The 10 things you should know about sign languages are the following: (1) Sign languages have phonology and poetry. (2) Sign languages vary in their linguistic structure and family history but shar...

We present a theoretical model that describes four explanations (mechanisms) why religious adolescents display less risk behavior than nonreligious adolescents. Specifically, religions affect the e...

Virtual intelligence is “the ability to communicate and navigate relationships and achieve business goals when engaging with others who are not physically co-present.” Virtual intelligence is parti...

Our mental experience is largely continuous on the scale of seconds and minutes. However, this continuity does not always arise from a volitional carrying forward of ideas. Instead, recent actions,...

A sizeable minority of people engage, or have engaged, in some form of consensually nonmonogamous relationship (explicit mutual agreements to have multiple emotional, romantic, and/or sexual relati...

Social scientists have begun to extensively study how living in contexts with high income inequality affects psychological outcomes. Herein we overview a conceptual framework that integrates, organ...

Empirical claims are inevitably associated with uncertainty, and a major goal of data analysis is therefore to quantify that uncertainty. Recent work has revealed that most uncertainty may lie not ...

Perception is our primary means of accessing the external world. What is the nature of this core mental process? Although this question is at the center of scientific research on perception, it has...

A cornerstone of human information processing is how we make decisions about incoming sensory percepts. Much of psychological science has focused on understanding how these judgments operate in ski...

Much research has examined the link between (anti-)egalitarian ideology and motivated social cognition. However, this research is typically framed around anti-egalitarianism, with the other end of ...

Self-regulation denotes the processes by which people initiate, maintain, and control their own thoughts, behaviors, or emotions to produce a desired outcome or avoid an undesired outcome. Self-reg...

Parental burnout (PB), an exhaustion disorder related to parenting, is receiving increasing attention. In this article we aim to take stock of the findings accumulated about PB over the past 15 yea...

Romantic relationships are ubiquitous among adolescents and adults the world over. More than 90% of adults in the United States will marry at some point, and cohabitation is increasingly common amo...

Recent evidence suggests that children play an active role in their own learning in many domains, yet the study of language development typically casts children as passive recipients of adult guida...

Here we present semantic space theory and the data-driven methods it entails. Across the largest studies to date of emotion-related experience, expression, and physiology, we find that emotion is h...

Chronic pain and substance use disorders (SUDs) are common, debilitating, and often persist over the longer term. On their own, each represents a significant health problem, with estimates indicati...

Deepfakes are an effective method of media manipulation because of their realism and also because truth is not a priority when people are consuming and sharing content online. Consumers are more fo...

Executive function (EF) skills, including working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, form the neurocognitive basis for conscious, goal-directed behavior and self-control. Young children...

Humans are avid explainers: We ask “why?” and derive satisfaction from a good answer. But humans are also selective explainers: Only some observations prompt us to ask “why?” and only some answers ...

Major depressive disorder is the leading cause of physical and mental disability worldwide, affecting more than 264 million people. A disproportionate amount of the enormous personal, societal, and...

Negative emotions can negatively bias social judgment. However, these emotions can be tempered when expressed, suggesting that emotional disclosure might enable fairer evaluations. Three projects c...

A growing body of evidence suggests that many aspects of psychology have evolved culturally over historical time. A combination of approaches, including experimental data collected over the past 75...

Cognitive psychology has traditionally focused on investigating principles of cognition that are universal across the human species. The motivation to identify “cognitive universals” stems from the...

Delusions are distressing and disabling symptoms of various clinical disorders. Delusions are associated with an aberrant and apparently contradictory treatment of evidence, characterized by both e...

Response durations for simple key presses are an easily available but heavily underused measure. Whereas response times dominate the toolbox of experimental psychologists and cognitive modelers ali...

We suggest that individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience difficulty accessing their internal states, including their feelings, emotions, preferences, and motivations. Instead...

In the last century since the word “empathy” was first introduced to the English vernacular, it has gained wide attention within academia and society more broadly. However, empathy has proven parti...

Institutional inversion occurs when collective attitudes lead to institutions that in turn lead to behaviors that are the opposite of those attitudes. We illustrate this process with the case of de...

Whether life transitions are anticipated or unforeseen, they can be challenging to navigate because the change process involves a period of uncertainty and adjustment. Specifically, transitions oft...

