American Psychologist最新文献

Operational psychologists provide a variety of psychological services in support of national security, national defense, and public safety. Their work may include the assessment of personnel for high-risk positions, consultation to investigations and crisis negotiations, support to military or intelligence training and operations, or other types of psychological and behavioral assessments. The practice of operational psychology differs in important ways from other practice areas and has developed significantly over the past 20 years. Given developments in the field, debate about the proper roles of psychologists in national security settings, and psychologists' ongoing need for guidance, these Professional Practice Guidelines for Operational Psychology are provided to benefit operational psychologists, the recipients of their services, and other affected parties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Sudhir Kakar, the father of Indian psychoanalysis, died on April 22, 2024, at the age of 85 years. Born in Nainital in 1938, he grew up in Sargodha (now in Pakistan), Rohtak, and Delhi. Kakar belonged to an upper caste Hindu family, well connected to the industrialist elites in India. Kakar became a psychoanalyst after meeting his guru Erik Erikson. After Girindrasekhar Bose, Kakar was one of the most creative psychoanalysts of modern India. He wrote and edited 25 books of nonfiction and seven novels. He is survived by his son, daughter, and his partner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recently, Dodge et al. (2024) published an article in American Psychologist offering recommendations to the mental health field for changing from an individual-level to a population-level focus. These recommendations included scaling up evidence-based programs, innovating and evaluating population-level interventions, and creating a primary system of care to promote mental health and well-being. For the past 2 decades, the Veterans Health Administration has been successfully engaged in these activities. In this commentary, we describe some of these ongoing efforts to demonstrate that Dodge et al.'s (2024) recommendations are indeed feasible with the proper infrastructure and resources and that the Veterans Health Administration's efforts can serve as a model for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When ancient humans gained the ability to investigate abstract questions, what first question did they pose? This article offers a novel, sweeping, historical analysis with important implications for psychological theory. The story begins with identifying the first question in Ancient Greek philosophy as "Where am I?" with particular interest in the world's overarching basic traits. For example, Pythagoras proposed the world was defined by beauty and Heraclitus suggested change. Though this discourse has traditionally puzzled historians, recent psychological research suggests it might have been largely a debate over primal world beliefs, an emerging research topic that this article introduces and situates historically. Recently, the latent structure of primal world beliefs was mapped statistically, revealing 26 dimensions. Most of these beliefs were new to psychologists, yet already posed by ancient philosophers-including Pythagoras' Beautiful world belief and Heraclitus' Changing world belief. Identifying first questions in early history may have value for psychological theorizing because it hints at something that social psychologists have long suspected: that humans are creatures fundamentally driven to understand their situation and what it calls for. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychology is currently facing a multilayered crisis stemming from the fact that the results of many psychological studies cannot be replicated (replication crisis), that psychological research has neglected cross-cultural and cross-temporal variation (universality crisis), and that many psychological theories are ill-developed and underspecified (theory crisis). In the present article, we use ideas derived from debates in theoretical and philosophical psychology as a basis for responding to all three crises. In short, we claim that psychological concepts are inherently vague in the sense that their meanings and the rules for their application are indeterminate. This does not imply that psychological concepts are ineffable or lack meaning. It implies, however, that hoping to arrive at a finite set of necessary and sufficient criteria that define psychological concepts once and for all is an illusion. From this, we deduce four recommendations for responding to psychology's crises. First, we argue that the replication crisis could be approached by paying more attention to the context conditions under which psychological realities and knowledge about these realities are being created. Second, we claim that the universality crisis can be alleviated by putting more effort into exploring variability across times and cultures. Third, we contend that acknowledging the language dependence of psychological research could be a fruitful way of addressing the theory crisis. Last, we show that embracing theoretical and methodological pluralism would be an antidote against psychology's crises in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This article memorializes Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024), Danny was always fascinated by the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior, beliefs, values, and tastes, if also by the grand problems of philosophy. His pioneering work led to his influential theory of attention as a limited resource that could be allocated to various tasks presented in his first book, Attention and Effort (1974). Prospect theory remained his most cited work by far and was the central work cited in his Nobel Prize award in 2002. Danny's Nobel Prize Lecture, carried the seeds of his highly influential