Folk Classification and Factor Rotations: Whales, Sharks, and the Problems With the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)
Gerald J. Haeffel et al.

Haeffel and colleagues evaluated the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), a classification system that clusters symptoms of mental illness into dimensions of psychopathology rather than the classic diagnostic taxonomies used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), for instance. The authors suggest that HiTOP does not show a high degree of accuracy and may hinder understanding of the etiology of psychopathology. Thus, they believe that HiTOP is not ready to be used in clinical settings and recommend that practitioners use the DSM while researchers develop a theory-based classification system.

Defining and Measuring Meditation-Related Adverse Effects in Mindfulness-Based Programs
Willoughby B. Britton, Jared R. Lindahl, David J. Cooper, Nicholas K. Canby, and Roman Palitsky

Mindfulness-based programs use meditation and other mindfulness techniques to treat psychological issues, such as stress or depression, but do these programs also have adverse effects? Britton and colleagues measured meditation-related side effects following three variants of an 8-week program of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Results indicated that 58% of participants experienced meditation-related adverse effects, and 37% reported that the adverse effects had negative impacts on their daily functioning. Lasting bad effects occurred in 6% to 14% of participants and were consistent with signs of dysregulated arousal (e.g., insomnia, anxiety, and dissociation).

Selectively Interfering With Intrusive but Not Voluntary Memories of a Trauma Film: Accounting for the Role of Associative Memory
Alex Lau-Zhu, Richard N. Henson, and Emily A. Holmes

Lau-Zhu and colleagues showed participants trauma films (e.g., famine in Rwanda) followed by an interference procedure (film stills as reminders, plus a Tetris game) or a control procedure (film reminders only). Participants reported intrusive memories of the films while completing cognitive tasks and performing a recognition test of film stills. They also reported intrusive memories of the films during the week after watching them. Overall, participants who went through the interference procedure reported fewer intrusive memories than those in the control group but comparable recognition memory, suggesting an involuntary versus voluntary memory dissociation for emotional content.

Decoupling of Obsessions and Compulsions During Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Youths With Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Bunmi O. Olatunji et al.

The relationship between obsessions and compulsions throughout treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) appears to be associated with treatment outcomes. Youths between 7 and 17 years of age with OCD received 10 sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy that emphasized exposure and response prevention (ERP). ERP entails exposure to fear-eliciting stimuli (i.e., obsessions) combined with instructions to abstain from compulsive behaviors (i.e., actions to reduce the anxiety provoked by the obsessions). Participants who showed improvement after the ERP treatment experienced a decoupling of obsessions and compulsions, whereas those who did not show improvement experienced a strengthening of the association between obsessions and compulsions.

Placebo Effects: A New Theory
Tao Liu

Liu proposes a new model to explain how a placebo’s effect on the mind can affect the body, lessening a person’s symptoms. According to Liu’s model, context-based placebo effects arise from positive treatment beliefs but are directly caused by benefit expectations. Thus, placebos mediate a belief-expectation transformation, triggering therapeutic responses. Specifically, placebos’ effects depend on treatment beliefs and how those beliefs are converted into patients’ motivations as well as expectations of benefits. Thus, placebo effects shift from weak to strong when patients’ belief-based treatment expectations shift from less negative through neutral to positive, changing the patients’ motivations.

Inferences Training Affects Memory, Rumination, and Mood
Baruch Perlman et al.

Perlman and colleagues used a cognitive-bias modification procedure to train participants to make causal inferences. Participants imagined themselves as the main character in negative social, academic, and occupational scenarios; each scenario was accompanied by a positive or negative causal inference. When asked to make inferences for new negative scenarios, participants made inferences that reflected their positive or negative training. Participants also confabulated memories about the inferences congruent with their training valence. Training had immediate effects on negative mood and rumination, but not after the recall of autobiographical memories. In participants with high levels of depression, training influenced inferences about autobiographical memories.

Filthiness of Immorality: Manipulating Disgust and Moral Rigidity Through Noninvasive Brain Stimulation as a Promising Therapeutic Tool for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Giuseppe Salvo et al.

Noninvasive brain stimulation may reduce some of the most impairing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), this research suggests. Healthy participants received 15 min of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the temporal lobe and completed measures to assess disgust (subjective ratings, physiological measures, and implicit measures) and moral judgment (ratings of moral wrongness depicted in different vignettes). Salvo and colleagues showed that cathodal tDCS of the insula appeared to reduce participants’ disgust and moral rigidity. This reduction after cathodal stimulation was stronger for participants with higher levels of OCD traits.

