Perspectives on Psychological Science

Experimental psychologists investigating eyewitness memory have periodically gathered their thoughts on a variety of eyewitness memory phenomena. Courts and other stakeholders of eyewitness research rely on the expert opinions reflected in these surveys to make informed decisions. However, the last survey of this sort was published more than 20 years ago, and the science of eyewitness memory has developed since that time. Stakeholders need a current database of expert opinions to make informed decisions. In this article, we provide that update...

We present a conceptual framework of situational moderators of gender/sex effects in negotiation, risk-taking, and leadership-three masculine-stereotypic domains associated with gender/sex gaps in pay and authority. We propose that greater situational ambiguity and higher relevance and salience of gender/sex increase the likelihood of gender/sex-linked behaviors in these domains. We argue that greater ambiguity increases the extent to which actors and audiences must search inwardly (e.g., mental schema, past experience) or outwardly (e...

In response to Webb and Tangney (2022) we call into question the conclusion that data collected on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) was "at best-only 2.6% valid" (p. 1). We suggest that Webb and Tangney made certain choices during the study-design and data-collection process that adversely affected the quality of the data collected. As a result, the anecdotal experience of these authors provides weak evidence that MTurk provides low-quality data as implied. In our commentary we highlight best practice recommendations and make suggestions for more effectively collecting and screening online panel data...

How should romantic-relationship quality be approached psychometrically? This is a complicated theoretical and methodological challenge that we begin to address through three studies. In Study 1a, we identified 25 distinct romantic-relationship categories among 754 items from 26 romantic-relationship-quality instruments with a weak Jaccard index (0.38), indicating that the scales' item content was extremely heterogeneous. Study 1b then demonstrated limited structure validity evidence in 43 scale-development-validation articles of 23 of these 26 instruments...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

How important is the timing of the pretreatment evaluation? If we consider mental health to be a relatively fixed condition, the specific timing (e.g., day, hour) of the evaluation is immaterial and often determined on the basis of technical considerations. Indeed, the fundamental assumption underlying the vast majority of psychotherapy research and practice is that mental health is a state that can be captured in a one-dimensional snapshot. If this fundamental assumption, underlying 80 years of empirical research and practice, is incorrect, it may help explain why for decades psychotherapy failed to rise above the 50% efficacy rate in the treatment of mental-health disorders, especially depression, a heterogeneous disorder and the leading cause of disability worldwide...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Psychological science tends to treat subjective well-being and happiness synonymously. We start from the assumption that subjective well-being is more than being happy to ask the fundamental question: What is the ideal level of happiness? From a cross-cultural perspective, we propose that the idealization of attaining maximum levels of happiness may be especially characteristic of Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies but less so for others. Searching for an explanation for why "happiness maximization" might have emerged in these societies, we turn to studies linking cultures to their eco-environmental habitat...

Understanding how genetics influences human psychology is something that the evolutionary sciences emphasize. However, the functions of complex genetic influences on behavior have been overlooked in favor of perspectives that posit unitary influences of genes on behavior. One such example is the belief that human growth, development, and behavior are influenced uniformly by their genes even though previous research has highlighted the genetic conflict endemic in these domains. Although much psychological research has robustly documented areas in which we see the footprints of genetic conflict in human behavior, these areas are referred to by different names that prevent researchers from making connections under a unifying framework...

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the public health system to respond to an emerging, difficult-to-understand pathogen through demanding behaviors, including staying at home, masking for long periods, and vaccinating multiple times. We discuss key challenges of the pandemic health communication efforts deployed in the United States from 2020 to 2022 and identify research priorities. One priority is communicating about uncertainty in ways that prepare the public for disagreement and likely changes in recommendations as scientific understanding advances: How can changes in understanding and recommendations foster a sense that "science works as intended" rather than "the experts are clueless" and prevent creating a void to be filled by misinformation? A second priority concerns creating a culturally fluent framework for asking people to engage in difficult and novel actions: How can health messages foster the perception that difficulties of behavior change signal that the change is important rather than that the change "is not for people like me?" A third priority entails a shift from communication strategies that focus on knowledge and attitudes to interventions that focus on norms, policy, communication about policy, and channel factors that impair behavior change: How can we move beyond educating and correcting misinformation to achieving desired actions?...

Confidence is commonly assumed to monitor the accuracy of responses. However, intriguing results, examined in the light of philosophical discussions of epistemic justification, suggest that confidence actually monitors the reliability of choices rather than (directly) their accuracy. The focus on reliability is consistent with the view that the construction of truth has much in common with the construction of reality: extracting reliable properties that afford prediction. People are assumed to make a binary choice by sampling cues from a "collective wisdomware," and their confidence is based on the consistency of these cues, in line with the self-consistency model...

The psychological study of systemic racism can benefit from the converging insights of "Black Marxism" and development economics, which illustrate how modern systemic racism is rooted in the political and economic institutions established during the historical period of European colonization. This article explores how these insights can be used to study systemic racism and challenge scientific racism in psychology by rethinking traditional research paradigms to incorporate the histories of race, class, and capitalism...

Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error...

Recent reviews of efforts to reduce prejudice and increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace have converged on the conclusion that prejudice is resistant to change and that merely raising awareness of the problem is not enough. There is growing recognition that DEI efforts may fall short because they do not effectively motivate attitudinal and behavioral change, especially the type of change that translates to reducing disparities. Lasting change requires sustained effort and commitment, yet insights from motivation science about how to inspire this are missing from the scientific and practitioner literatures on DEI trainings...

Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences...

Interparental interactions have an important influence on child well-being and development. Yet prior theory and research have primarily focused on interparental conflict as contributing to child maladjustment, which leaves out the critical question of how interparental positive interactions-such as expressed gratitude, capitalization, and shared laughter-may benefit child growth and development. In this article, we integrate theory and research in family, relationship, and affective science to propose a new framework for understanding how the heretofore underexamined positive interparental interactions influence children: interparental positivity spillover theory (IPST)...

Emotional voices attract considerable attention. A search on any browser using "emotional prosody" as a key phrase leads to more than a million entries. Such interest is evident in the scientific literature as well; readers are reminded in the introductory paragraphs of countless articles of the great importance of prosody and that listeners easily infer the emotional state of speakers through acoustic information. However, despite decades of research on this topic and important achievements, the mapping between acoustics and emotional states is still unclear...

Some studies show that living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education, are associated with the magnitude of psychological sex differences. We systematically and quantitatively reviewed 54 articles and conducted new analyses on 27 meta-analyses and large-scale studies to investigate the association between living conditions and psychological sex differences. We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

We illustrate how standard psychometric inventories originally designed for assessing noncognitive human traits can be repurposed as diagnostic tools to evaluate analogous traits in large language models (LLMs). We start from the assumption that LLMs, inadvertently yet inevitably, acquire psychological traits (metaphorically speaking) from the vast text corpora on which they are trained. Such corpora contain sediments of the personalities, values, beliefs, and biases of the countless human authors of these texts, which LLMs learn through a complex training process...