American Psychologist最新文献

Using a decolonial approach, we provided a narrative review of the research on racism in psychology and conducted a systematic review of the top five psychology journals publishing research on racism and mental health to identify trends in racism research over time and the research gaps. We examined 372 articles on racism published between 1992 and 2022: American Psychologist, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, and The Counseling Psychologist. Based on our review, we found that published research examining racism has steadily increased over the past 3 decades, with the greatest spikes in 2021 and 2022. The largest increase was in studies focused on People of Color's experiences with racism. The overwhelming majority of the articles were empirical (86.3%) and most of these studies (87.5%) employed cross-sectional designs. We identified corollary topics by racial/ethnic group, prevalent research designs, and the emergence of strength-based and healing approaches to address racism's impact. There were general racial and ethnic differences in trends, with research on various People of Color groups focused on the harmful effects of racism and research on White populations focused on Whiteness and level of awareness of racism. We conclude with recommendations to enhance the content and methodological rigor of future research while also suggesting policy implications to support advancements in this critical area of study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in American Psychologist on Jul 15 2024 (see record 2025-04658-001). In the article, three sentences and a reference were redacted related to proceedings against a university concerning its psychology program because appropriate context was not provided in the article. All versions of this article have been corrected.] This article calls for the American Psychological Association (APA) to proactively include the elimination of antisemitism or prejudice against Jewish people in its current mission to disassemble all forms of racism from its organization as well as society. In this article, Jews (estimated as 2.4% of the population) are defined as a people with a common identity, ethnicity, and religion as they experience prejudice; their intersection in Jewish identity; the history and characteristics of antisemitism and its current manifestation in public life, academic institutions, and psychology. Despite Jews having made major contributions to the development of psychology as a profession, historically through the first half of the 20th century, Jews were systematically discriminated against within the discipline of psychology through quotas for acceptance into graduate training, discriminatory employment practices in university psychology departments, and most egregiously through the espousing of "scientific racism" including eugenics by prominent leaders in the APA. We describe how historically leaders in the APA engaged in overt and covert antisemitism while the APA continues to do little or nothing to combat it. We then offer suggestions for the mitigation and elimination of this form of bias, discrimination, and hate as it once again escalates in society. We recommend that the APA engages in research about antisemitism, its predictors, consequences, and power; evaluates the efficacy of intervention programs; encourages contact with various multicultural minoritized groups; and disseminates knowledge to educate about the psychological effects of antisemitism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Mantras, sometimes called holy names or prayer words, are increasingly included and studied as components in health and human services interventions. In this emerging field, the term "mantra" has been implicitly defined over several decades in a way that has been useful, largely shared across research teams, and historically resonant. However, confusion has arisen in how "mantra" is defined and used in a small fraction of recent publications that depart from longstanding usage. To provide needed guidance going forward for researchers, editors, reviewers, and practitioners, the present article discusses historical, cross-cultural, conceptual, and empirical background and proposes a definition of "mantra" for use in empirical research on mantra interventions: A mantra is a phrase or sound that has been repeated and sanctified over time within a spiritual tradition. Using this definition, we categorize several dozen empirical studies of mantra repetition interventions. Emphasizing well-established psychosocial processes such as priming and spreading activation, we explain theoretical and empirical bases for expecting repetition of mantras to enlist spiritual resources and provide added value for health and well-being, over and above the repetition of neutral non-mantra sounds or phrases. Although the term mantra should be used carefully in professional discourse, we allow that looser definitions can be acceptable in communications with intervention recipients, clients, and patients, parallel to recent recommendations for how to employ the term "spirituality." Directions for future research are suggested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Natural language processing (NLP)-previously the domain of a select few language and computer scientists-is undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity across disciplines. The ubiquity of language data, alongside extremely rapid methodological innovations, has magnetized the field, attracting researchers with the promise of measuring, forecasting, and understanding the most central questions in business, psychology, biology, sociology, the humanities, and beyond. The power of language analysis to reveal insights into human thought, feeling, and behavior has become a core interest emerging from recent technological advances, which are being probed to unearth deeply embedded truths about the human condition. However, NLP research has reached a critical juncture, sitting at the cusp of societal transformation in many aspects of daily life. The details of how NLP research develops over the next 3-5 years will define this transformation. In this emerging, near-infinite space of NLP-driven research, we provide a critical frame of reference for how, when, and why these technologies should evolve in a particularly transdisciplinary manner. Specifically, we discuss (a) the urgency of pairing existing and emerging NLP research with existing scientific knowledge, theory, and principles from the behavioral sciences; (b) the coevolution of NLP technologies; and (c) the practical implications and ethical consequences of expanding language analysis using broader psychosocial theories of the human