APS is aware of the significant concerns shared by Steven O. Roberts about racist and biased editorial practices at Perspectives on Psychological Science. We take these concerns seriously. We support editorial independence but also editorial integrity. Our goal is to publish and widely disseminate the best quality psychological science research. This is only possible if we work aggressively to ensure our publications use best editorial practices. We are working to build an equitable organization that promotes the development and application of high-quality science that informs solutions to the complex and persistent problems of racism, intolerance, discrimination, and bias. In the coming days and weeks, we will make every effort to address the concerns raised by Dr. Roberts and others, engaging with our journal editors, our Publications Committee, our Diversity and Inclusion Committee, our Board, and our Members to make appropriate changes to our policies and practices.  

We value the input of the psychological science community. Please email us at aps@psychologicalscience.org. Thank you.

Testing Deprivation and Threat: A Preregistered Network Analysis of the Dimensions of Early Adversity
Sofia Carozza, Joni Holmes, and Duncan E. Astle

How can psychological science enhance efforts to protect children from the effects of adversity? One promising approach involves disentangling threat (which is thought to interfere with emotional regulation) from deprivation (which may constrain cognitive development). To assess how threat and deprivation affect children’s development, Carozza and colleagues analyzed the links between childhood adversity and adolescent cognition and emotional functioning and identified the timeline of these effects (i.e., relationships between age of exposure and later outcomes). Their results suggest that deprivation and threat are separate dimensions of adversity and that early experiences of deprivation are linked with cognition and emotional functioning later in life. These links vary by age of exposure. Results did not find specific links between threat and emotional functioning.  

Two-Year-Olds’ Eye Movements Reflect Confidence in Their Understanding of Words
Isabelle Dautriche, Louise Goupil, Kenny Smith, and Hugh Rabagliati

The capacity of realizing what one knows and does not know might exist before children are old enough to talk about it. In two experiments, 2-year-olds saw two objects and heard the name of one; afterward, Dautrich and colleagues asked the children to look toward the named object. When the children were familiar with the name used (e.g., dog), they looked more persistently after a correct look at the named object than after an incorrect look at the other object—a marker of confidence. They demonstrated less confidence when the named object was unfamiliar (e.g., toma) or the person naming the objects was unreliable (i.e., someone who named familiar objects using incorrect labels, such as calling a ball a “dog”).  

Cognitive Change Before Old Age (11 to 70) Predicts Cognitive Change During Old Age (70 to 82)
Federica P. Conte et al.

Conte and colleagues examined how cognitive change from ages 11 to 70 is associated with cognitive change at older ages (from 70 to 82 years). They used data from a large longitudinal study of cognitive, brain, and general aging of participants who were born in 1936 and assessed throughout their lives General cognitive ability (g) accounted for 71.3% of the differences in change between participants. Greater cognitive gain from ages 11 to 70 predicted slower decline in g from 70 to 82 years, independently of cognitive level in childhood and at age 70 and of domain-specific change (i.e., in visuospatial, memory, or processing speed) beyond g.

Flavor Sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviors in the Human Fetus
Beyza Ustun, Nadja Reissland, Judith Covey, Benoist Schaal, and Jacqueline Blissett

Fetuses react with different facial expressions to different flavors of the foods their mothers eat, this research suggests. Ustun and colleagues used 4D ultrasound scans at 32 and 36 weeks’ gestation to examine fetuses’ reactions after their mothers swallowed a vegetable capsule of either carrot or kale. When the fetuses were exposed to carrot flavor, they were more likely to show “laughter-face” reactions, and when they were exposed to kale flavor, they were more likely to show “cry-face” reactions. The researchers also found that facial responses to flavors became more complex as fetuses matured.   

What You See Is What You Hear: Sounds Alter the Contents of Visual Perception
Jamal R. Williams, Yuri A. Markov, Natalia A. Tiurina, and Viola S. Störmer

What people hear impacts how they perceive the visual world, this research suggests. Using a task in which ambiguous images (e.g., an image that could be a cat or a kettle) were paired with naturalistic sounds, Williams and colleagues found that participants’ representations of the images shifted toward the visual features of the object related to the sound (e.g., they were more likely to perceive the same image as a cat if they heard a meow or as a kettle if they heard a whistle). These effects were driven by continuous integration of audiovisual inputs during perception itself rather than decision or response biases or expectations.   

Parents’ Political Ideology Predicts How Their Children Punish
Rachel A. Leshin, Daniel A. Yudkin, Jay J. Van Bavel, Lily Kunkel, and Marjorie Rhodes

Parents’ political ideology appears to predict their children’s punishment behavior—that is, their willingness to pay a personal cost to punish others for violations that do not affect them directly. In a study of American children ages 3−8, Leshin and colleagues found that punishment behavior varied according to their parents’ political ideology—a possible proxy for the value systems transmitted to children intergenerationally. Children of conservative parents tended to punish more members of different groups and to express anger at perpetrators, whereas children of liberal parents tended to punish more members of their own group to enforce cooperative norms. 

Stepping Up to the Mic: Gender Gaps in Participation in Live Question-and-Answer Sessions at Academic Conferences
Shoshana N. Jarvis, Charles R. Ebersole, Christine Q. Nguyen, Minwan Zhu, and Laura J. Kray

How does the gender difference in academia, where women are underrepresented, translate to participation in face-to-face question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions? Jarvis and colleagues examined participation in filmed conferences and found that men disproportionately participated, whereas women were less comfortable participating and more likely to fear backlash for their participation. As to why students were more likely to hold back, women cited anxiety, whereas men said they wanted to make space for others to participate. Understanding the psychological barriers impacting women’s participation in Q&A might foster work toward structural changes to create a more equitable space for scientific discourse. 

