#beyondAcademia: “I can get … a lot of … satis-fffaction”

After experimental psychologists leave academia, how satisfied are they with their new careers? And how do the positives and negatives compare to their experience in academia? Our respondents, introduced here, shared the upsides, and the downsides, of pursuing a non-academic career. Intellectual Satisfaction If there’s one thing academia is known for, it’s for the pursuit […]

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#beyondAcademia: What skills can experimental psychologists offer?

The experience that experimental psychologists acquire during their academic careers proves to be extremely useful outside of academia. When we asked our respondents, whom we introduced at the beginning of the week, what knowledge and skills from academia they use most often in their new careers, Katie Rotella summed up the group’s views: “pretty much […]

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#beyondAcademia: What are the motivations for a career switch out of academia?

We introduced our respondents yesterday. Their motivations for leaving academia fell into four broad themes: lifestyle factors, scarcity, curiosity, and impact. Lifestyle factors Most respondents cited the need for increased control over their careers and where they lived as important reasons for their career switch. Being a young scientist in academia involv­es stress and uncertainty. […]

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(The good) life beyond academia

According to 2015 estimates, the average psychology PhD graduate is 31.2 years old and has spent the last seven years in graduate school. What’s next? Approximately 32% plan to complete a postdoc, and 23% have definite employment lined up. This employment is more likely to be in non-academic sectors—industry, government, or non-profit—than in academia. Then […]

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It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it: sound cues help listeners parse words differently across languages

Hearing other people speak a foreign language can be dizzying. How can they speak so fast? Why don’t they pause between words, like we do? Actually, foreign-language speakers do pause: but despite how it sounds to us in our native tongue, spoken language is not neatly broken up by silence between words. Not convinced? Take […]

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Dobby did it!

Dobby. Dobby did it! We have a new and powerful platform for the Featured Content section of the Psychonomic webpage. The team of elves at TRG (a Hogwarts subsidiary) has worked tirelessly behind the scences to convert all our existing content to the new platform. The chief deputy elf, Ryan Stoeffler, deserves a particular “thank-you” for […]

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When HOOK lets you remember the voice of BOOK: generation effects for context

Get ready to think of some antonyms. Ready? Now fill in the blanks: HOT-C____, SHORT-T_____, and LEFT-R____. Decades of memory research have converged on the strong conclusion that your memory for cold, tall, and right will be better after you generate them in response to the antonym cues than if you had merely read those […]

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Jekyll, Hyde and Seek? The promises and pitfalls of establishing a work persona on social media

Setting the stage: a packed room in the Austria Center Vienna, venue of the International Convention of Psychological Science from 23-25 March 2017. Six speakers from various research areas, some in the audience already tweeting about the session before it even started. The session focused on the use of Social Media to Promote Professional Development, […]

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When too much inhibition freezes ducks and bunnies into their perceptual place

Our perception of the world is flexible and depends on our expectations, our experience, and on cues around us. Ambiguous images, whose identity can change depending on our interpretation, offer a striking illustration of this flexibility. Perhaps the best-known and best-studied ambiguous image is the rabbit-duck, first brought to psychologists’ attention by Jastrow in 1899. […]

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