American Psychologist

Carefully standardized facial images of 591 participants were taken in the laboratory while controlling for self-presentation, facial expression, head orientation, and image properties. They were presented to human raters and a facial recognition algorithm: both humans (r = .21) and the algorithm ( r = .22) could predict participants' scores on a political orientation scale (Cronbach's α = .94) decorrelated with age, gender, and ethnicity. These effects are on par with how well job interviews predict job success, or alcohol drives aggressiveness...

How gender identity is assessed directly shapes how students are supported in elementary schools in the United States. Despite the existence of gender diversity, calls for more inclusive science, and recommendations from national research associations and societies to incorporate and emphasize the voices of individuals with diverse gender identities, most studies exploring gender disparities in education have relied heavily on the assumption of a gender binary. As a result, the omission of diverse gender identities from educational research in the elementary years is troubling...

Loneliness is gaining attention globally as a public health issue because elevated loneliness increases one's risk for depression, compromised immunity, chronic illness, and mortality. Our objective is to zoom into how loneliness has historically evolved through midlife and investigate whether elevations in loneliness are confined to the United States or are similarly transpiring across peer European nations. We use harmonized data on loneliness from nationally representative longitudinal panel surveys from the United States and 13 European nations to directly quantify similarities and differences in historical change of midlife loneliness trajectories...

William ("Bill") E. Pelham Jr. was a renowned clinical child psychologist who specialized in the assessment and treatment of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Bill was born in 1948 in Atlanta, Georgia, to William E. Pelham Sr. and Kittie Copeland Kay, the eldest of four brothers. Bill is most well-known for the development, study, and advocacy of psychosocial treatments for children with ADHD. While at Florida State University in the 1980s, he developed a comprehensive summer treatment program designed to improve family and classroom functioning, strengthen peer relationships, and boost academic achievement...

This article presents an obituary for Endel Tulving. Tulving's educational and professional careers are summarized. His work in the field of human memory is detailed. It is noted that Tulving's look at the field of verbal learning in the late 1950s persuaded him that the dominant associative tradition missed many important aspects of human memory. His research found that at the time of retrieval, memory for the original event may be successfully reinstated only by contextual cues that interact in a complementary fashion with the specifically encoded memory trace, a process that Tulving referred to as "synergistic ecphory"...

Article memorializes Robert Alan LeVine (1932-2023). Robert Alan LeVine was a leading psychological anthropologist, who was instrumental in the rise of cultural psychology. LeVine taught at Northwestern University (1958-1960), the University of Chicago (1960-1976), and Harvard University (1976-1998), where he was Emeritus Professor of Education and Human Development. He wrote 15 books and published over 125 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)...

We respond to commentaries by Brown (2024) and Najavits (2024) on our original work titled "To Expose or Not to Expose: A Comprehensive Perspective on Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder" (Rubenstein et al., 2024). Their work serves to augment the original argument that exposure is an important change factor in the amelioration of traumatic stress but should be viewed more broadly than traditional treatment paradigms suggest. We are grateful for this opportunity and aim to promote additional dialogue in the field about ways to improve upon existing models of trauma and its treatment...

This commentary on Rubenstein et al. (2024) applauds their sensitive historical exploration of exposure therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and balanced review of the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. I offer five points to expand on their contribution. (a) Stringent exposure therapy workforce requirements limit scalability, thus restricting access for the large number of patients in need of PTSD treatment. (b) There are additional non-trauma-focused approaches that show efficacy for PTSD...

In this invited commentary, I address what I see as the major contributions Rubenstein et al. (2024) have made to challenging the hegemony of exposure therapies for trauma-exposed persons. These include a thorough review of the history of the rise of exposure therapies, the identification of posttrauma responses as forms of anxiety disorders, and an extensive discussion of the neurobiology of the trauma response. Additionally, Rubenstein et al. expose the very high dropout rates in studies of exposure therapies and ways in which many traumatized people have not found them helpful...

Trauma-focused psychotherapies, in particular prolonged exposure (PE) therapy, have been recognized as the "gold standard" for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But effectiveness and implementation data show that a large proportion of patients who undergo exposure therapy retain their PTSD diagnosis, and implementation studies have shown low engagement and high dropout rates. Meanwhile, non-trauma-focused therapies have shown promise in treating PTSD. In this review, we aim to answer the question of whether exposure is necessary to treat PTSD by integrating clinical and research literature from multiple perspectives...