Placebo Analgesia Reduces Costly Prosocial Helping to Lower Another Person’s Pain
Helena Hartmann, Paul A. G. Forbes, Markus Rütgen, and Claus Lamm

Taking painkillers lowers both pain empathy and helping behavior, this research suggests. Hartmann and colleagues administered a placebo painkiller to a group of participants. Compared to participants who did not take the placebo, members of this group went on to show less willingness to exert physical effort to reduce the pain of a person allegedly receiving shocks. They also used less physical effort when helping. These detrimental effects of analgesia on prosociality may have implications for social cohesion in societies in which analgesics are regularly consumed. 

Walking in Her Shoes: Pretending to Be a Female Role Model Increases Young Girls’ Persistence in Science
Reut Shachnai, Tamar Kushnir, and Lin Bian

Pretend play might be an effective tool to engage girls in science, this research suggests. Girls and boys ages 4 to 7 years played a challenging science activity in three different conditions. In the exposure condition, the children heard about a successful scientist who matched their gender. Children in the roleplay condition pretended to be that scientist. And children in the baseline condition did not receive information about a scientist. Boys were highly motivated across all three conditions, completing an average of 14 rounds of the game without any intervention. Among girls, only those in the roleplay condition persisted longer in the science activity than girls in the baseline condition. Thus, pretend play as role models might motivate young girls in science and even help reduce gender gaps. (See a related article from APS.) 

No Subliminal Memory for Spaced Repeated Images in Rapid-Serial-Visual-Presentation Streams
Howard Bowman, and Alberto Avilés

Thunell and Thorpe (2019) reported that participants could detect repetition in rapidly presented visual streams of images and later remember the repeated images. Because these effects occurred when images were presented very rapidly, they appear to suggest that the processes underlying detection of repetitions, and by extension also statistical learning, operate unconsciously. In this commentary, Bowman and Avilés analyze whether Thunell and Thorpe’s findings imply that stimuli representations may last even when they do not reach awareness. They reanalyzed the original study’s results and found that learning can occur only when stimuli that are not consciously perceived are repeated very rapidly. That is, when the repetitions are more spaced, representations do not accumulate unconsciously and thus do not cause learning. These findings suggest that in a real-world setting, conscious awareness is needed to learn episodic, incidental information. 

Opportunity Neglect: An Aversion to Low-Probability Gains
Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz, Leslie K. John, and Michael I. Norton

Opportunity neglect may occur when people forgo low-probability opportunities (e.g., applying to a highly prestigious company or university) even in the absence of objective costs (e.g., free and quick applications). Prinsloo and colleagues show opportunity neglect in naturalistic situations, including applying for jobs and winning consumer products, and in gambles for both goods and money with positive expected value, even with no possibility of monetary loss and nontrivial rewards (e.g., a 1% chance at $99). One way to reduce opportunity neglect is to remind people that they have nothing to lose—highlighting that rejecting an opportunity is equivalent to choosing a zero probability of success. 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment. Interested in writing for us? Read our contributor guidelines.

Many people come to therapy worried that they may not be spending enough time with their partner. They ask questions like:

• “My partner wants us to spend time together every day but I can’t because of my busy work schedule. How do we overcome this?”
• “My partner and I spend a fair bit of time together every week, but lately I’ve been feeling a little distant from them. Will making more time for each other help?”
• “My partner loves to go fishing, but I don’t really enjoy it. We don’t get a lot of ‘us’ time, so when he asked me to join him I couldn’t say no. Is this healthy?”

We know that spending time with our significant other is important. However, it is crucial to understand that there is a distinction between ‘quantity time’ and ‘quality time.’

…

HUMANS HAVE A complicated relationship with happiness. Consider this study on the subject: Scientists found that valuing happiness can lead to less happiness when you feel happy. It’s an emotional rollercoaster fueled by unhelpful expectations.

Yet the relationship gets more complex still. According to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science our current state of well-being can interfere with our perception of the past. Overall, researchers observed an asymmetrical pattern: Happy people tend to overreport an improvement in their well-being, while unhappy people tend to exaggerate a worsening sense of well-being.

…

What happens in your brain when you decide to trust someone?

“When people make decisions to trust, it’s kind of the same as when they make decisions to gamble,” Jamil Zaki says.

“You see activities in the parts of the brain that are involved in its dopamine system that calculate on the fly, ‘Well, what does this gamble look like?’”

In episode two of our special series “Essential trust,” neuroscientists explain how our brains process trust, and why it’s worth the risk.

…

Academic conferences provide invaluable opportunities for researchers to present their work and receive feedback from attendees during question-and-answer sessions. Women are less likely to ask questions during these sessions, however, and research in Psychological Science suggests that this may be due to anxiety about how colleagues will receive their comments.  

Addressing these concerns could help women academics contribute more proportionally to the scientific process, said lead author Shoshana N. Jarvis (University of California, Berkeley), who conducted the research with Charles R. Ebersole (American Institutes for Research), Christine Q. Nguyen, Minwan Zhu, and Laura J. Kray (University of California, Berkeley). 