Differentiating Kinds of Systemic Stressors With Relation to Psychotic-Like Experiences in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence: The Stimulation, Discrepancy, and Deprivation Model of Psychosis
Teresa Vargas, Katherine S. F. Damme, K. Juston Osborne, and Vijay A. Mittal

Vargas and colleagues used the data from 3,207 youths (ages 9 to 11) to explore the relationships among the youths’ psychotic-like experiences and exposure to systemic stressors, including their neighborhoods and living situations. In their analysis, the factors that appeared to be related to psychosis protection and vulnerability were neighborhood safety (stimulation domain; lack of safety and high attentional demands), sense of belonging with one’s ethnic group and American culture participation (discrepancy; social exclusion and lack of belonging), and deprivation (lack of environmental enrichment). Thus, the researchers found partial support for a model of psychosis involving stimulation, discrepancy, and deprivation.

Teens could spend their whole day doing activities that drain their energy, which sometimes gives them psychological stress. But they also develop different coping strategies to destress, such as spending time online.

A new study, titled “Adolescents’ Online Coping: When Less Is More but None Is Worse” published in Clinical Psychological Science, revealed that teens ages 13-17 in low socioeconomic settings who spend moderate time online cope better with stress compared to those who spend several hours online and those who completely neglect it.

As reported by the Association for Psychological Science (APS), study main author Kathryn Modecki collaborated with researchers from Griffith University’s Menzies Health Institute and School of Applied Psychology to conduct the study.

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Corporations, universities, and individuals have tried to find some magic formula to understand personalities and what characteristics and skills someone brings to the table. Over the years and across the globe, people have used handwriting analysis, phrenology—reading the bumps on the head, and even Ivy League diplomas to ascertain if someone has leadership potential or is an ideal team player. Perhaps the best known personality test is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This episode takes a deep dive into the skeptical side of this topic with Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.

U.S. President Joe Biden has appointed APS Fellow Jennifer Richeson to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a highly influential group of external experts charged with directly advising the president and the White House on science, technology, and innovation. Announced September 22, the appointment—along with those of 29 other experts in broadly diverse fields of science, engineering, medicine, technology, and more—signals the growing influence of psychological science at the highest levels of government and in shaping public policy.  

The Phillip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University, Richeson is a social psychologist who uses a broad range of empirical methods to examine psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity, including the potential cognitive “costs” and mutual misperceptions associated with intergroup interactions. She served on the APS Board of Directors from 2009 to 2012 and discussed her research, her thoughts about the current state of race relations, and more in her 2016 interview with Inside the Psychologist’s Studio. Her research in APS journals has covered topics including threat, contact, and race relations; race and the disciplining of young students; and racial bias during interracial interactions. 

According to the presidential executive order that established the council, its members must include experts from outside the federal government who are responsible for advising the president “on matters involving policy affecting science, technology, and innovation, as well as on matters involving scientific and technological information that is needed to inform public policy relating to the economy, worker empowerment, education, energy, the environment, public health, national and homeland security, racial equity, and other topics.” 

“APS has called for the Biden administration to ensure that psychological scientists are more involved in shaping U.S. public policy,” said APS Executive Director Robert Gropp. “Psychological science research has much to contribute to efforts to combat bias and promote inclusivity, to help individuals recognize misinformation campaigns, and to support the adoption of healthy behaviors. We are thrilled to see that the newly appointed members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology include distinguished scientists such as Dr. Jennifer Richeson.” 

In recent years, Richeson has received many other notable recognitions for her work, including selection as a Guggenheim fellow in 2015 and the 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award for her explorations of psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity. In 2006, she received a MacArthur Fellowship award for “bringing new life to the topic of intergroup relations” and “highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives.” 

In a maverick method, nephrologist Michael Field taught medical students to decipher different heart murmurs through their stethoscopes, trills, grace notes, and decrescendos to describe the distinctive sounds of heart valves snapping closed, and blood ebbing through leaky valves in plumbing disorders of the heart.

Separately, in music based on electrocardiographic (ECG) traces of heart rhythm disorders, one of us—musician-mathematician Elaine Chew—used music notation to capture the signature rhythms of electrical anomalies of the heart. Collaged from extant music fragments matching the heartbeats, Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk provided the 2:4:3 rhythmic tattoo of ventricular early beats, Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango remixed produced the irregular rhythms of atrial fibrillation. Little Etudes for piano, with pedagogical descriptions by cardiologist Pier Lambiase, provided a layperson’s introduction to electrical aberrations of the heart.

