American Psychologist

This article provides an executive summary of the American Psychological Association's (APA's) revised Guidelines for Assessment and Intervention With Persons With Disabilities . The revision was requested by the Committee on Disability Issues in Psychology and was approved by the APA Council of Representatives in February 2022. The task force updated and expanded the guidelines' empirical bases; squarely situated the guidelines in a changing sociocultural landscape (reflected in discussions of disability models, biases and barriers, language use, intersectionality, and respectful and fair assessment and intervention); and added many concrete suggestions for conceptualizing disability and working with disabled clients and their support systems...

The significance of youth suicide as a public health concern is underscored by the fact that it is the second-leading cause of death for youth globally. While suicide rates for White groups have declined, there has been a precipitous rise in suicide deaths and suicide-related phenomena in Black youth; rates remain high among Native American/Indigenous youth. Despite these alarming trends, there are very few culturally tailored suicide risk assessment measures or procedures for youth from communities of color...

Peers' negative police encounters may have collateral consequences and shape adolescents' relationship with authority figures, including those in the school context. Due to the expansion of law enforcement in schools (e.g., school resource officers) and nearby neighborhoods, schools include spaces where adolescents witness or learn about their peers' intrusive encounters (e.g., stop-and-frisks) with the police. When peers experience intrusive police encounters, adolescents may feel like their freedoms are infringed upon by law enforcement and subsequently view institutions, including schools, with distrust and cynicism...

Intergroup contact provides a reliable means of reducing prejudice. Yet, critics suggested that its efficacy is undermined, even eliminated, under certain conditions. Specifically, contact may be ineffective in the face of threat, especially to (historically) advantaged groups, and discrimination, experienced especially by (historically) disadvantaged groups. We considered perceived intergroup threat and perceived discrimination as potential moderators of the effect of contact on prejudice. Two meta-analyses of correlational data from 34 studies (totaling 63,945 respondents-drawn from 67 subsamples across 19 countries) showed that contact was associated with decreased prejudice and increased out-group positivity, in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, among advantaged and disadvantaged group members, and in both Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) and non-WEIRD contexts...

Memorializes Ferdinand Taylor Jones (1932-2022). Jones' career as a clinical psychologist was characterized by an unwavering commitment to social justice, multicultural training, and college mental health. He was professor of psychology emeritus and lecturer emeritus in the School of Medicine at Brown University. Jones was the first director of Brown's Department of Psychological Services when it was created in 1980. In the Warren Alpert School of Medicine, he established seminars on minority issues for psychology interns and postdoctoral fellows and was a leader of support groups for medical students...

Youth mental health is in a crisis as prevalence rates for youth psychopathology continue to rise. With global increases in youth mental health problems, along with the havoc wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health disparities continue to widen as youth from disadvantaged backgrounds (e.g., ethnic/racial minority, low socioeconomic, rural, gender and sexual minorities) are disparately impacted. Parents occupy a critical position in their children's lives in terms of influence, proximity, and responsibility for providing their children with the resources they need to protect their mental health...

A hallmark of human cognition is the capacity to think about observable experience in ways that are nonobvious-from scientific concepts (genes, molecules) to everyday understandings (germs, soul). Where does this capacity come from, and how does it develop? I propose that, contrary to what is classically assumed, young children often extend beyond the tangible "here-and-now" to think about hidden, invisible, abstract, or nonpresent entities. I review examples from three lines of research: essentialism, generic language, and object history...

Visual disabilities significantly impact an individual's mental health. Little is known about the prospective relationship between visual disabilities and anxiety disorders and the underlying effects of modifiable risk factors. Our analysis was based on 117,252 participants from the U.K. Biobank, with baseline data collected between 2006 and 2010. Habitual visual acuity was measured by a standardized logarithmic chart, and ocular disorders reported using questionnaires were collected at baseline. Incident hospitalized anxiety recorded using longitudinal linkage with hospital inpatient data, lifetime anxiety disorder, and current anxiety symptoms assessed by a comprehensive online mental health questionnaire were identified over a 10-year follow-up...

Despite their best intentions, most people fail to save enough for the future. In this research, we demonstrate that people are more successful at saving when their savings goals are aligned with their Big Five personality traits. Study 1 uses a nationally representative sample of 2,447 U.K. citizens to test whether people whose self-declared savings goals more closely match their Big Five personality also report higher levels of savings. We apply specification curve analyses to minimize the risk of having arbitrary analytical decisions produce false-positive results...