“More men participate in Q&A sessions compared to what we would expect based on who’s in the audience. When asked, men say they are more comfortable participating, and women are more afraid of experiencing backlash for their participation,” Jarvis said in an interview. 

In the first of two studies, Jarvis and colleagues observed recordings of 193 Q&A interactions that occurred following 32 research talks at a single-track interdisciplinary conference.  Approximately 63% of the conference’s 375 attendees identified as men and 35% identified as women, according to attendees’ conference registrations, survey responses, pronoun listings on personal websites, appearances, and names. The remaining 2% of attendees were excluded from the analysis because they identified as nonbinary or the researchers could not determine their gender. 

In line with previous research on how gender influences conference participation, 78% of Q&A interactions were found to be initiated by men stepping up to the microphone, whereas women did so just 22% of the time. Men were also more likely than women to be one of the first four audience members to participate in a Q&A session. 

Related research on women in academia >

Gender was not found to significantly influence attendees’ behavior when they did ask questions, however. Research assistants who were unaware of what Jarvis and colleagues were studying rated men and women attendees as equally likely to challenge other researchers by questioning their expertise or the quality of their work. Men and women were also rated as equally likely to perform polite behaviors such as thanking a speaker for sharing their research or complimenting their work. Additionally, attendees were 24% more likely to be rated as polite when the speaker they were addressing was a woman, regardless of their own gender. 

“When people are in power, they use that power to display dominant behaviors and disproportionately occupy space,” as has historically been the case with men in academia, Jarvis and colleagues wrote. “Men’s dominance in Q&A sessions seems to be driven by their greater willingness to jump into the discussion rather than in how they communicate while at the microphone.” 

In the second study, Jarvis and colleagues surveyed researchers by email 6 months after they attended a psychology conference in the United States. The surveys were completed by 234 conference attendees, of whom 69% were women and 28% were men. The remaining 3% of respondents were excluded from the analysis because they were nonbinary or did not disclose their gender on the survey. 

The survey results showed that women respondents reported being less comfortable participating in Q&A sessions and more likely to fear experiencing professional backlash if they did participate. Women and men were equally likely to report holding back questions, but they gave different reasons for doing so: Women were more likely to hold back because of anxiety, but men did so to allow other people time to ask questions. 

“While we expected men to ask more questions than women, we were surprised to learn that men report holding back questions to make space for other people. Despite this level of self-awareness, it does not seem to be enough to mitigate the collective gender differences,” Jarvis said. 

Future work could extend these findings by exploring how race and other identities may influence conference attendees’ willingness to participate in Q&A sessions, as well as what changes could help mitigate gender differences in participation, Jarvis and colleagues concluded. 

“By understanding the psychological barriers impacting women’s participation in Q&A sessions, we set the stage to begin work toward structural changes that would create a more equitable space for scientific discourse,” the researchers wrote. 

Reference 

Jarvis, S. N., Ebersole, C. R., Nguyen, C. Q., Zhu, M., & Kray, L. J. (2022). Stepping up to the mic: Gender gaps in participation in live question-and-answer sessions at academic conferences. Psychological Science, 33(11), 1882–1893. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221094036  

Thinking Structurally: A Cognitive Framework for Understanding How People Attribute Inequality to Structural Causes
Jamie Amemiya, Elizabeth Mortenson, Gail D. Heyman, and Caren M. Walker

Amemiya and colleagues propose a new cognitive framework to specify how people attribute inequality to structural causes (i.e., stable, interconnected societal forces that systematically advantage some social groups and disadvantage others). This framework suggests that people will recognize structural factors as causal when they perceive them to affect inequality above and beyond any intrinsic causes (e.g., abilities, motivation). Thus, people may attribute inequality to structural causes when they make two observations: The disadvantaged groups’ outcomes improve under better societal conditions, and the advantaged group members whose baseline traits are similar to the disadvantaged group experience more favorable societal conditions and life outcomes.   

It’s Not You, It’s Me: A Review of Individual Differences in Visuospatial Perspective Taking
Steven Samuel, Geoff G. Cole, and Madeline J. Eacott  

Visuospatial perspective taking (VSPT) is the ability to understand something about the visual relationship between an observer and their target. The heterogeneity of results from VSPT tasks suggests the existence of multiple VSPT strategies, individual differences in performance, and context-specific factors that influence the accuracy of outcomes. Samuel and colleagues report several predictors of VSPT performance and identify gaps in understanding. These gaps suggest pathways for future research and, possibly, a theory of VSPT. The authors make the case that focusing on understanding the perspective taker, rather than their target, will aid understanding of VSPT.  

Global Diversity of Authors, Editors, and Journal Ownership Across Subdisciplines of Psychology: Current State and Policy Implications
Zhicheng Lin and Ningxi Li

Lin and Li surveyed 68 top psychology journals in 10 subdisciplines and examined the global diversity of authors, editors, and journal ownership. Results showed that (a) the global diversity of authorship, editorship, and ownership is low; (b) disparity intensifies along the hierarchy of authors, editors, and journal ownership and substantially differs between subdisciplines and journal types; (c) removing authors, editors, and publishers in the United States markedly increases global diversity and eliminates differences in diversity between subdisciplines and between authorship and editorship; and (d) more authors and editors are from the journal’s home country and the editor-in-chief’s home country, biases that are most pronounced in U.S.-based journals.   

Not All Effects Are Indispensable: Psychological Science Requires Verifiable Lines of Reasoning for Whether an Effect Matters
Farid Anvari et al.

