Psychopathology is a common element of the human experience, and psychological scientists are not immune. Recent empirical data demonstrate that a significant proportion of clinical, counseling, and school psychology faculty and graduate students have lived experience, both past and present, of psychopathology. This commentary compliments these findings by leveraging the perspectives of the authors

How common are mental-health difficulties among applied psychologists? This question is paradoxically neglected, perhaps because disclosure and discussion of these experiences remain taboo within the field. This study documented high rates of mental-health difficulties (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) among faculty, graduate students, and others affiliated with accredited doctoral and internship programs

We comment on an article by Sheldon et al. from a previous issue of Perspectives (May 2021). They argued that the presence of positive emotion (Hypothesis 1), the intensity of positive emotion (Hypothesis 2), and chronic positive mood (Hypothesis 3) are reliably signaled by the Duchenne smile (DS). We reexamined the cited literature in support of each hypothesis and show that the study findings were

In principle, successful replications should enhance the credibility of scientific findings, and failed replications should reduce credibility. Yet it is unknown how replication typically affects the influence of research. We analyzed the citation history of 98 articles. Each was published by a selective psychology journal in 2008 and subjected to a replication attempt published in 2015. Relative to

As many schools and departments are considering the removal of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) from their graduate-school admission processes to enhance equity and diversity in higher education, controversies arise. From a psychometric perspective, we see a critical need for clarifying the meanings of measurement “bias” and “fairness” to create common ground for constructive discussions within

We examined the wrecked-by-success hypothesis. Initially formalized by Sigmund Freud, this hypothesis has become pervasive throughout the humanities, popular press, and modern scientific literature. The hypothesis implies that truly outstanding occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being. Study 1 tested this hypothesis in three cohorts of

In this commentary, I highlight flaws in the article by Woo and colleagues (this issue) that undermine its credibility and utility as rigorous science that contributes to the field. I do so by discussing (a) the concept of epistemic oppression regarding the glaring exclusion of multiple germane bodies of research and (b) the importance of including construct validity within a psychometric article regarding

The article by Woo et al. (this issue) reviews the existing research on graduate-school admissions measures. The goal of this commentary is to expand on their review and suggest several ways of supplementing the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) to both increase the predictive validity of admissions decisions and improve the diversity of a graduate program. We rely on several decades of research to

This is a Lewinian-field-theory approach to understanding the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in the context of racism to contribute to the debate about whether graduate schools should remove GRE scores from admissions processes. Woo and colleagues (this issue; p. ♦♦♦) review the empirical literature on bias from a psychometric perspective. In this commentary, I challenge the definition of the underlying

The Woo et al. review (this issue) provides a foundation for considering the larger goals of higher education. We step back to consider the broader goals and ideals of higher education. Fundamentally, we want to admit a diverse set of students into graduate school and then produce the most accomplished scientists, artists, leaders, and innovators. In a world with inequality in preparation and finite

Older adults report surprisingly positive affective experience. The idea that older adults are better at emotion regulation has emerged as an intuitively appealing explanation for why they report such high levels of affective well-being despite other age-related declines. In this article, I review key theories and current evidence on age differences in the use and effectiveness of emotion-regulation

Publishing studies using standardized, machine-readable formats will enable machines to perform meta-analyses on demand. To build a semantically enhanced technology that embodies these functions, we developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa)—a databank that contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation (1958–2017) conducted in 78 societies involving 356,283 participants. Experts annotated these studies

There is a critical disconnect between scientific knowledge about the nature of bias and how this knowledge gets translated into organizational debiasing efforts. Conceptual confusion around what implicit bias is contributes to misunderstanding. Bridging these gaps is the key to understanding when and why antibias interventions will succeed or fail. Notably, there are multiple distinct pathways to

A large portion of research in the social sciences is devoted to using interventions to combat societal and social problems, such as prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict. However, these interventions are often developed using the theories and/or intuitions of the individuals who developed them and evaluated in isolation without comparing their efficacy with other interventions. Here,

Society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. But do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard. We present a unifying framework that points to emotional and cognitive barriers that make learning from failure difficult. Emotions undermine learning because people find failure ego-threatening. People tend to

Research on mixed emotions is flourishing but fractured. Several psychological subfields are working in parallel and separately from other disciplines also studying mixed emotions, which has led to a disorganized literature. In this article, we provide an overview of the literature on mixed emotions and discuss factors contributing to the lack of integration within and between fields. We present an

To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology

Psychedelic science has generated hundreds of compelling published studies yet with relatively little impact on mainstream psychology. I propose that social psychologists have much to gain by incorporating psychoactive substances into their research programs. Here I use (±)-3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) as an example because of its documented ability in experiments and clinical trials to

Researchers across disciplines, including psychology, have sought to understand how people evaluate the fairness of resource distributions. Equity, defined as proportionality of rewards to merit, has dominated the conceptualization of distributive justice in psychology; some scholars have cast it as the primary basis on which distributive decisions are made. The present article acts as a corrective

Whether women and men are psychologically very similar or quite different is a contentious issue in psychological science. This article clarifies this issue by demonstrating that larger and smaller sex/gender differences can reflect differing ways of organizing the same data. For single psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ by sex/gender

The mental-health-care treatment gap remains very large in low-resource communities, both within high-income countries and globally in low- and middle-income countries. Existing approaches for disseminating psychological interventions within health systems are not working well enough, and hard-to-reach, high-risk populations are often going unreached. Alternative implementation models are needed to

Selfishness is central to many theories of human morality, yet its psychological nature remains largely overlooked. Psychologists often draw on classical conceptions of selfishness from evolutionary biology (i.e., selfish gene theory), economics (i.e., rational self-interest), and philosophy (i.e., psychological egoism), but such characterizations offer limited insight into the psychology of selfishness

Research on well-being has exploded in recent years to more than 55,000 relevant publications annually, making it difficult for psychologists—including key communicators such as textbook authors—to stay current with this field. Moreover, well-being is a daily concern among policymakers and members of the general public. Well-being science is relevant to the lives of students—illustrating the diverse

Social-science researchers have increasingly moved from conducting their studies in a face-to-face format to an online format. Although new and innovative remote platforms afford researchers generalizability and scale, many of these platforms also tend to solicit socially desirable responses. This pattern of socially desirable responding is evident in examinations of racial discrimination, in which

Cognitive development is marked by age-related improvements across a number of domains, as young children perform worse than their older counterparts on most tasks. However, there are cases in which young children, and even infants, outperform older children and adults. So when, and why, does being young sometimes confer an advantage? This article provides a comprehensive examination of the peculiar

Tools and tests for measuring the presence and complexity of consciousness are becoming available, but there is no established theoretical approach for what these tools are measuring. This article examines several categories of tests for making reasonable inferences about the presence and complexity of consciousness (defined as the capacity for phenomenal/subjective experience) and also suggests ways

Laboratory procedures have been used for decades as analogues for clinical processes with the goal of improving our understanding of psychological treatments for emotional disorders and identifying strategies to make treatments more effective. This research has often focused on translation from the laboratory to the clinic. Although this approach has notable successes, it has not been seamless. There

Although psychology’s recent crisis has been attributed to various scientific practices, it has come to be called a “replication crisis,” prompting extensive appraisals of this putatively crucial scientific practice. These have yielded disagreements over what kind of replication is to be preferred and what phenomena are being explored, yet the proposals are all grounded in a conventional philosophy

Psychological science is at an inflection point: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities that stem from our historically closed and exclusive culture. Meanwhile, reform efforts to change the future of our science are too narrow in focus to fully succeed. In this article, we call on psychological scientists—focusing specifically on those who use quantitative methods in the United States as

The psychological study of ideology has traditionally emphasized the content of ideological beliefs, guided by questions about what people believe, such as why people believe in omniscient gods or fascist worldviews. This theoretical focus has led to siloed subdisciplines separately dealing with political, religious, moral, and prejudiced attitudes. The fractionation has fostered a neglect of the cognitive

