Findings from psychological research are usually difficult to interpret for non-experts. Yet, non-experts resort to psychological findings to inform their decisions (e.g., whether to seek a psychotherapeutic treatment or not). Thus, the communication of psychological research to non-expert audiences has received increasing attention over the last years. Plain language summaries (PLS) are abstracts of peer-reviewed journal articles that aim to explain the rationale, methods, findings, and interpretation of a scientific study to non-expert audiences using non-technical language. Unlike media articles or other forms of accessible research summaries, PLS are usually written by the authors of the respective journal article, ensuring that research content is accurately reproduced. In this study, we compared the readability of PLS and corresponding scientific abstracts in a sample of 103 journal articles from two psychological peer-reviewed journals. To assess readability, we calculated four readability indices that quantify text characteristics related to reading comprehension (e.g., word difficulty, sentence length). Analyses of variance revealed that PLS were easier to read than scientific abstracts. This effect emerged in both included journals and across all readability indices. There was only little evidence that this effect differed in magnitude between the included journals. In sum, this study shows that PLS may be an effective instrument for communicating psychological research to non-expert audiences. We discuss future research avenues to increase the quality of PLS and strengthen their role in science communication.

对于非专家而言，心理研究的发现通常很难解释。然而，非专家诉诸于心理发现来告知他们的决定（例如，是否寻求心理治疗）。因此，近几年来，与非专业听众进行心理研究的交流越来越受到关注。普通语言摘要（PLS）是经过同行评审的期刊文章的摘要，旨在向使用非技术语言的非专业读者解释科学研究的原理，方法，发现和解释。与媒体文章或其他形式的可访问研究摘要不同，PLS通常由相应期刊文章的作者撰写，以确保准确再现研究内容。在这个研究中，我们在来自两个心理学同行评审期刊的103篇期刊文章中比较了PLS和相应的科学摘要的可读性。为了评估可读性，我们计算了四个可读性指数来量化与阅读理解有关的文本特征（例如，单词难度，句子长度）。方差分析表明，PLS比科学摘要更易于阅读。这种影响在包括期刊在内的所有可读性指数中均出现。几乎没有证据表明所收录期刊之间的这种影响在大小上有所不同。总而言之，这项研究表明，PLS可能是向非专业受众传达心理研究的有效工具。我们讨论了未来的研究途径，以提高PLS的质量并加强其在科学交流中的作用。