book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). His research influenced policy and program development in economics, philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Highlights of Kahneman's career and professional contributions are noted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This article memorializes Jean Maria Arrigo (1944-2024). Jean Maria's dedication to pursuing truth and accountability led to ethical reforms to the world's largest organization of psychologists. Despite her success in reforming APA policy, until her death, Jean Maria remained deeply concerned about the weaponization of psychology and the dangers posed by ties between professional associations and the national security establishment. Highlights of Arrigo's career and professional contributions are noted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The realization that most behavioral science research focuses on cultures labeled as WEIRD-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Arnett, 2008; Henrich et al., 2010; Thalmayer et al., 2021)-has given an impetus to extend the research to more diverse populations. Confucian East Asian societies have relatively strong social and technological infrastructure to advance science and thus have gained much prominence in cross-cultural studies. This has inadvertently fostered another bias: the dominance of WEIRD-Confucian comparisons and a tendency to draw conclusions about "non-WEIRD" cultures in general based on data from Confucian societies. Here, analyzing 1,466,019 scientific abstracts and, separately, coverage of 60 large-scale cross-cultural psychological projects (N_samples = 2,668 from N_countries = 153 covering n_participants = 3,722,940), we quantify the dominance of Confucian over other non-WEIRD cultures in psychological research. Our analysis also reveals the underrepresentation of non-European Union postcommunist societies and the almost total invisibility of Pacific Island, Caribbean, Middle African, and Central Asian societies within the research database of psychology. We call for a shift in cross-cultural studies toward midsize (7+ countries) and ideally large-scale (50+ countries) cross-cultural studies, and we propose mitigations that we believe could aid the inclusion of diverse researchers as well as participants from underrepresented cultures in our field. People in all world regions and cultures deserve psychological knowledge that applies to them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

From childhood to adulthood, the human brain develops highly specialized yet interacting neural modules that give rise to nuanced attention and other cognitive functions. Each module can specialize over development to support specific functions, yet also coexist in multiple neurobiological modes to support distinct processes. Advances in cognitive neuroscience have conceptualized human attention as a set of cognitive processes anchored in highly specialized yet interacting neural systems. The underlying mechanisms of how these systems interplay to support children's cognitive development of multiple attention processes remain unknown. Leveraging developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging with attention network test paradigm, we demonstrate differential neurocognitive development of three core attentional processes from childhood to adulthood, with alerting reaching adult-like level earlier, followed by orienting and executive attention with more protracted development throughout middle and late childhood. Relative to adults, young children exhibit immature specialization with less pronounced dissociation of neural systems specific to each attentional process. Children manifest adult-like distributed representations in the ventral attention and cingulo-opercular networks, but less stable and weaker generalizable representations across multiple processes in the dorsal attention network. Our findings provide insights into the functional specialization and generalization of neural representations scaffolding cognitive development of core attentional processes from childhood to adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Adverse life experiences are associated with an increased risk of mental disorders. The successful adaptation to adversity and maintenance or quick restoration of mental health despite adversity is referred to as resilience. Identifying factors that promote resilience can contribute to the prevention of mental disorders. Lifestyle behaviors, increasingly recognized for their impact on mental health, are discussed as potential resilience factors. Several studies found that healthy eating and physical activity (PA) are positively associated with resilience. However, most of these studies assessed resilience through questionnaires, which is unsatisfactory given that resilience research is moving toward conceptualizing resilience as the outcome of a dynamic process, which can only be assessed prospectively and longitudinally. The present study is the first to assess the relationship between diet quality, PA, sedentary behavior (SB), and resilience, captured prospectively and longitudinally in a sample of 145 individuals (75.17% female; M_age = 28.88, SD_age = 7.80; M_BMI = 24.11, SD_BMI = 3.97). Resilience was assessed as the relationship between stressor exposure and mental health (i.e., the stressor reactivity score: higher scores indicate lower resilience and vice versa). Diet quality (i.e., the Healthy Eating Index) was assessed on the basis of app-based food records and 24-hr dietary recalls. PA and SB were objectively recorded through accelerometers. Regression analysis showed that neither diet quality nor PA and SB predicted resilience (ps > .30). Profound differences in the conceptualization and operationalization of resilience might explain the contrary findings. Prospective longitudinal studies are needed to replicate the findings of the present study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).