Noel Vest’s goal was to go to community college to earn a degree as a chemical dependency counselor when he walked out the doors of a Nevada prison on June 28, 2009.

Other than hard labor, it was the only career he thought was possible for a formerly incarcerated person.

Almost a decade later Vest is about to graduate from Washington State University with a PhD in psychology and start the next chapter of his life as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

“Never in a million years would I have dreamed I’d be where I am today,” Vest said. “There’s a lot to be … » More …

The term “precrastination” is defined as the tendency to tackle subgoals at the earliest opportunity — even at the expense of extra effort.

In a study from 2018, led by Lisa Fournier, a professor of psychology at Washington State University, subjects were tasked with retrieving two buckets of balls. One was 6 to 12 feet in front of them, and the other was another 6 to 10 feet farther. Eighty percent of the subjects picked up the first bucket, carried it with them all the way to the second one, and then carried both back to the starting point.

Amy Nusbaum learned from a recent study that a significant amount of college students don’t get enough to eat, so she decided to set up a mini food bank.

“This is a thing I can do right now that’ll help the students right now. And it doesn’t need to be like a huge thing, it’s a mailbox outside of my office, that for most of the last few months I’ve just been buying stuff as it runs out,” said Nusbaum, a doctoral candidate in psychology.

She started to run out of food, but before she made … » More …

While the scientific research behind CBD for pain relief is still lacking, what we do know is very promising. Believe it or not, marijuana has been used to treat pain as far back as 2900 B.C. More recently, scientists have started to discover that specific compounds found in marijuana, including CBD, are to thank for its pain-relieving effects.

Many studies suggest that how CBD works to relieve pain all comes down to the brain. Essentially it boils down to neurotransmitters in the brain. One theory is that it desensitizes a certain receptor that is known to be involved in pain – the TRPV1. This is … » More …

Fatigue and sleepiness on the job significantly raise the odds of officers drawing citizen complaints during their shift, according to a newly published study by a team of sleep specialists.

Their first-of-its-kind analysis finds that public complaints are roughly seven times more likely to occur on shifts with a traditionally high probability of officer tiredness—primarily, night shifts.

The study was led by Samantha Riedy, a PhD candidate in experimental psychology and a graduate research assistant at the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University (WSU). Joining her were Dr. Drew Dawson, a prominent sleep investigator with Central Queensland University in Australia, and WSU’s Dr. … » More …