Current Psychology最新文献

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly shaped working practices across a variety of fields including academia. Demonstrating a remarkable versatility, these models can generate responses to prompts with information in the form of text, documents, and images, show ability to summarize documents, perform literature searches, and even more, understand human behavior. However, despite providing many clear benefits, barriers remain toward their integration into academic work. Ethical and practical concerns regarding their suitability for various tasks further complicate their appropriate use. Here, we summarize recent advances assessing the capacity of LLMs for different components of academic research and teaching, focusing on three key areas in the psychological sciences: education and assessment, academic writing, and simulating human behavior. We discuss how LLMs can be used to aid each area, describe current challenges and good practices, and propose future directions. In doing so, we aim to increase the awareness and proper use of LLMs in various components of academic work, which will only feature more heavily over time.

The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) has been extensively validated using Classical Test Theory, mostly relying on factor analytic methods among adult samples. The current study used Item Response Theory to validate SWLS among a sample of early adolescents in California and examine associations between SWLS and tobacco and cannabis use. Data were collected from ninth-grade students (N = 2552) attending 10 public high schools in Los Angeles, California in 2013. Nonparametric and parametric item response modeling were used to validate the SWLS. Binary logistic regression was used to examine the associations between SWLS and tobacco and cannabis use. Item discrimination indices were above 1.80, indicating all items functioned appropriately in terms of measuring the construct and separating participants of different levels of life satisfaction. The test information curve indicated that the SWLS was best for discriminating between respondents with low to average life satisfaction. Participants who reported high scores on the SWLS, compared with those who reported low scores, were significantly less likely to report lifetime e-cigarette, cigarette, and cannabis use. The SWLS possessed excellent psychometric properties among a sample of early adolescents in California. Findings may be useful for scholars and practitioners to screen for subjective well-being in early adolescence, and target interventions focused on improving adolescent health & well-being, which may help prevent substance use initiation or sustained use.

The attachment theory emphasizes the role of caregiver sensitivity in shaping children's behavioral development. However, it remains unclear whether variations in early caregiving quality in low-risk populations influence children's physical health across development. This study investigates whether maternal sensitivity and infant-mother attachment security are associated with children's physical health from 0 to 14 years. We employed Bayesian generalized linear mixed models to analyze data from a low-risk Dutch sample from birth to age 14 (N = 193). Maternal sensitivity was assessed five times from 5 weeks to 14 years, while attachment security was assessed at 12 months using the Strange Situation Procedure. Child health complaints were recorded monthly in the first year and with intervals of 1-2 years until 14 years (N = 150) and categorized according to the International Classification of Primary Care: respiratory, skin, general, digestive symptoms. Higher maternal sensitivity scores in the first year of life and throughout 14 years were related to fewer total health complaints, particularly respiratory. Securely attached children showed fewer symptoms when early maternal sensitivity was higher. Insecurely attached children showed fewer health complaints, irrespective of sensitivity throughout childhood. Our findings indicate that maternal sensitivity and attachment may influence physical health. Future research should explore underlying psychobiological mechanisms.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-025-08350-5.

College students tend to engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors as well as substance use. Simultaneously, they are self-focused and capable of increased self-regulation. In the current study, we investigated the intersection of these behaviors on college students' self-development. Specifically, we hypothesized that substance use would relate curvilinearly to self-regulation and self-esteem, prosocial tendencies would relate positively to self-regulation and self-esteem, and prosocial tendencies would moderate the relations between substance use and the two self-variables. A total of 572 undergraduate students (72.2% women; M _age=19.37 years, SD = 1.29) completed online surveys. As expected, a curvilinear relation between substance use and self-esteem was detected. In addition, results suggest that substance use negatively predicted self-regulation, whereas prosocial tendencies toward strangers and family positively predicted self-regulation. Prosocial tendencies as a moderator between substance use and the two self variables yielded mixed results. Therefore, the relation between substance use, prosocial tendencies, self-esteem, and self-regulation among college students remains nuanced and complex.

Mental processes underlying people's responses to Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) have rarely been studied. In cognitive psychology, one of the most popular and successful mental process models is the drift diffusion model. It decomposes response time (RT) data to distinguish how fast information is accessed and processed ("drift rate"), and how much information is accessed and processed ("boundary separation"). We examined whether the drift diffusion model could be successfully applied to people's RTs for EMA questions and could shed light on between- and within-person variation in the mental process components underlying momentary reports. We analyzed EMA data (up to 6 momentary surveys/day for one week) from 954 participants in the Understanding America Study (29,067 completed measurement occasions). An item-response-theory diffusion model was applied to RTs associated with 5 momentary negative affect ratings. As hypothesized, both diffusion model parameters showed moderate stability across EMA measurement occasions. Drift rate and boundary separation together explained a majority of the variance in the observed RTs and demonstrated correspondence across different sets of EMA items, both within and between individuals. The parameters related in theoretically expected ways to within-person changes in activities (momentary work and recreation) and person-level characteristics (neuroticism and depression). Drift rate increased and boundary separation decreased over the study, suggesting that practice effects in EMA consist of multiple distinctive cognitive processes. The results support the reliability and validity of the diffusion model parameters derived from EMA and provide initial evidence that the model may enhance understanding of process underlying EMA affect ratings.