Psychological science needs to more rigorously assess when psychological findings matter for the contexts that researchers want to generalize to, according to Anvari and colleagues. They propose that researchers transparently provide verifiable lines of reasoning to justify their claims about an effect’s importance or unimportance. The authors urge researchers to think thoroughly about the various mechanisms that may both amplify and counteract the importance of an observed effect size and to draw on these mechanisms when an effect is being generalized to a new and likely more dynamic context. Such reasoning should help researchers identify when effects are dispensable.  

How Effective Altruism Can Help Psychologists Maximize Their Impact
Izzy Gainsburg et al.

Effective altruism—a growing movement aimed at doing the most good by using science and reason to inform efforts—may be the key to maximizing the impact of psychologists interested in making the world a better place, Gainsburg and colleagues suggest. The authors review principles of effective altruism that can be applied to how psychologists approach their work and discuss ideas for increasing the positive impact of psychological science. Gainsburg and colleagues aim to stimulate new areas of research and inspire the psychology community to engage in effective altruism.  

Challenging the White = Neutral Framework in Psychology
Steven O. Roberts and Elizabeth Mortenson

Roberts and Mortenson argue that portraying White samples as if they were generalizable to all humans is rooted in a “White = neutral” framework. They argue that the continued use of this framework will prevent psychology from becoming a truly objective and inclusive science because: (a) Research with White samples will be valued over research with samples of color, (b) norms that maintain White neutrality will remain unchallenged, and (c) the role of White identity in psychological processes will remain underexamined. The authors provide recommendations to move toward a framework in which all samples are identified for the unique and diverse perspectives that they bring to the world.  

Is Religion Special?
Jordan W. Moon, Adam B. Cohen, Kristin Laurin, and David P. MacKinnon

Religion is psychologically important, but there is no strong evidence that it is psychologically special apart from its possible effects on health, Moon and colleagues suggest. Religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, well-being, and self-control. However, it does not appear to act on these domains via special mechanisms (e.g., beliefs in supernatural agents, providing ultimate meaning, and providing literal immortality). Moon and colleagues note that future research aimed at demonstrating that religion is psychologically special would have to include, for instance, careful definitions of religion and careful attention to experimental design.  

On the Role of Interoception in Body and Object Perception: A Multisensory-Integration Account
Wladimir Kirsch and Wilfried Kunde

A person seeing a fake hand can feel it as their own hand. Feeling a heavy weight may make hills look steeper. These are examples of “embodied perception,” which suggests that what people sense of their body influences what they perceive of the environment and vice versa. Kirsch and Kunde argue that embodied perception results from multisensory integration of interoceptive signals from the body and exteroceptive signals from the environment. This view challenges theories attributing a special role to the body itself and various phenomenon-specific explanations. 

Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health
Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner

How do experiences in nature, in spiritual contemplation, or in being moved by music or with psychedelics promote mental and physical health? Through awe, according to Monroy and Keltner. They review recent advances in the scientific study of awe, an emotion often considered ineffable and beyond measurement. Awe engages five processes that benefit well-being—shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning. The authors also describe how experiences of awe strengthen the mind and body.  

A Systematic Review of Black People Coping With Racism: Approaches, Analysis, and Empowerment
Grace Jacob et al.

How do Black people in Western societies regulate their emotions when coping with racism, which coping strategies do they use, and which strategies promote well-being? Jacob and colleagues review 26 studies, quantitative and qualitative, and all from the United States or Canada. Findings indicate that Black people tend to cope with racism through social support (friends, family, support groups), religion (prayer, church, spirituality), avoidance (attempting to avoid stressors), and problem-focused coping (confronting the situation directly). Jacob and colleagues also underscore the importance of encouraging personal empowerment to promote psychological well-being.   

How Do People Come to Judge What Is “Reasonable”? Effects of Legal and Sociological Systems on Human Psychology
Mikaela Spruill and Neil A. Lewis, Jr. 

How do people decide what is reasonable? Spruill and Lewis, Jr. look through the lens of situated cognition to review and integrate findings from social psychology, judgment and decision-making, communication, law, and sociology to generate a framework for conceptualizing judgments of reasonableness and the judgments’ implications for how people make decisions, particularly in the context of the legal system. They theorize that differences in structural and social contexts create information asymmetries that shape people’s beliefs about what is and is not reasonable as well as how they update these beliefs in the face of new information. The authors also discuss the practical implications of the framework for addressing inequities in law and social policy.  

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Across species, caregivers exert a powerful influence on the neural and behavioral development of their offspring. From a pregnant parent vigilantly monitoring their prenatal health to a pack of wolves bringing food to a sick elder, from informal family caregivers at home to trained professionals in health care facilities, how caregivers act and behave can greatly impact the outcomes—physical and emotional—of those they care for.  

“There are only four kinds of people in the world,” said former U.S. First Lady Rosalyn Carter in 2011. “Those who have been caregivers. Those who are currently caregivers. Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.” In recognition of caregivers everywhere, and, in the United States, November as National Caregivers Month, APS has assembled a collection of research exploring various aspects of caregiving, published between 2017 and 2022 in the APS Journals Psychological Science, Clinical Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, and Perspectives on Psychological Science.  