The states of the Mountain West region of the United States consistently have the highest rates of suicide in the country, a pattern particularly pronounced in older White men. Although multiple constructs have been proposed to explain this long-standing pattern, including social isolation, cultural values, and psychopathology, relatively little research has been conducted to directly examine the predictive role of these risk factors and how they interact. We review the extant research for these constructs to establish (a) whether the risk factor occurs at a higher rate or is otherwise more influential in this region compared to the rest of the country and (b) whether the risk factor may account for specific effects in older White men in order to determine whether the evidence supports the role of each risk factor in understanding the high rates of suicide among older White men in this region...

Herein, I characterize free will (FW) is an evolved functional capacity within the mature human mind, which provides us with numerous adaptive benefits. The FW capacity was selected for because it enables us to respond effectively to momentary contingencies, via on-the-spot deliberation. But FW also extricates us from the present moment, enabling us to generate and decide between imagined long-term futures. Based upon a compatibilist philosophical definition of FW, I present a creative process model of how the FW capacity works, the goal breakthrough model...

This article memorializes William R. Safarjan (1943-2023). Dr. Safarjan spent much of his career working as a clinical psychologist for the California Department of State Hospitals at Atascadero State Hospital, 1984-2009. During his professional career, Dr. Safarjan served in many roles with the California Psychological Association, including president in 1998, liaison to the California Psychological Association, and membership chair and chair of the research political action committee. He served as vice chair of the American Psychological Association (APA) membership committee, chair of the APA committee of state leaders, council of representatives from California...

From childhood to adulthood, the human brain develops highly specialized yet interacting neural modules that give rise to nuanced attention and other cognitive functions. Each module can specialize over development to support specific functions, yet also coexist in multiple neurobiological modes to support distinct processes. Advances in cognitive neuroscience have conceptualized human attention as a set of cognitive processes anchored in highly specialized yet interacting neural systems. The underlying mechanisms of how these systems interplay to support children's cognitive development of multiple attention processes remain unknown...

Psychology is currently facing a multilayered crisis stemming from the fact that the results of many psychological studies cannot be replicated (replication crisis), that psychological research has neglected cross-cultural and cross-temporal variation (universality crisis), and that many psychological theories are ill-developed and underspecified (theory crisis). In the present article, we use ideas derived from debates in theoretical and philosophical psychology as a basis for responding to all three crises...

Recent studies have found a citation gap in psychology favoring men. This citation gap is subsequently reflected in differences in h-index scores, a crude measure but important one for impact on career advancement. We examine a potential reason for the gap: that male researchers are more likely to come to mind than female researchers (i.e., a difference in memory accessibility). In a survey, faculty from psychology departments in R1 institutions in the United States listed up to five names they considered experts in their field and up to five names they considered rising stars (defined as pretenure) in their field...

The realization that most behavioral science research focuses on cultures labeled as WEIRD-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Arnett, 2008; Henrich et al., 2010; Thalmayer et al., 2021)-has given an impetus to extend the research to more diverse populations. Confucian East Asian societies have relatively strong social and technological infrastructure to advance science and thus have gained much prominence in cross-cultural studies. This has inadvertently fostered another bias: the dominance of WEIRD-Confucian comparisons and a tendency to draw conclusions about "non-WEIRD" cultures in general based on data from Confucian societies...

Reports an error in "Atypical child-parent neural synchrony is linked to negative family emotional climate and children's psychopathological symptoms" by Haowen Su, Christina B. Young, Zhuo Rachel Han, Jianjie Xu, Bingsen Xiong, Zisen Zhou, Jingyi Wang, Lei Hao, Zhi Yang, Gang Chen and Shaozheng Qin ( American Psychologist , Advanced Online Publication, Jul 13, 2023, np). In the article "Atypical Child-Parent Neural Synchrony Is Linked to Negative Family Emotional Climate and Children's Psychopathological Symptoms," by Haowen Su, Christina B...

Wilcox (2024) and Boswell (2024) make a number of important observations about facilitating process sensitivity training, and here, we respond to those suggestions. We postulate that cultivating process sensitivity is complementary, not antithetical, to traditional training in viewing therapy from a theoretical lens, and thus, can serve to enhance, rather than replace one's existing psychotherapy skills. Moreover, we argue that seeing the impact of process adjustments in real time can be a significant motivator for training in process sensitivity since the benefits are more immediately obvious...

Westra and Di Bartolomeo (2024) make a compelling case for integrating "process acuity" skills into routine clinical training. The authors have done the field a service by articulating the need for novel and process-science-informed psychotherapy training and practice. This brief commentary echoes the authors' observations about the status quo of clinical training and expands upon what else will need to be considered to fully realize the goals of their proposal. Specifically, research on negative process signals has outpaced research on the optimal responses to such process signals...