The reason these heart-music mappings work is because abnormal heart rhythms tend to form simple inter-beat-interval ratios. In fact, the distinctive rhythms in Beethoven’s music so closely resemble those of heart rhythm disorders that cardiologists have speculated that they may be transcriptions of Beethoven’s possible arrhythmia, his interoceptive awareness of his own heartbeat enhanced by his deafness.

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Aging Impairs Inhibitory Control Over Incidental Cues: A Construal-Level Perspective
Liat Hadar, Yaacov Trope, and Boaz M. Ben-David

Older adults’ purchasing decisions appear to be more influenced by peripheral product features than by central and goal-relevant features, this research indicates. Compared with older adults, younger adults were more willing to pay more for a product with superior central, desirable attributes (e.g., a coffee maker able to brew a variety of coffee types) than a product with superior peripheral, feasible attributes (e.g., a coffee maker that is easy to use and reliable). Younger adults were also more satisfied after completing a high-desirability/low-feasibility task than a low-desirability/high-feasibility task and after experiencing a goal-relevant product than a goal-irrelevant product.

Mind-Body Practices and Self-Enhancement: Direct Replications of Gebauer et al.’s (2018) Experiments 1 and 2
Thomas I. Vaughan-Johnston, Jill A. Jacobson, Alex Prosserman, and Emily Sanders

Gebauer and colleagues (2018) reported that mind-body practices such as yoga and meditation increase self-enhancement by boosting self-esteem and narcissism. Using the same procedures as Gebauer and colleagues (2018), Vaughan-Johnston and colleagues conducted a field study with yoga students and a meditation intervention with college students. Although the effect was not clearly obtained in the replication study, an integrative data analysis of the original and replication data suggested that mind-body practices indeed increase self-enhancement (self-esteem and narcissism) rather than quieting the ego.

Disproportionate School Punishment and Significant Life Outcomes: A Prospective Analysis of Black Youths
Edith Chen et al.

Black individuals with higher self-control who attend schools that disproportionately punish Black students may be more academically oriented in late adolescence and have better adult life outcomes at the cost of physical health, this study suggests. In an 18-year longitudinal study, Chen and colleagues tracked Black youths from age 11 to age 29. They found that individuals with higher self-control and, consequently, higher academic orientation who attended schools that disproportionately punished Black students completed more schooling, had higher incomes, and exhibited better mental health in adulthood than their counterparts with lower self-control. However, these same individuals were also more likely to develop adult insulin resistance, which is related to cardiometabolic disease.

Revisiting the Integration Hypothesis: Correlational and Longitudinal Meta-Analyses Demonstrate the Limited Role of Acculturation for Cross-Cultural Adaptation
Kinga Bierwiaczonek and Jonas R. Kunst

Bierwiaczonek and Kunst tested the acculturation theory, which posits that when people move to a new country, acculturation influences how well they adapt to that country’s culture. Integration (or biculturalism), which involves engagement in both one’s heritage culture and the host culture, is considered the best acculturation strategy. However, the present work, consisting of both a reanalysis of a previous meta-analysis of correlational studies and a new meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, indicates that the correlation between acculturation and adaptation appears to be weak, at best. Thus, focusing on immigrants’ individual cultural styles might not foster integration as well as focusing on contextual factors such as discrimination.

Face-Based Judgments: Accuracy, Validity, and a Potential Underlying Mechanism
Seungbeom Hong, Hye Won Suk, Yoonseok Choi, and Jinkyung Na

American and Korean participants judged the trustworthiness of Korean and American politicians’ faces, respectively, and reported their confidence in such judgments. Although the facial inferences overall were somewhat accurate, participants were not able to say whether individual inferences were more accurate or more inaccurate. This indicates that people may not know when to trust their face-based inferences. In another experiment, the researchers also showed that the accuracy of face-based inferences appears to be driven by self-fulfilling effects of the perceivers’ beliefs (e.g., individuals who look corruptible end up accepting more bribes than their counterparts because they are bribed more frequently).