In “The Parental Care Motivational System and Why It Matters (for Everyone)” (2018), Mark Schaller argued that this motivational “system”—which includes tenderness and protectiveness toward young children—evolved to maximize the survival of offspring. But parents aren’t the only ones with this system, as a wide variety of stimuli, such as kittens, puppies, and even baby-faced adults, can activate it in almost anyone. This could have implications for many psychological processes and motivational systems. Consider mating motivations. Evidence suggests that when these are activated, the parental care system is temporarily inhibited. 

As for those being cared for, the impact often extends from cradle to grave. In a 2021 article called “Influences of Caregiving on Development: A Sensitive Period for Biological Embedding of Predictability and Safety Cues,” Dylan G. Gee and Emily M. Cohodes present evidence for a sensitive period during infancy and toddlerhood when caregiver inputs that are predictable and associated with safety may become biologically embedded, influencing the developing children’s corticolimbic circuit (involved in emotion regulation) and even making it more receptive to caregiver influences later in life. This influence is diminished when children experience early adversity that disrupts that predictability and safety. 

To that point, there is indeed great heterogeneity in young children’s caregiving experiences. In Ten Lessons About Infants’ Everyday Experiences (2022), Kaya de Barbaro and Caitlin M. Fausey, using cameras and other recording devices to capture infants’ behaviors in natural settings, cited studies that found wide variation in how caregivers encourage children as well as the amount of time the two groups engage directly. Differences in how caregivers structure physical spaces and in how they encourage or restrain infants’ movements, in turn, can also affect how children engage with the world. 

What impact can these early caregiving experiences have on adults’ mental and physical health? It depends. In Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Retrospective Assessments of the Quality of Childhood Parenting: Prospective Evidence From Infancy to Age 26 Years (2021), Marissa D. Nivison and colleagues assessed data and caregiving reports from children’s birth until they were 26 years old, along with retrospective self-reports by the adult children, at age 26, on the caregiving they had received and their parents’ emotional availability. The researchers found a poor match between the actual measures of early caregiving and the retrospective reports, which tended to be more influenced by the adult children’s depressive symptoms and closeness to their parents. 

Caregiving is no less critical in adolescence. In a meta-analysis called Parenting and Self-Control Across Early to Late Adolescence: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis (2019), Jian-Bin Li and colleagues explored the relationship between parenting and self-control among people between 10 and 22 years old. Analyzing 191 articles, they found that “positive parenting,” reflecting warmth and positive control, is associated with higher self-control, whereas “negative parenting,” reflecting hostility and negative control, seems associated with lower self-control. The effect seems to be reciprocal, too—for instance, adolescents’ higher self-control seems to increase positive parenting, whereas adolescents’ lower self-control seems to give rise to a more negative parent–child relationship. 

Can positive parenting serve as a buffer against other challenges? Yes, according to Gene H. Brody and colleagues in a 2019 article called The Protective Effects of Supportive Parenting on the Relationship Between Adolescent Poverty and Resting-State Functional Brain Connectivity During Adulthood. Exposure to poverty during childhood is a known risk for disrupted brain structure and function in regions subserving emotional processing, emotion regulation, and executive functioning. Using functional MRI, the researchers assessed the central-executive and emotion-regulation neural networks of 25-year-old African American participants living in rural environments in the United States. Supportive parenting (i.e., encouragement, involvement, and communication) appeared to ameliorate those negative impacts—perhaps by exposing young people who grow up in poverty to cognitive control and problem-solving skills and thus affect their brain development, the researchers surmised. 

In addition, caregiving often comes with its own perks. In On the Benefits of Giving Social Support: When, Why, and How Support Providers Gain by Caring for Others (2017), Tristen Inagaki and colleagues reviewed emerging findings that suggest when, why, and how giving support to others provides benefits to the self. They identified possible mechanisms by which these benefits arise, outlined boundary conditions that influence such benefits, and noted that “to gain a richer understanding of the association between social ties and well-being, an important future research direction is to not only consider the support receiver but also emphasize the support provider.” 

None of this is to suggest that caregiving is easy. In Parental Burnout: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter? (2019), Moïra Mikolajczak and colleagues described parental burnout as a state of intense exhaustion in which parents become emotionally detached from their children and doubtful about their capacity to be good parents. In two studies of participants with at least one child living at home, they found that parents who felt more burnout also reported higher escape ideation and neglectful or even violent behaviors against their children. Besides creating interventions to reduce parental burnout, the researchers wrote, prevention efforts should reinforce the use of parenting hotlines and provide parents with more support. 

Ironically, the people who may seem best suited to notably challenging forms of caregiving may also be most vulnerable to harm from it. In Emotional and Cognitive Empathy in Caregivers of People With Neurodegenerative Disease: Relationships With Caregiver Mental Health (2021), Alice Y. Hua and colleagues observed that caregivers of people with dementia or neurodegenerative disease who show high levels of emotional empathy appear to have poorer mental health than those with lower empathy levels. Higher emotional empathy, but not cognitive empathy, appeared to be associated with worse mental health, suggesting that emotional empathy might be a risk factor and an intervention target.   

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Panic attacks revolve around terror. Though people mainly associate them with the mind, they’re actually constellations of symptoms, both physical and cognitive. Your brain is seized by fear; your body responds, and it can be hard to make sense of it all.

What is a panic attack?

Most experts define a panic attack as a sudden onset of intense fear, as opposed to a condition like general anxiety, which usually manifests as almost constant worry.

People having panic attacks are bombarded by mental and physical symptoms, which can vary from person to person.

