshot of the title page of an article published in the journal "Psychological Bulletin" titled: "Trust and Subjective Well-Being Across the Lifespan: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis of Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Associations."

Trust in others and institutions predicts subjective well-being and vice versa. This makes me even more attuned to the costs of people and systems that undermine trust. The decay of trust as a public health issue. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1037/bul0...

Have you noticed how we often describe people from disadvantaged backgrounds as “strivers” or “go-getters” (💪🏼) rather than naturally gifted (🧠)? This may sound benign, but our new KiDLAB research shows that it reveals a harmful, early-emerging stereotype. (1/5)

I am thrilled to announce that this framework is out!

Who is responsible for inequality?

@tanialombrozo.bsky.social and I show that answers depend on whether people are judging causes or obligations, and the past vs the future.

doi.org/10.1177/1745...

Image is of the journal article title, publication outlet and author list.

Ever try to encourage student creativity in undergraduate education? Out now and open access, our new paper documents an iterative (4 study) exploration and evaluation of our approach doi.org/10.1016/j.ts...
#edpsych #highered #creativity

The arts for disease prevention and health promotion: a systematic review - Nature Medicine The arts, according to a systematic synthesis of data from 95 studies (across 26 countries), may support non-communicable disease prevention by providing opportunities for increased physical activity,...

Don't underestimate the effect of the arts—music, dance, visual, gardening, crafts, theater—for promoting health, a systematic review
@naturemedicine.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In our research on socioeconomic background in academia, we ran a survey. Over 2,000 faculty members responded (thanks if you were one!)

Social & cultural capital showed up time and again as key issues.

A few findings you might be interested in...🧵

Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name.

"These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."

Interwoven systems: Towards an integrative framework of students’ motivational and emotional self-regulation Adaptively regulating achievement motivation and achievement emotions is critical for students in navigating their academic lives. Traditionally, motivational (MR) and emotional self-regulation (ER...

How are students' motivational and emotional self-regulation related? In our new article, we advocate for more integrative approaches and discuss possible conceptual and functional linkages between MR and ER.
doi.org/10.1080/0046...

New paper in PSPB on the benefits of giving positive feedback to students, especially from underrepresented groups. Although not the norm in STEM, giving positive feedback boosts self-efficacy and belonging, which increases STEM performance, attitudes, interest
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The Long-Disputed Science of Twin Studies Twin studies and heritability estimates are used in support of biological determinism and in defense of the global inequality status quo.

This critique of twin studies is well written and convincing. www.madinamerica.com/2024/09/the-...

A theory of stereotype negotiation Inequality is pervasive, challenging people and organizations. Yet we lack a clear picture of how people navigate inequality in everyday social and or…

New paper building a theory of stereotype negotiation. How people don't just let stereotypes happen to them; instead they constantly and actively navigate social impressions and others' evaluations by @cydneydupree.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Motivated reasoning is a well-understood phenomenon - or is it?

In a new paper just published at @collabrapsychology.bsky.social we discuss three known unknowns.

doi.org/10.1525/coll...

Here is a 🧵

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com:

1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science.

2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Random Roommates, Broader Minds: Why Higher Ed Should Invest in Intergroup Contact - Sarah E. Gaither, Esha S. Naidu, Emily B. Reilly, 2025 As U.S. campuses grow more diverse, university policy choices determine whether cross-group encounters produce connection or division. Drawing on decades of int...

New paper with Esha Naidu and Emmy Reilly! As U.S. campuses grow more diverse, what really matters isn’t just who is on campus—it’s how universities shape interactions. Randomized roommates when supported with institutional backing can strengthen belonging
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Academic accommodations in college more than doubled between 2011 and 2024 (4% -> 10%) and is driven by students getting accommodations for mental health conditions - job market paper by @alvinchristian.bsky.social

New paper in press at JPSP! An adversarial collaboration focusing on a large-scale test of how strongly implicit racial attitudes predict discriminatory behavior. Pre-print here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Waiting time during admission procedures increases social inequalities in higher education | PNAS Many domains in life require people to wait to access better outcomes, such as waiting in line to access prized tickets for a show, waiting to obta...

Happy to share our latest study published in PNAS.

Using data from 274,316 French students, we find that lower-SES students are less likely to wait for better university offers, even when waiting would lead to more prestigious or better-fit programs.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A screenshot of the article title, highlights, and other information.

Excited to share a new paper by my grad student and myself, highlighting how classroom experiences such as positive classroom climate relate to changes in STEM motivational beliefs across the semester 🤸‍♀️🎉https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1m8Px,8E16MF-A

How can psychology help fight poverty? Our
@pnas.org article shows how “culturally wise” interventions can support women’s agency and boost poverty reduction (Patrick Premand, Thomas Bossuroy, Abdoulaye Sambo, Hazel Markus, Greg Walton @stanforduniversity.bsky.social): t.co/maI5vf3meP

We replicated one of the oldest experiments in Psychology (Triplett, 1898) as a registered report. Children completed a task faster in pairs than when they were alone.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Starting the week strong with a newly accepted paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, co-authored with postdoc @lizsnoland.bsky.social and Sohad Murrar! We merged two largely independent research lines to call for data disaggregation of Asian Americans and MENA Americans

What happens when a lottery determines which proposals for third-party funding get reviewed?

Details here (#OpenAccess and fresh off the press): doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Using Students’ Motivation and Early Course Performance to Examine STEM Dropout: A Survival Analysis Approach - Leiming Ding, Erin Windsor, Jeffrey A Greene, Robert D Plumley, Sirui Ren, Nancy Stachur... Despite extensive efforts to reduce STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) dropout, the United States still faces a shortage of STEM professio...

Kudos to Leiming Ding on this super cool study showing that STEM college students' cost perceptions interacted with early assessment performance to predict dropout intentions. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky