The cultural transmission of technical know-how has proven vital to the success of our species. The broad diversity of learning contexts and social configurations, as well as the various kinds of coordinated interactions they involve, speaks to our capacity to flexibly adapt to and succeed in transmitting vital knowledge in various learning contexts. Although often recognized by ethnographers, the

Humans operate in groups that are oftentimes nested in multilayered collectives such as work units within departments and companies, neighborhoods within cities, and regions within nation states. With psychological science mostly focusing on proximate reasons for individuals to join existing groups and how existing groups function, we still poorly understand why groups form ex nihilo, how groups evolve

Global climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of misinformation on social media are just a handful of highly consequential problems affecting society. We argue that the rough contours of many societal problems can be framed within a "wisdom of crowds" perspective. Such a framing allows researchers to recast complex problems within a simple conceptual framework and leverage known results

Many animal species exhibit seasonal changes in their physiology and behavior. Yet despite ample evidence that humans are also responsive to seasons, the impact of seasonal changes on human psychology is underappreciated relative to other sources of variation (e.g., personality, culture, development). This is unfortunate because seasonal variation has potentially profound conceptual, empirical, methodological

Emotions are often thought of as internal mental states centering on individuals' subjective feelings and evaluations. This understanding is consistent with studies of emotion narratives, or the descriptions people give for experienced events that they regard as emotions. Yet these studies, and contemporary psychology more generally, often rely on observations of educated Europeans and European Americans

To curb the spread of the coronavirus, almost all countries implemented nationwide school closures. Suddenly, students experienced a serious disruption to their school and social lives. In this article, we argue that psychological research offers crucial insights for guiding policy about school closures during crises. To this end, we review the existing literature on the impact of school closures during

Most content consumed online is curated by proprietary algorithms deployed by social media platforms and search engines. In this article, we explore the interplay between these algorithms and human agency. Specifically, we consider the extent of entanglement or coupling between humans and algorithms along a continuum from implicit to explicit demand. We emphasize that the interactions people have with

The relationship between age-related hearing loss (ARHL) and cognitive impairment (CI) remains intricate. However, there is no robust evidence from experimental or clinical studies to elucidate their relationship. The key unaddressed questions are (a) whether there is a causal effect of ARHL on CI and (b) whether efficacious treatment of ARHL (such as hearing-aid use) ameliorates CI and dementia-related

The interpersonal distance (IPD) theory provides a novel approach to studying autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this article, we present recent findings on the neurobiological underpinnings of IPD regulation that are distinct in individuals with ASD. We also discuss the potential influence of environmental factors on IPD. We suggest that different IPD regulation may have implications for cognitive

Traditional contact tracing is one of the most powerful weapons people have in the battle against a pandemic, especially when vaccines do not yet exist or do not afford complete protection from infection. But the effectiveness of contact tracing hinges on its ability to find infected people quickly and obtain accurate information from them. Therefore, contact tracing inherits the challenges associated

In many important real-world decision domains, such as finance, the environment, and health, behavior is strongly influenced by experience. Renewed interest in studying this influence led to important advancements in the understanding of these decisions from experience (DfE) in the last 20 years. Building on this literature, we suggest ways the standard experimental design should be extended to better

The multiple-memory-systems framework-that distinct types of memory are supported by distinct brain systems-has guided learning and memory research for decades. However, recent work challenges the one-to-one mapping between brain structures and memory types central to this taxonomy, with key memory-related structures supporting multiple functions across substructures. Here we integrate cross-species

Humans evolved to be hyper-cooperative, particularly when among people who are well known to them, when relationships involve reciprocal helping opportunities, and when the costs to the helper are substantially less than the benefits to the recipient. Because humans' cooperative nature evolved over many millennia when they lived exclusively in small groups, factors that cause cooperation to break down

What are the major sources of worldwide variability in subjective well-being (SWB)? Twin and family studies of SWB have found substantial heritability and strong effects from unique environments but virtually no effects from shared environments. However, extant findings are not necessarily valid at the global level. Prior studies have examined within-countries variability but did not take into account

Humans regularly solve complex problems in cooperative teams. A wide range of mechanisms have been identified that improve the quality of solutions achieved by those teams on reaching consensus. We argue that many of these mechanisms work via increasing the transient diversity of solutions while the group attempts to reach a consensus. These mechanisms can operate at the level of individual psychology

Expectations can profoundly modulate pain experience, during which the periaqueductal gray (PAG) plays a pivotal role. In this article, we focus on motivationally evoked neural activations in cortical and brainstem regions both before and during stimulus administration, as has been demonstrated by experimental studies on pain-modulatory effects of expectations, in the hope of unraveling how the PAG

Although many sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) consider themselves religious or spiritual, the impact of this religiousness or spirituality (RS) on their health is poorly understood. We introduce the religious/spiritual stress and resilience model (RSSR) to provide a robust framework for understanding the variegated ways that RS influences the health of SGMs. The RSSR bridges existing theorizing

Circadian rhythms are powerful timekeepers that drive physiological and intellectual functioning throughout the day. These rhythms vary across individuals, with morning chronotypes rising and peaking early in the day and evening chronotypes showing a later rise in arousal, with peaks in the afternoon or evening. Chronotype also varies with age from childhood to adolescence to old age. As a result of

Fear is an emotion triggered by the perception of danger and motivates safety behaviors. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were ample danger cues (e.g., images of patients on ventilators) and a high need for people to use appropriate safety behaviors (e.g., social distancing). Given this central role of fear within the context of a pandemic, it is important to review some of the emerging

Autism spectrum disorders are more prevalent in children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (D/HH) than in the general population. This potential for diagnostic overlap underscores the importance of understanding the best approaches for assessing autism spectrum disorder in D/HH youths. Despite the recognition of clinical significance, youths who are D/HH are often identified as autistic later than individuals

The relationship between parenting and self-control has received much attention from social and developmental psychologists. In a meta-analytic review, Li et al. (2019) identified a longitudinal association between parenting and subsequent self-control (P → SC) of r = .157, p < .001, and a longitudinal association between adolescent self-control and subsequent parenting (SC → P) of r = .155, p < .001

One of the essential insights from psychological research is that people’s information processing is often biased. By now, a number of different biases have been identified and empirically demonstr...