…

When I attended a Washington Wizards open practice at D.C.’s Capital One Arena earlier this month, the focus was more on spectator entertainment than Rocky-style workouts. The season opener was a week away, and the players ran drills at half speed and engaged in silly skills competitions for fans, including a basketball version of Connect Four. But as a lifelong Wiz devotee, I was having an awestruck, love-you-man moment. Here I was posing for a photo with Phil freakin Chenier. Franchise royalty. My childhood idol. Back in the 1970s, when Chenier was draining jumpers and sporting a Richard Pryor mustache, the team routinely chased titles. These days? Not so much.

Being an NBA fan who loves the Wizards is a little like being a foodie who adores turnips: It just doesn’t make sense. Since the 2000–01 season, only the Knicks and Timberwolves have lost more games. The franchise last advanced beyond the second round of the playoffs in 1979 (back when they were called the Bullets), and they’ve missed the playoffs 16 of the past 25 years. We fans have endured 40-plus years of frustration and disappointment, mainly from the typical issues—bad defense, bad draft picks, bad trades—but sometimes from … weirder ones: One All-Star player was charged with a gun felony involving a teammate, and another was once suspended without pay for being overweight. It’s all #SoWizards, to use a Twitter hashtag.

And yet, I made it out to the open practice with a few hundred fans on a Tuesday night, wearing a Wizards T-shirt and feeling the faint, irrational warmth of preseason hope. Anyone can root for a winner. That’s easy. Last season, the NFL teams with the top-selling merchandise were the Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Steelers, and Chiefs. Each team finished with a winning record. In Philadelphia, the currently undefeated Eagles and the World Series–bound Phillies have generated a 20 percent or more increase in business for local restaurants, sports bars, and memorabilia stores.

…

Do you ever hurt your own feelings?

For me, it’s a common occurrence. A curt reply to that thoughtful work email, zero responses to that happy hour invitation – little slights like these get my inner critic going. What a dumb thing to say! Of course they don’t like you. Who do you think you are?

This kind of negative self-talk can get in the way of creating strong relationships with ourselves and others. But there are ways to stop this spiral of thinking, says psychologist Ethan Kross. In moments of hurt or confusion, pause to consider other possibilities.

…

In the final discussion with social psychologist David Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, APS’s Ludmila Nunes talks with him about the third section of his book, in which he applies his psychological insights to the larger world around us. 

Listen to the previous episodes featuring David Myers and his latest book, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. You’ll get to know more about David’s career and his goals of helping his readers and students think critically, savor the world, and develop a sense of wonder and respect for “the human creature.”  

Read more about David Myers’s new book, including an excerpt of the chapter Failure and Flourishing here.

It’s been an election cycle packed with misinformation and conspiracy theories. So why do so many people believe the lies?

Blame the brain.

Many of the decisions we make as individuals and as a society depend on accurate information; however, our psychological biases and predispositions make us vulnerable to falsehoods.

As a result, misinformation is more likely to be believed, remembered and later recalled — even after we learn that it was false.

“On every level, I think that misinformation has the upper hand,” said Nathan Walter, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University who studies the correction of misinformation.

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The aim of this article is to provoke some thoughts and considerations of how you, as leaders in financial services, might augment your communications to engage both systems of your audience’s brains—the smaller conscious, practical part and the larger nonconscious, emotional part.

The financial industry worldwide is, firstly, governed, framed and communicated in numbers. So, it is unsurprising that organisations in this space engage with clients in terms of numbers around risks, gains, yields, outcomes and so on. This makes perfect sense if we take it at face value from an industry perspective. Yet, if we look at it from another angle, that of human psychology, total reliance on communications based purely on numbers represents a not-so-insignificant set of problems—problems that assume we know what our audiences need (facts, figures, numbers, logic) or they fully understand what they need; problems that disempower the effectiveness of financial product and service communications as we assume people are more confident with their finances than they are; problems that fail to fully engage or be relevant to our target audiences because we assume what people’s motivating factors are to engage with money; problems that undermine our organisation’s ability to differentiate itself in a crowded market and create a nonnumerical-based reason to engage with us.

While one could write multiple doctoral theses on this subject, I will attempt, for the sake of this short article, to discuss the impact of a few of these psychological problems in relation to financial planning and decision-making (problems that apply regardless of culture, gender or geographical location). I will narrow the focus somewhat and consider several problems that are linked while assuming that our audiences are governed by rational, logical, computer-processing-type brains. I will counter this assumption by discussing the impacts of emotions on decisions, then evaluate the importance of our nonconscious brain before ending with the influences of cognitive biases in the financial sector.

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It’s easy to assume tennis star Rafael Nadal has at least a little OCD going on. He always makes sure his chair sits perfectly perpendicular to the court. He always puts two drink bottles in front of the chair to his left, one behind the other, aimed diagonally at the court.

Before he serves, he uses his right hand to touch the back and front of his shorts, then his left shoulder, then his right, then his nose, left ear, nose, right ear, and lastly his right thigh.

At changeovers, he always waits for the other player to cross the line, then he crosses with his right-foot first. He folds a towel and puts it behind him, then folds a second towel and puts it on his lap. He takes one sip from the first bottle, then another sip from the second bottle, and puts them back in the same place with the labels facing the same direction.

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The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement
Hannes Rosenbusch, Anthony M. Evans, and Marcel Zeelenberg 

Why are some jokes funnier than others? It might depend on the audience, this research suggests. Across five studies with varied stimuli and types of audiences (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), Rosenbusch and colleagues found that perceivers’ characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high likelihood of explaining and predicting humor appreciation (in this case, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting level of amusement.   