It is often claimed that only experiments can support strong causal inferences and therefore they should be privileged in the behavioral sciences. We disagree. Overvaluing experiments results in their overuse both by researchers and decision makers and in an underappreciation of their shortcomings. Neglect of other methods often follows. Experiments can suggest whether X causes Y in a specific experimental

The search for genetic risk factors underlying the presumed heritability of all human behavior has unfolded in two phases. The first phase, characterized by candidate-gene-association (CGA) studies, has fallen out of favor in the behavior-genetics community, so much so that it has been referred to as a “cautionary tale.” The second and current iteration is characterized by genome-wide association studies

Gender differences in sexuality have gained considerable attention both within and outside of the scientific community. We argue that one of the main unacknowledged reasons for these differences is simply that women experience substantially worse sex than men do. Thus, in examinations of the etiology of gender differences in sexuality, a confound has largely been unacknowledged: Women and men are treated

Even though the motivation to feel worthy, to be respected, and to matter to others has been identified for centuries by scholars, the antecedents, consequences, and conditions of its activation have not been systematically analyzed or integrated. The purpose of this article is to offer such an integration. We feature a motivational construct, the quest for significance, defined as the need to have

Cultural psychologists often treat binary contrasts of West versus East, individualism versus collectivism, and independent versus interdependent self-construal as interchangeable, thus assuming that collectivist societies promote interdependent rather than independent models of selfhood. At odds with this assumption, existing data indicate that Latin American societies emphasize collectivist values

During crises and disasters, such as hurricanes, terrorist threats, or pandemics, policymakers must often increase security at the cost of freedom. Psychological science, however, has shown that the restriction of freedom may have strong negative consequences for behavior and health. We suggest that psychology can inform policy both by elucidating some negative consequences of lost freedom (e.g., depression

Consent is central to many of today’s most pressing social issues: What counts as sexual assault? Whom are the police allowed to search? Can they use people’s data like that? Yet despite the fact that consent is in many ways an inherently psychological phenomenon, it has not been a core topic of study in psychology. Although domain-specific research on consent—most commonly, informed consent and sexual

Original article: Taves, A. (2020). Mystical and other alterations in sense of self: An expanded framework for studying nonordinary experiences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 669–690. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619895047

Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this article we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational

The U.S. criminal-justice system has consequentialist and retributivist goals: It considers what is best for society as well as how to punish people in a manner proportional to their crimes. In deciding on the degree of retribution that is called for, the system attempts to determine the blameworthiness—or culpability—of the people involved, weighing factors such as their ability to think rationality

COVID-19 has infected millions of people and upended the lives of most humans on the planet. Researchers from across the psychological sciences have sought to document and investigate the impact of COVID-19 in myriad ways, causing an explosion of research that is broad in scope, varied in methods, and challenging to consolidate. Because policy and practice aimed at helping people live healthier and

For many behavioral scientists, working in psychology and neighboring sciences, Perspectives on Psychological Science (PPS) has attained the status of a favorite journal offering a forum for theoretical and methodological contemplation. PPS has become a journal that helps behavioral scientists define their identity and establish common ground for their discipline.

We propose a behavioral-science approach to sexual assault on college campuses. In this framework, people commit assault when aspects of the immediate situation trigger certain psychological states. No set of mental processes or situational configurations is a precise predictor of assault. Instead, the interaction between mental processes and situational configurations predicts when sexual assault

In the September 2020 issue of Perspectives, Scott et al. argued that there is insufficient empirical work on White parents’ racial-socialization strategies to support generalizations about the topic and, therefore, that journalists’ recommendation that White parents discuss race and racism with their children represents a case of speculation without evidence. Although we strongly support Scott et

The ideal experiment in physics must be conceptual, cunning, and conclusive. Adoption of these same standards in psychology has led to experiments that are uninformative and frivolous. We explain why we believe that psychology is fundamentally incompatible with hypothesis-driven theoretical science and conclude that this erodes the logic behind recent proposals to improve psychological research, such