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception
Niels Chr. Hansen, Haley E. Kragness, Peter Vuust, Laurel Trainor, and Marcus T. Pearce

Hansen and colleagues investigated how uncertainty about upcoming events informs people’s attentional behaviors and perceptions of musical-phrase boundaries. Participants heard sequences of musical tones that conveyed different levels of uncertainty about which tones came next. In a self-paced listening task, participants spent more time listening to tones that conveyed high uncertainty, indicating more implicit attention and the perception of a boundary, than to tones conveying less uncertainty. Participants also indicated that sequences that ended on tones conveying more uncertainty appeared to be more complete, thus implicating a boundary. These results suggest that focusing attention on points of uncertainty may facilitate perceptual grouping and prospectively contribute to segmentation in auditory perception.

Read the related news release here.

Memory Fidelity Reveals Qualitative Changes in Interactions Between Items in Visual Working Memory
Zachary Lively, Maria M. Robinson, and Aaron S. Benjamin

Memory fidelity might explain why people sometimes remember objects in a visual display as more similar to one another (i.e., attraction) and other times as more different from one another (i.e., repulsion) than they actually were. In three experiments, participants saw colored squares and later reported on the colors they remembered by clicking on a continuous color wheel. Results indicated that attraction and repulsion arose as a function of memory fidelity—weaker memories resulted in attraction, whereas stronger memories resulted in repulsion. These findings suggest that changes in memory fidelity affect the interactions among items in visual working memory.

Ideological Extremism Among Syrian Refugees Is Negatively Related to Intentions to Migrate to the West
Katarzyna Jasko, David Webber, Erica Molinario, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Katherine Touchton-Leonard

The fear that refugees trying to emigrate to the West might endorse ideologically extreme views or harbor negative sentiment toward the West might be unfounded, this research suggests. Jasko and colleagues surveyed 1,000 Syrian refugees residing in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. They found that most refugees did not intend to emigrate to Western countries, but those most interested in moving to the West were the least likely to endorse Islamist extremism or have negative sentiment toward the West. The more ideologically extreme refugees said they would rather move back to their home country than move to the West.

Facebook-owned Instagram has been criticised for keeping secret its internal research into the effect social media had on teenager users.

According to the Wall Street Journal, its studies showed teenagers blamed Instagram for increased levels of anxiety and depression.

Campaign groups and MPs have said it is proof the company puts profit first.

Instagram said the research showed its “commitment to understanding complex and difficult issues”.

The Wall Street Journal’s report, not disputed by Facebook, finds:

• A 2019 presentation slide said: “We make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls”
• Another slide said teenagers blamed Instagram for increased levels of anxiety and depression
• In 2020, research found 32% of teenage girls surveyed said when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse
• Some 13% of UK teenagers and 6% of US users surveyed traced a desire to kill themselves to Instagram
• Instagram conducted multiple focus groups, online surveys and diary studies over a number of years
• In 2021, it conducted large-scale research of tens of thousands of people that paired user responses with its own data about time spent on Instagram and what was viewed

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Most kids are now in their third year of school during the pandemic. It’s been a time of ups and downs; adjustments and re-adjustments. Some have flourished in online school and want to stay home — others have floundered and are excited to go back.

NPR spoke to a group of kids ages 6 and up about what the pandemic has been like, and how they’re feeling about the new school year.

Two experts in childhood education and development explain how the pandemic has challenged kids and what we can do to help them: Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Education; and Katie McLaughlin, a psychologist at Harvard University.

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This week is our last with Maddie as a host, so we’re spending it with a trip down memory lane. The first episode Maddie invites us to relive and enjoy is our first listener question episode on the science behind thrill-seeking. She talks to psychologist Ken Carter about why some people love to get scared.

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Jonathan Tissue, 35, returned home from combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq with invisible wounds. He had been injured twice but was physically mobile. It was his anger at home that made him seem like a different person to his friends and family. Every time he drove by a garbage truck, he became tense, recalling the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device that hit his convoy while overseas.

The doctors at Veterans Affairs prescribed traditional talk therapy for his combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder. For five years, he met with psychotherapists but nothing improved. He became more difficult, irritable, anxious, depressed, with occasional angry outbursts.

Frustrated, he stopped the treatments but after several years he realized he was no longer the husband or father he once was and wanted to be. This time, VA doctors suggested a new kind of treatment: virtual reality immersion therapy.

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During the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I live by myself. I work from home. At times, I experienced fits of fidgetiness and restlessness, contributing to feelings of burnout.

Here’s what helped: reappraising the situation.