Storage in Visual Working Memory Recruits a Content-Independent Pointer System
William Thyer et al.

Thyer and colleagues recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) activity while participants maintained varying numbers of items (geometric shapes varying in color and/or orientation) in their visual working memory (WM). The EEG results enabled precise tracking of the number of individuated items each participant held and predicted individual differences in their WM capacity. This neural “load signal” was unaffected by variations in the type and number of visual features held about each item, suggesting that it tracked the number of item representations and not their content. Thyer and colleagues hypothesize that the number of items matters because of a WM limit in the number of distinct entities that a person can simultaneously track through time and space.  

Experience of Playing a Musical Instrument and Lifetime Change in General Cognitive Ability: Evidence From the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936
Judith A. Okely, Katie Overy, and Ian J. Deary

Okely and colleagues analyzed data from older adults who completed general cognitive-ability assessments (e.g., intelligence tests) at ages 11 and 70 and reported their experience playing a musical instrument. The researchers found a small, statistically significant positive association between this experience and change in general cognitive ability between ages 11 and 70. Specifically, individuals with more musical-instrument experience were likely to show greater gains in general cognitive ability. This association was reduced but remained statistically significant following adjustment for covariates such as childhood and adulthood socioeconomic status, years of education, and disease history.  

Underestimating Counterparts’ Learning Goals Impairs Conflictual Conversations
Hanne K. Collins, Charles A. Dorison, Francesca Gino, and Julia A. Minson

Expressing willingness to learn about each other might improve communication between people holding opposing views. Across seven studies, participants consistently underestimated how willing their disagreeing counterparts were to learn about opposing views. However, participants did not underestimate their own willingness to learn or how willing others who share the same views would be. This belief predicted greater derogation of attitude opponents and more negative expectations for conflictual conversations. In both American partisan politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a short informational intervention increased beliefs that disagreeing counterparts were willing to learn about the others’ views. This decreased derogation and increased willingness to engage in the future.  

Surprisingly Happy to Have Helped: Underestimating Prosociality Creates a Misplaced Barrier to Asking for Help
Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley

People may be overly reluctant to ask for help. The reason? Miscalibrated expectations about others’ prosocial motivation can make them underestimate how positively others will feel when asked to help, according to Zhao and Epley. In a series of scenarios, recalled experiences, and live interactions among participants in the United States, those needing help consistently underestimated others’ willingness to help and their positivity in doing so, and overestimated their sense of inconvenience. These miscalibrated expectations stemmed from underestimating helpers’ prosocial motivation while overestimating compliance motivation.   

Face-Information Sampling in Super-Recognizers
James D. Dunn et al.

Super-recognizers have exceptional face-recognition abilities. Dunn and colleagues compared visual sampling of super-recognizers with that of typical viewers by measuring participants’ gaze position as they learned and recognized unfamiliar faces. Using eye-tracking, the researchers created “spotlight” apertures that revealed only part of the unfamiliar faces. Super-recognizers performed better than average people at all aperture sizes. They also made more fixations (i.e., stopped scanning and held their central vision to take in detailed information more often), focused less on the eye region, and distributed their gaze more than typical viewers. This indicates that face-recognition ability cannot be explained by holistic information (i.e., whole-face) sampling. Moreover, differences were most apparent when participants were learning faces, which suggests that super-recognizers might better be thought of as “super-learners.”  

Mugs and Plants: Object Semantic Knowledge Alters Perceptual Processing With Behavioral Ramifications
Dick Dubbelde and Sarah Shomstein
 
What people know about an object can change what they see and how they see it. Dubbelde and Shomstein hypothesized that people process objects with and without action associations (i.e., tools and nontools, respectively) differently because the objects recruit different brain areas. Results indicated that when participants saw a tool, such as a mug, the parietal cortex was recruited, leading them to perceive this object with higher temporal resolution (i.e., faster) than when they saw a nontool, such as a potted plant. However, participants saw details better (i.e., better spatial resolution) when they saw a nontool.   

Real-World Exploration Increases Across Adolescence and Relates to Affect, Risk Taking, and Social Connectivity
Natalie M. Saragosa-Harris et al.

Exploration and risk taking may play an important role in sustaining adolescent well-being and establishing social connectivity, this research suggests. Saragosa-Harris and colleagues used geolocation tracking to quantify exploration—variability in daily movement patterns—over a 3-month period in 58 adolescents and adults (ages 13–27) in New York City. They found that individuals near legal adulthood exhibited the highest exploration levels. Days of higher exploration were associated with greater positive affect irrespective of age. Higher exploration was associated with greater social connectivity in all participants and also with higher risk taking selectively among adolescents.  

Stress and Stress-Induced Glucocorticoids Facilitate Empathic Accuracy in Men but Have No Effects for Women
Jonas P. Nitschke, Jens C. Pruessner, and Jennifer A. Bartz 

Acute stress can undermine cognitive abilities such as decision making. But in men, paradoxically, it might improve the ability to understand others’ feelings (i.e., empathy), this research suggests. Nitschke and colleagues found that acute stress increased cortisol response, resulting in a higher presence of glucocorticoids in saliva, which in turn facilitated empathic accuracy (i.e., the ability to rate how people depicted in short videos were feeling). Notably, this effect occurred only in men—women showed a smaller cortisol response to stress, and acute psychosocial stress did not improve their empathy. Moreover, women taking oral contraceptives showed worse empathic accuracy than regularly cycling women.  

