Ahra Ko 고아라

Friends!!!! It’s that time again… Submit abstracts for @spspnews.bsky.social EP preconference: my.spsp.org/Events/Submi...

We are accepting data blitz & poster submissions!

We (@ahrako.bsky.social &me) are so excited to see y’all in Chicago!
Https://ep2026.mystrikingly.com
#EPatSPSP2026 #SPSP2026

New paper out in SPPS w/
@jaimiekrems.bsky.social
(open access)
doi.org/10.1177/1948...

People who oppose abortion typically suggest that their position is motivated by concern for the unborn. But is there more going on?

We illustrate our framework's value through 3 key dimensions: kin presence 👪, violence 🛡️, and sex-age ratio ⚖️.

⭐ Building on Lewin’s field theory and integrating affordance management with life-history perspectives, we offer a more nuanced, temporally dynamic, and evolutionarily grounded framework✨

We actively manage ‘ecological affordances’ by:
1️⃣ fine-tuning how attentively and emotionally we respond to environmental cues,
2️⃣ adjusting how we think, feel, and behave,
3️⃣ restructuring our environments (e.g., relocating)
to align with shifting life-stage goals 🎯

Why does living near family feel essential in childhood 🥰, suffocating in young adulthood 😮‍💨, and lifesaving in parenthood 🥹? Because you changed!

What the environment affords (aka ‘ecological affordances’) depends on one’s goals 🎯, which shift across life stages. So do your strategies.

🚨 New in Behavioral and Brain Sciences:
"Ecological Affordances across Life Stages: An Affordance Management Framework" is out as a target article & now open for commentary proposals!

Ever wonder why an environment once full of promise 🥰 can later feel constraining 😮‍💨? doi.org/10.1017/S014... 🧵

We illustrate our framework's value through 3 key contexts: kin presence 👪, violence 🛡️, and sex-age ratio ⚖️.

⭐ Building on Lewin’s field theory and integrating affordance management with life-history perspectives, we offer a more nuanced, temporally dynamic, and evolutionarily grounded framework✨

We actively manage ‘ecological affordances’ by:
1️⃣ fine-tuning how attentively and emotionally we respond to environmental cues,
2️⃣ adjusting how we think, feel , and behave,
3️⃣ restructuring our environments (e.g., relocating 📦)
to align with shifting life-stage goals 🎯.

Why does living near family feel essential in childhood 🥰, suffocating in young adulthood 😮‍💨, and lifesaving in parenthood 🥹?

Because you changed!

What the environment affords (aka ‘ecological affordances’) depends on one’s goals, which shift across life stages. So do your strategies.

3️⃣ Feeling disgust bridged threat perception and avoidance behavior—within the same individual over time (again)!

Overall, our research revealed how flexible the ‘behavioral immune system’ can be—long-theorized flexibility, finally demonstrated using real-world longitudinal data!

2️⃣ This threat perception shifted dynamically within the same person over time. Americans who became more disease-avoidant (than their own baseline) when new COVID cases surged, saw Republicans as more infectious—*even among Republican supporters*.

Real-time ecological recalibration!

1️⃣ Our disease psychology can quickly learn new, socially constructed cues. Though conservatives are typically more threat-vigilant & voters favor them in crises, COVID flipped the script in the U.S.

Americans believed that Republicans were more likely to infect others with COVID than Democrats.

Thrilled to receive the Postdoctoral Award for our paper @American Psychologist: doi.org/10.1037/amp0.... A deep dive into the 'functional flexibility' of disease psychology. COVID’s natural experiment put long-held theories to the test. Here are 3 contributions from a longitudinal study 🧵