The study of intimate relationships and health is a fast-growing discipline with numerous well-developed theories, many of which outline specific interpersonal behaviors and psychological pathways that may give rise to good or poor health. In this article, we argue that the study of relationships and health can move toward interrogating these mechanisms with greater precision and detail, but doing

The modern world holds countless risks for humanity, both large-scale and intimately personal—from cyberwarfare, pandemics, and climate change to sexually transmitted diseases and drug use and abuse. Many risks have prompted institutional, regulatory, and technological countermeasures, the success of which depends to some extent on how individuals learn about the risks in question. We distinguish between

Popular press articles have advocated for parent–child conversations about race and racism to prevent children from developing racial biases, yet empirical investigations of the impact of racial socialization in White U.S. families are scarce. In an article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2020, Scott et al. warned that, given the lack of empirical evidence, parents might actually

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: Psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences and at the same time considered these methods a means of creating a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics—because of its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological

Since the middle of the 20th century, perceptions of risk have been critical to understanding engagement in volitional behavior change. However, theoretical and empirical risk perception research seldom considers the possibility that risk perceptions do not simply exist: They must be formed. Thus, some people may not have formulated a perception of risk for a hazard at the time a researcher asks them

Behavioral science is increasingly used in public policy to understand and address various manifestations of inequalities. Yet evidence from effective population-level interventions is limited. One framework, known as positive deviance, emphasizes individuals from disadvantaged circumstances who have significantly better outcomes than are typical for their group. Studying their behaviors and outcomes

Groups, teams, and collectives—people—are incredibly important to human behavior. People live in families, work in teams, and celebrate and mourn together in groups. Despite the huge variety of human group activity and its fundamental importance to human life, social-psychological research on person perception has overwhelmingly focused on its namesake, the person, rather than expanding to consider

In 2020, Pesta et al. published an article entitled “Racial and Ethnic Group Differences in the Heritability of Intelligence: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” in the journal Intelligence. The authors framed their analysis as an examination of the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, which holds that the heritability of intelligence varies as a function of socioeconomic status. Pesta et al. concluded that the

Social media has rapidly transformed the ways in which adolescents socialize and interact with the world, which has contributed to ongoing public debate about whether social media is helping or harming adolescents. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified both the challenges and opportunities of adolescents’ social-media use, which necessitates revisiting the conversation around teens and social media.

Olfaction is the most ancient sense and is directly connected with emotional areas in the brain. It gives rise to perception linked to emotion both in everyday life and in memory-recall activities. Despite its emotional primacy in perception and its role in sampling the real physical world, olfaction is rarely used in clinical psychological settings because it relies on stimuli that are difficult to

Advances in methods for longitudinal data collection and analysis have prompted a surge of research on psychological processes. However, decisions about how to time assessments are often not explicitly tethered to theories about psychological processes but are instead justified on methodological (e.g., power) or practical (e.g., feasibility) grounds. In many cases, methodological decisions are not

In the face of a slow and inadequate global response to anthropogenic climate change, scholars and journalists frequently claim that human psychology is not designed or evolved to solve the problem, and they highlight a range of “psychological barriers” to climate action. Here, we critically examine this claim and the evidence on which it is based. We identify four key problems with attributing climate

A debate surrounding modularity—the notion that the mind may be exclusively composed of distinct systems or modules—has held philosophers and psychologists captive for nearly 40 years. Concern about this thesis—which has come to be known as the massive modularity debate—serves as the primary grounds for skepticism of evolutionary psychology’s claims about the mind. In this article we argue that the

Psychological theories of gender and/or sex (gender/sex) have the capacity to shape people’s self-perceptions, social judgments, and behaviors. The institutional power of psychology to affect cognition and behavior—not just to measure them—necessitates a serious consideration of our social responsibility to manage the products of our intellectual labor. Therefore, I propose that psychological research