Personalized Prediction of Behaviors and Experiences: An Idiographic Person–Situation Test
Emorie D. Beck and Joshua J. Jackson
 
How can psychological science accurately predict future behaviors and experiences? Beck and Jackson used data collected in several assessments of college students and built personalized prediction models to predict future occurrences of procrastination, loneliness, and studying. Rather than pitting persons against situations, they used an idiographic, person-specific perspective that leverages psychological phenomena, situations, and time to jointly predict future behaviors and experiences. The researchers were able to accurately predict students’ behaviors, but some students’ behaviors were more predictable than others.  Moreover, the features of each person and situation that best predicted each future behavior and experience varied widely across students.  

Recognition of Masked Faces in the Era of the Pandemic: No Improvement Despite Extensive Natural Exposure
Erez Freud et al.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, masks frequently occluded faces, which may have led to deficits in people’s ability to recognize others. As real-life exposure to masked faces increased, did the recognition of masked faces improve? This research suggests that it did not. Freud and colleagues tested masked-face recognition at six different time points over 20 months, alongside a 12-month longitudinal study. Results indicated persistently poor recognition of masked faces and little improvement across time points. Additional experiments indicated that the amount of individual exposure to masked faces did not improve recognition.  

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Editor’s note: This release is a slight modification of a release originally distributed by Northwestern University on November 9.

Greta Thunberg, David Hogg and Malala Yousafzai, all teenagers when their activism caught the world’s attention, are proof that leadership develops well before adulthood.

As essential as they are, and as complex the challenges they face as tomorrow’s leaders, scientists do not understand the traits and experience that define young leaders. While there is clear evidence that leaders blossom early, little research exists about leadership development in adolescence.

“Understanding the Leaders of Tomorrow: The Need to Study Leadership in Adolescence” makes a case for adding a multidisciplinary developmental perspective to leadership research. The study was published November 9 in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

“The rapid development of personality, peer relationships, values and vocational identity during this period, make adolescence an optimal time for developing leadership potential,” said Jennifer Tackett, a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University and the paper’s corresponding author.

Tackett, who is also editor of APS’s Clinical Psychological Science journal, is director of the Personality Across Development (PAD) lab, and a professor of psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.

Arguing that an understanding of youth leadership would have immediate application for educators, parents, policy makers, and employers, the authors propose bringing together expertise from different areas of psychological science to study early leadership and how it emerges, develops, and influences leadership ability as adults.

They point out opportunities for taking concepts from the study of leadership in adults and extending them to adolescents, while simultaneously leveraging existing adolescent-focused research on peer influence and cognitive and behavioral development to form a more nuanced model of how leadership develops through life stages.

They also suggest new avenues of research including studying the environments adolescent leaders occupy, such as athletics, social justice efforts, extracurriculars, and social media, to better understand how early leadership takes shape.

In addition to the benefits research on leadership development in youth could have on society, it could also benefit the individual youth by helping them form a broader sense of their own leadership identity and an enhanced understanding of their own personal strengths and capacity, according to the authors.

Other goals of the research are to develop leadership interventions to maximize potential and facilitate better diversification of the leadership pipeline.

“We think that a lot of great leadership potential is getting lost as youth develop in the context of cumulative, multilayered systemic barriers, and that looking earlier in life may be a key to harnessing and fostering this potential well ahead of these later outcomes,” Tackett said. “Everyone stands to benefit from improving leadership skill and effectiveness in the leaders of tomorrow.”

Other leadership scientists contributing to the paper include researchers from Cleveland State University, the University of Southern California, Wayne State University, the University of Toronto, Ghent University, the University of Exeter, and Rice University.

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I’ve learned to do a lot of things by watching YouTube videos. Wire a four-way circuit. Replace the control board on a clothes dryer. Create complicated (at least to me) spreadsheet pivot tables.

Granted, “learned” is an overstatement. I got a basic sense of what to do. Most of what I learned actually came from doing, and struggling, and eventually figuring out — not from watching.

Even though I went into those tasks, and plenty more, extremely confident that they would be a breeze.

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It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain.

His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death, the most shattering. I’d spent the first weeks of his existence obsessing over him around the clock, preoccupied with the basics of survival and longing for a snatch of sleep. Now, in the first weeks after his death, I reeled through a twisted mirror image of the same experience. It left me buckled over my kitchen sink, an awful, primal sound tearing from deep in my lungs. That sound—of keening—was one I’d heard just twice before: once from an animal, and then from a friend at her 12-year-old’s funeral. I hope to never hear it again.

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Developmental psychologists have long noted that very small children think a lot like scientists. Anybody who has spent time with a 2-year-old has witnessed their insatiable curiosity and constant experiments. Yet by the time most children are in middle school, they lose much of that innate interest and don’t see science as part of their future, especially girls and minorities.

How can we counteract this phenomenon, given how important it is to encourage people to develop scientific skills and to know and care about science? What can we do to help children retain their natural scientific impulse?

A series of studies by Marjorie Rhodes at New York University and her colleagues suggests an interesting and unexpected answer. It has a lot to do with subtle features of how we talk to children about science. Do we talk about “being a scientist” or “doing science”? It turns out that children are more likely to stay engaged in science if they think of it as something you do rather than something you are.

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