What I was feeling was isolation, and the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it gnaw at me, I tried to remember: Loneliness is normal, sometimes even useful. I remembered that sadness existed in part to remind me of something I really value, the company of other people. I knew, when the opportunity arose, I’d reorient myself to immersion with others. And when that time came, I’d embrace it; it was a reminder that I was still capable of feeling the joy I had been lacking. And as a consolation, that felt good.

Cognitive reappraisal — sometimes called cognitive reframing — is most commonly encountered in therapy, where it’s used to regulate emotions. It’s a component of cognitive behavioral therapy, a whole suite of strategies that can encourage positive patterns of thinking and behavior.

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In psychological science, Bayesian inference is increasingly viewed as a statistical approach that may usefully supplement or even supplant traditional null-hypothesis significance testing. The Learn Bayes module that is integrated into the statistical software, JASP, explains the core ideas and principles of Bayesian inference.

For decades, when Liz Cutler’s husband, Tom Kreutz, did something that bothered her, Cutler would sometimes pull out a scrap of paper from the back of her desk drawer. On it she would scribble down her grievances: maybe Kreutz had stayed late at work without giving her a heads-up, or maybe he’d allowed their kids to do something she considered risky. The list was Cutler’s way of honoring a promise she and her husband had made. They would talk about their frustrations only in scheduled meetings—which they held once a year for a time, and later, every three months. It’s a system they’ve adhered to for more than 40 years.

Any psychologist will tell you that conflict is both an inevitable and a vital part of a close relationship. The challenge—which can make the difference between a lasting, satisfying partnership and one that combusts—is figuring out how to manage conflict constructively.

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The original proponents of trigger warnings on campus argued that they would empower students suffering from trauma to delve into difficult material. “The point is not to enable — let alone encourage — students to skip readings or our subsequent class discussion,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in The New York Times. “It’s about enabling everyone’s rational engagement.”

Now, about a decade after trigger warnings arrived on college campuses, it’s clear that an avoidance rationale is officiallycompeting with the original lean-in logic.

A recent Inside Higher Ed piece by Michael Bugeja, an Iowa State journalism professor, is emblematic of this shift. In light of the tumultuous times (a “mental-health pandemic,” ongoing sexual violence and racism, the anxiety of returning to in-person instruction), Bugeja says that trigger warnings are needed now more than ever. All faculty members should follow his lead, he argues, and include detailed trigger warnings on their syllabi accompanied by the following note: “You don’t have to attend class if the content elicits an uncomfortable emotional response.”

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When debates about trigger warnings first erupted, there was little-to-no research on their effectiveness. Today we have an emerging body of peer-reviewed research to consult.

The consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, including literature passages, photographs, and film clips: Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)

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As technology evolves and our lives become increasingly digital, deciding how much teenagers should spend online is a difficult problem for any concerned parent.

While much has been said about the potential detrimental effects of spending too much time on the internet, a new study has found that teens who spend time online are better at coping with stress.

The research, published in Clinical Psychological Science, studied 200 adolescents aged 13-17 living in low socioeconomic settings.

The participants were given iPhones to use as they would their own phones. They were asked to report the hours they used their devices, as well as any stressors, and their emotions at least five times a day for a week.

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American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Last year, U.S. colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70 percent of the decline.

The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s—every year, in other words, that I’ve been alive. This particular gender gap hasn’t been breaking news for about 40 years. But the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up.

For decades, American women have been told that the path to independence and empowerment flows through school. Although they are still playing catch-up in the labor force, and leadership positions such as chief executive and senator are still dominated by men, women have barnstormed into colleges. That is the very definition of progress. In poorer countries, where women are broadly subjugated or otherwise lack access to regular schooling, girls enjoy no educational advantage whatsoever.

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Summary: New research shows that Syrian refugees were significantly more motivated to return home than to emigrate to the West. Those who were motivated to emigrate were the least likely to endorse extreme religious and political views.

Refugees often endure extreme hardships as they seek shelter and security far from their homelands. Unfortunately, after arriving in foreign countries, refugees often endure suspicions about their motives and apprehension about their perceived religious and political ideologies.

These fears are gravely misguided, according to a recently published study of Syrian refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq in 2016 and 2017. The study found that the refugees were significantly more motivated to return home than to emigrate to the West. Moreover, those who were motivated to relocate to Western countries were the least likely to endorse extreme religious and political views.

