Psychology terms made easy: prosody

Welcome to another installment of our Psychology Terms Made Easy series! In this post, we will be breaking down the concept of prosody 🔊! Can you think of a time when your friend told you they were “fine”, but the features of their voice (such as the pitch, intensity level and rhythm) told you otherwise? Together, these features were helping you understand how your friend really felt!

Not only can researchers investigate how well people identify emotional states through prosody, but they can also study how we use prosody to express ourselves… such as in our EXPRESS-1 Study 😄!

Special thanks to our research assistant Jake Hartwig-Macdonald for helping us deconstruct the concept of prosody!!

#psychology #prosody #science #scicomm #emotion #PTME

Psychology terms made easy: social re-orientation

New post in our Psychology Terms Made Easy series! If you’re a parent of a teenager, you may have noticed changes in your teen’s social behaviour as they enter adolescence. 👦 👧 Psychologists often call this phenomena “social re-orientation”. It describes the changes in social behaviour that prioritize peers outside of the family home during adolescence. 👯 More research is needed to understand WHY this happens, but many researchers think that social re-orientation is spurred on by changes in teenagers’ hormones, brain function, and social environments. 🧠

Our DETECT-A study focuses on exactly this—check out our link in bio to learn more about this study, and how 12- to 15-year-olds can participate! ✌️

(Thanks to lab member Olivia Merulla for this explainer! 🙏)

Psychology terms made easy: Attentional biases

New post in our Psychology Terms Made Easy series… on attentional biases! The DSEC Lab is interested in how humans direct their attention to different things in our social environments. 👀 Certain things (like threatening faces, for example) are more likely to draw our attention than others. ❗ Is everyone likely to show attentional biases? Are some people more likely than others to experience this? Check out these slides by DSEC Lab directed research student Olivia Merulla for some answers to these questions! 🕵️

Let us know what questions you have for us in the comments below! What terms should we cover next? 🤗

#PTME #research #psychology #attention #explain

Psychology terms made easy: Nonverbal encoding

Welcome to a new series: Psychology Terms Made Easy! 🙌 We’ll be breaking down the terms we use for concepts we study in the lab. First up: nonverbal encoding! 🎭 Flip through the slides to see an explanation of this concept, and an example of when you would be encountering nonverbal encoding in the real world!

Shout out to Honours student Sarah Robichaud for her work in creating this installment of #PTME! What terms do you want us to tackle next? 😁