Our visual system possesses a remarkable ability to extract summary statistical information from groups of similar objects, known as ensemble perception. It remains elusive whether the processing of ensemble statistics exerts influences on our perceptual decision-making and what roles consciousness and attention play in this process. In a series of experiments, we demonstrated that the processing of ensemble statistics can exert significant modulation effects on our perceptual decision-making, which is independent of consciousness but relies on attentional resources...

Scholarly citation represents one of the most common and essential elements of psychological science, from publishing research, to writing grant proposals, to presenting research at academic conferences. However, when authors mischaracterize prior research findings in their studies, such instances of miscitation call into question the reliability and credibility of scholarship within psychological science and can harm theory development, evidence-based practices, knowledge growth, and public trust in psychology as a legitimate science...

Gender identity is a core component of human experience, critical to account for in broad health, development, psychosocial research, and clinical practice. Yet, the psychometric characterization of gender has been impeded due to challenges in modeling the myriad gender self-descriptors, statistical power limitations related to multigroup analyses, and equity-related concerns regarding the accessibility of complex gender terminology. Therefore, this initiative employed an iterative multi-community-driven process to develop the Gender Self-Report (GSR), a multidimensional gender characterization tool, accessible to youth and adults, nonautistic and autistic people, and gender-diverse and cisgender individuals...

Peer victimization is a worldwide crisis unresolved by 50 years of research and intervention. We capitalized on recent methodological advances and integrated self-determination theory with a social-ecological perspective. We provided teachers with a professional development experience to establish a highly supportive classroom climate that enabled the emergence of pro-victim student bystanders during bullying episodes. In our longitudinal cluster randomized control trial, we randomly assigned 24 teachers (15 men, 9 women; 19 middle school, 5 high school; 32...

This article memorializes Sam G. McFarland (1939-2022). A social and political psychologist, Sam joined the Western Kentucky University (WKU) faculty in 1979 and remained there throughout his 42-year career. In addition to teaching and research, Sam was the long-time director of the WKU Honors Program. Sam achieved the highest university honor, University Distinguished Professor. He remained an active researcher and writer throughout his life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

This article memorializes Bruce G. Klonsky (1950-2022), a devoted State University of New York at Fredonia (SUNY) educator and researcher. After joining SUNY Fredonia Psychology Department in 1979, he taught a wide range of psychology courses (15+), supervised hundreds of internship students, and was a creative research mentor for many undergraduates. His own research focused on leadership, social and personality development, and sport psychology, most recently examining the use of sport psychologists by professional sports teams...

This article memorializes Stuart (Stu) Oskamp (1930-2022). Professor Oskamp, an eminent social psychologist, made enduring contributions by applying social psychological knowledge to real-world problems, especially to the sustainability of the earth. Stu taught at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) from 1960 to 2000. While there he served as chair of the psychology department, chair of the entire graduate faculty, acting director of the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences, and became professor emeritus and received the CGU President's Medal in 2000...

Contact theory is a well-established paradigm for improving intergroup relations-positive contact between groups promotes social harmony by increasing intergroup warmth. A longstanding critique of this paradigm is that contact does not necessarily promote social equality. Recent research has blunted this critique by showing that contact correlates positively with political solidarity expressed by dominant groups toward subordinate groups, thus furthering the goal of equality. However, this research precludes causal inferences because it conflates within-person change (people with higher contact subsequently expressing higher solidarity) and between-person stability (people with chronically high contact simultaneously expressing chronically high solidarity, and vice versa)...

The intended purpose of exclusionary discipline is to improve the learning environment by removing disruptive students; however, emerging evidence has suggested that these practices may have the opposite effect. Exclusionary discipline-especially policies that use suspensions as punishment for minor, developmentally normative behavioral infractions-is a known threat to suspended students' academic achievement, but few have examined whether and how these suspensions may vicariously affect nonsuspended classmates' academic achievement...

It is well established that experiences of racial discrimination pose a significant health risk to ethnic minority youth. In this article, we introduce a new concept, racial uplifts , to capture a largely neglected countertheme in the scientific literature-the nature and processes underlying salubrious race-related experiences. We report on data from a mixed-method study of everyday racial uplifts in the lives of Asian American youth. Study 1a ( n = 20; age range = 17-23 years) and Study 1b ( n = 14; age range = 18-22 years) examined data collected through semistructured focus group interviews...

Presents a memoriam for Philip Cushman. Cushman worked for over four decades as a psychotherapist and served as a core faculty member at Antioch University (2009-2015) and the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP; 1994-2002) and taught as an adjunct at several institutions including the University of Washington and Seattle University. It is noted that Cushman was best known for his critical treatment of how the self was conceptualized in the field of psychology, along with his historically rich analysis of the moral and political horizons of psychotherapy...