Negative schemas lie at the core of many common and debilitating mental disorders. Thus, intervention scientists and clinicians have long recognized the importance of designing effective interventi...

In the last decade there has been a proliferation of research on misinformation. One important aspect of this work that receives less attention than it should is exactly why misinformation is a pro...

Research suggests that people differ more in their ability to lie than in their ability to detect lies. However, because studies have not treated senders and messages as separate entities, it is un...

Self-control denotes the ability to override current desires to render behavior consistent with long-term goals. A key assumption is that self-control is required when short-term desires are transi...

There has been a remarkable push for the use of positionality statements—also known as reflexivity statements—in scientific-journal articles and other research literatures. Grounded in reputable ph...

Research and theory in nonverbal communication have made great advances toward understanding the patterns and functions of nonverbal behavior in social settings. Progress has been hindered, we argu...

The mass incarceration of Black people in the United States is gaining attention as a public-health crisis with extreme mental-health implications. Although it is well documented that historical ef...

Infants master temporal patterns of their native language at a developmental trajectory from slow to fast: Shortly after birth, they recognize the slow acoustic modulations specific to their native...

For Durkheim, individuals’ survival and well-being rest on cultural resources and social belonging that must be revived periodically in collective assemblies. Durkheim’s concern was to clarify how ...

Mediation analysis prevails for researchers probing the etiological mechanisms through which treatment affects an outcome. A central challenge of mediation analysis is justifying sufficient baselin...

Four validity types evaluate the approximate truth of inferences communicated by primary research. However, current validity frameworks ignore the truthfulness of empirical inferences that are cent...

There is growing evidence that the published psychological literature is marred by multiple errors and inaccuracies and often fails to reflect the changing nature of the knowledge base. At least fo...

The Bayesian-brain framework applied to placebo responses and other mind–body interactions suggests that the effects on the body result from the interaction between priors, such as expectations and...

Music is both universal, appearing in every known human culture, and culture-specific, often defying intelligibility across cultural boundaries. This duality has been the source of debate within th...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as “remembered” or “imagined”—as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a...

Psychology has been “zooming in” on individuals, dyads, and groups with a narrow lens to the exclusion of “zooming out,” which involves placing the targeted phenomena within more distal layers of i...

Natural human interaction requires us to produce and process many different signals, including speech, hand and head gestures, and facial expressions. These communicative signals, which occur in a ...

Measuring subjective well-being as a key indicator of national wellness has increasingly become part of the international agenda. Current recommendations for measuring well-being at a national leve...

Singlehood, defined as not being in a romantic relationship, is becoming increasingly common worldwide. Despite this, research on singlehood has not received remotely equivalent research attention ...

In this rejoinder, we discuss several areas of agreement as well as some noteworthy divergence in perspectives that are worth exploring further. We also note a few areas where immediate clarificati...

Advances in computer science and data-analytic methods are driving a new era in mental health research and application. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies hold the potential to enhance the a...

The scientific-reform movement, frequently referred to as open science, has the potential to substantially reshape the nature of the scientific activity. For this reason, its sociopolitical anteced...

Researchers have been concerned with internal and external validity for decades, and the discussion continues. The present proposal is that there are less important and more important senses in whi...

We propose a new model of exhaustion and recovery that posits that people evaluate an activity as exhausting or recovering on the basis of the subjective expectation about how exhausting or recover...

The collection and use of demographic data in psychological sciences has the potential to aid in transforming inequities brought about by unjust social conditions toward equity. However, many curre...

The modern world is becoming increasingly integrated, and disciplines are frequently collaborating with each other. Following this trend, clinical psychologists are also often working within multid...

In attempting to draw bigger conclusions, researchers in psychology open their labs to more diverse groups of people. Yet even the most far-reaching theories must be tested with specific stimuli, m...

Multisite (multilab/many-lab) replications have emerged as a popular way of verifying prior research findings, but their record in social psychology has prompted distrust of the field and a sense o...

Climate change is undermining the mental and physical health of global populations, but the question of how it is affecting substance-use behaviors has not been systematically examined. In this nar...

Microaggression research has made great strides over the past decade while steadily pushing itself into mainstream psychological science. Yet the field remains firmly situated within the Western, e...

In this commentary I provide a review of the microaggression construct within a linguistic-pragmatic framework. From this perspective, microaggressions can be viewed as nonconventional indirect spe...

The special issue on microaggressions highlighted how subtle interpersonal bias is complex, harms its targets, and reinforces established systems of inequity. The aim of this commentary is to contr...

Discourse on gender diversity tends to overlook differences across levels of hierarchy (e.g., students, faculty, and editors) and critical dimensions (e.g., subdisciplines and geographical location...

Wood et al. (2022) reviewed arguments in support of the idea that much of human behavior is habitual. In this commentary, we first point at ambiguities in the way Wood et al. referred to habits. Th...

We write in response to an article published in this journal by Andrew Ortony titled “Are All ‘Basic Emotions’ Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct.” The author claimed that “for ...

Such is the power of self-relevance, it has been argued that even arbitrary stimuli (e.g., shapes, lines, colors) with no prior personal connection are privileged during information processing foll...

Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication—the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological con...