Cultural differences in emotion expression, experience, and regulation can cause misunderstandings with lasting effects on interpersonal, intergroup, and international relations. We propose that th...

Academic and lay interest has accrued over recent years with respect to how people develop a purpose in life. However, few theoretical models exist for understanding this developmental process as w...

We like people and objects more when they are described in positive than in negative terms. But even seemingly neutral words can elicit positive or negative responses. This is the case for words th...

Despite extensive research on gender differences in spatial cognition, the potential roles of affective and situational factors in accounting for these differences remain relatively understudied. H...

To varying degrees, people have the capacity to alter their subjective experience such that it misrepresents reality in ways consistent with their goals and such that the misrepresentation can be s...

I review recent literature on information demand and its implications for attention control. I argue that this literature motivates a view of attention as a mechanism that reduces uncertainty by se...

The sexual harassment of girls and women is a common occurrence that begins in early adolescence and continues into adulthood. Not only is experiencing sexual harassment common, but it is also wide...

Children’s understanding of contagion has been a fruitful area for studying children’s learning. However, despite a large literature on children’s conceptual understanding of illness, there is very...

Life motion, the active movements of people and other animals, contains a wealth of information that is potentially accessible to the visual system of an observer. Biological-motion point-light dis...

Behaving prosocially can increase well-being among both those performing a prosocial act and those receiving it, and yet people may experience some reluctance to engage in direct prosocial actions....

The ability to make rapid and precise decisions regarding the presence or absence of threats in the environment is critical for survival. Although threatening stimuli may be detected more accuratel...

The notion of metacognitive myopia refers to a conspicuous weakness of the quality control of memory and reasoning processes. Although people are often remarkably sensitive even to complex samples ...

Genomic research is rapidly advancing, and personalized genetic risk information about various mental disorders is likely to become readily available for many individuals. Although genetic profilin...

From the COVID-19 global pandemic to racial injustice and the continued impact of climate change on communities across the globe, the past couple of years have demonstrated the need for a greater u...

Research that conceptualizes marginalization as tied to both pride and prejudice—or as simultaneously a source of strengths and stigma—is especially well positioned to address social problems in wa...

We organize the literature on triggers and functions of nostalgia by advancing a regulatory model in which the emotion serves as a homeostatic corrective (i.e., a process that establishes and maint...

Human decisions are context dependent in ways that violate classical norms of rational choice. However, these norms implicitly depend on idealized descriptive assumptions that are often unrealistic...

Callous-unemotional (CU) traits, a risk factor for psychopathy, delineate youths with relatively low empathy and guilt, and identify youths with high risk for chronic and severe antisocial behavior...

Leadership often involves providing leadership to a group that is structured into separate subgroups that have distinctive self-contained identities that are cherished by their members. In this res...

Controlled behavior requires response inhibition, which is a cognitive function that involves withholding action as goals change. Response inhibition is often assessed using the stop-signal paradig...

Past studies show that spending money on other people—prosocial spending—increases a person’s happiness. However, foundational research on this topic was conducted prior to psychology’s credibility...

Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people ...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) parents raise well-adjusted children. How do they accomplish this feat despite stigma and discrimination? Psychological scholarship (often ba...

This article introduces ecological active learning, a developmental framework that focuses on children’s ability to adapt and tailor their active-learning strategies to the particular structure and...

The vast majority of research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focuses on characterizing and addressing the social communication deficits and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior that const...

Despite decades of clinical, sociopolitical, and research efforts, progress in understanding and treating mental health problems remains disappointing. I discuss two barriers that have contributed ...

No two emergency situations are alike. A combination of human and contextual factors makes each emergency and disaster unique in its time line, its aftermath, and especially its impact on affected ...

Psychology is the study of the mind, how it works, and how it affects behavior. In the context of intergroup relations and, specifically, the study of racism, the tight focus on mind and behavior h...

Research on work as a calling is gaining momentum, and work-as-a-calling theory is providing a helpful deductive structure to the consistent evidence that people who view their work as a calling an...

Human genetics is advancing at an unprecedented pace. Improvements in genotyping technology and rapidly falling costs have accelerated gene discovery. We can now comprehensively scan the genome, te...

Over the past several decades, researchers in psychology, neuroscience, marketing, and economics have been keen to understand context effects in multialternative, multiattribute decision making. Th...