“People in Western countries have been reluctant to accept refugees, in part, because of the perception that these individuals hold extremist political views and therefore pose a security threat,” said Katarzyna Jasko, a researcher with Jagiellonian University in Poland and lead author on the paper, which was published in the journal Psychological Science. “Our results run counter to such views and could be used as an educational tool to provide evidence against such misperceptions.”

Researching the Syrian crisis

The Syrian civil war officially began in 2011, sparking a mass exodus from the country. By the end of 2016, Syrians made up the world’s largest forcibly displaced population, accounting for more than 12 million people. The number of displaced Syrians is now estimated at nearly 13.5 million, including more than 6.6 million refugees hosted in more than 120 countries around the globe.

In 2016 and 2017, a team of researchers recruited 1,000 Syrian refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq—the nations with the largest numbers of refugees—to participate in a survey about their experiences, opinions, and aspirations. The researchers were aided by two independent organizations, both of which had prior experience conducting research with refugees.

Study participants were identified either through publicly available registries, at which point they were invited by trained Arabic-speaking research associates, or by a local nongovernmental organization via its lists of individuals who had received its services.

Participants gave oral consent to participate in the survey, with the understanding that their responses would not be linked to them personally. They were also informed that the research was being conducted independently of local governments and that their responses would not impact their immigration status.

Refugees’ desires and ideologies

The survey measured participants’ willingness to relocate to Western countries and their desire to move back to Syria as well as their political and ideological views. Because there is no one agreed-upon measure of political extremism, the researchers used several scales to test for extremist ideals, including measures of Islamist ideology, willingness to sacrifice for one’s religion, and willingness to sacrifice for a political cause.

“The majority of refugees in our study wanted to return home to Syria and they did not intend to migrate to the West. This was not surprising,” said Jasko. “The second result—that most refugees reject violent extremism—is also in line with our other research on political violence, which shows that majorities of people are strongly against ideologically motivated violence. What is more theoretically interesting in our study is the link between migration intentions and ideological beliefs. Past research on refugees has predominantly focused on their basic needs for safety and security as drivers of migration decisions. We assumed that their sociopolitical attitudes should also be related to those decisions.”

Indeed, the study, which was based on data collected from participants who are typically hard to reach, found the same pattern of results in three out of four locations: Refugees who wanted to migrate to the West held the least extreme political and religious views.

The new results provide important insights into the cultural attitudes and beliefs of refugees—and undercut common stereotypes and fears.

“Our team is currently collecting more data with refugees and host communities to see how the relationship between ideology and migration intentions and attitudes develop over time,” said Jasko.

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Reference: Jasko, K., Webber, D., Molinario, E., Kuglanski, A., & Touchton-Leonard, K. (2021) Ideological extremism among Syrian refugees is negatively related to intentions to migrate to the West. Psychological Science, 32(9), 1362–1374 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621996668

This resource is dedicated to breaking the habit of prejudice and discrimination. The Awareness Harmony Acceptance Advocates believe in working together to overcome these social issues by spreading awareness of the problem, establishing harmony between groups, and promoting acceptance of differences.

When a reporter asked Richard Daley, then the mayor of Chicago, whether his gun-control policies were effective, Daley pointed to a rifle and shouted, “If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective this is!” Rahm Emanuel, a political operative who would also go on to become mayor of Chicago, mailed a dead fish to a pollster who had delivered results late. Tony Banks, a member of the U.K. Parliament, once publicly said that another member was “living proof that a pig’s bladder on a stick can be elected to Parliament.”

In many workplaces, those sorts of comments and actions could cost people their jobs. But in politics, rude behavior is often described as a sign that a politician is “tough,” “no-nonsense,” or “effective.” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who once reportedly threw a binder and hit a staffer with it, has argued that politicians need to be rough to deal with other politicians. “When you’re out there on the world stage and dealing with people like Vladimir Putin, yeah, you want someone who’s tough,” she said in a cable-news interview. Former President Donald Trump was famous, of course, for his cruelty—making fun of a reporter’s disability, bragging about assaulting women. This approach, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer argued in 2018, helped Trump politically. Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” he wrote, and “it is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him.”

Electoral politics is about popularity. So why does cruelty seem to be popular? I took a look at some research on the topic, and found that academics have a few basic theories. The first might seem obvious: Jerks—people who consciously and intentionally violate norms and rules—may succeed in politics simply because they want power so much. Jerks seek out high-status positions, Deniz Ones, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “That exact profile is the one we find among managers,” Ones said. “They’re the types who want to boss others around.”

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