condition. While our discussion focuses principally on using language as a window in the individual mind, this topic holds substantial implications for other disciplines and lines of inquiry, including the dynamics of social interaction and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Educators have become increasingly committed to social and emotional learning in schools. However, we know too little about the typical growth trajectories of the competencies that schools are striving to improve. We leverage data from the California Office to Reform Education, a consortium of districts in California serving over 1.5 million students, that administers annual surveys to students to measure social and emotional competencies (SECs). This article uses data from six cohorts of approximately 16,000 students each (51% male, 73% Latinx, 11% White, 10% Black, 24% with parents who did not complete high school) in Grades 4-12. Two questions are addressed. First, how much growth occurs in growth mindset, self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness from Grades 4 to 12? Second, do initial status and growth look different by parental educational attainment and gender? Using accelerated longitudinal design growth models, findings show distinct growth trends among the four SECs with growth mindset increasing, self-management mostly decreasing, and self-efficacy and social awareness decreasing and then increasing. The subgroup analyses show gaps between groups but patterns of growth that are more similar than different. Further, subgroup membership accounts for very little variation in growth or declines. Instead, initial levels of competencies predict growth. Also, variation within groups is greater than variation between groups. The findings have practical implications for educators and psychologists striving to improve SECs. If schools use student-report approaches, predicting steady and consistent positive growth in SECs is unrealistic. Instead, U-shaped patterns for some SECs appear to be normative with notable declines in the sixth grade, requiring new supports. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumptions about gender and sexuality have been challenged. This article situates these changes in the historical context of 21st century social technologies, which challenge traditional sources of authority about information and provide enhanced opportunities for individuals to experience authenticity in gender and sexuality. We frame authenticity as a master cultural narrative in the United States characterized by feeling a heightened sense of self-authorship and alignment between inner experience and embodiment of gender and sexuality. Five narratives now circulate in the United States, four of which support sexual and gender diversity: (a) gender as self-constructed; (b) sexuality as plural, playful, flexible, and fluid; (c) sexuality and monogamy as cultural compulsions; and (d) intersectionality as central to the experience of sexuality and gender. A fifth narrative seeking to legitimize hierarchies (e.g., patriarchy) is hostile to sexual and gender diversity but remains anchored in a metanarrative of authenticity and has benefitted equally from the affordances of social technologies. This historical moment provides researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to more intentionally ground their work in lived experience, challenge normative thinking about sexuality and gender, practice affirmation, center the phenomenon of diversity over discrete identity categories in an ever-exclusionary acronym (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and more identities [LGBTQ+]), and embrace fluid and nonlinear narratives of social change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 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) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Open data collected from research participants creates a tension between scholarly values of transparency and sharing, on the one hand, and privacy and security, on the other hand. A common solution is to make data sets anonymous by removing personally identifying information (e.g., names or worker IDs) before sharing. However, ostensibly anonymized data sets may be at risk of re-identification if they include demographic information. In the present article, we provide researchers with broadly applicable guidance and tangible tools so that they can engage in open science practices without jeopardizing participants' privacy. Specifically, we (a) review current privacy standards, (b) describe computer science data protection frameworks and their adaptability to the social sciences, (c) provide practical guidance for assessing and addressing re-identification risk, (d) introduce two open-source algorithms developed for psychological scientists-MinBlur and MinBlurLite-to increase privacy while maintaining the integrity of open data, and (e) highlight aspects of ethical data sharing that require further attention. Ultimately, the risk of re-identification should not dissuade engagement with open science practices. Instead, technical innovations should be developed and harnessed so that science can be as open as possible to promote transparency and sharing and as closed as necessary to maintain privacy and security. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

There is no crisis of replication and generalizability in psychological science, only misunderstanding or forgetting the fundamental nature of psychological phenomena and resultant implications for empirical testing. Stability-variability is the central feature of every psychological phenomenon, meaning that brain-mind interactions can only create stable patterns from which there will always be deviations. Psychological phenomena are not comparable to COVID-19 vaccines that were very effective (95%) initially for almost everyone for a long time. Replications cannot be the gatekeepers of scientific psychological knowledge, only constructive additions and explorations contributing to theory development and measurement improvement. Once a logically justified and theoretically well-developed hypothesis is presented, the phenomenon exists as long as one of the following conditions is true: (1) it has not been shown logically that the phenomenon cannot exist or (2) it has not been shown empirically that the phenomenon does not exist. Like in physics and other sciences, generalization to theory is critical in psychological science, but less important relative to hypothetical (phantom) populations. Initial COVID-19 vaccines were effective because they worked for the right theoretical reason, the mRNA mechanism. This central principle holds true for psychological phenomena as well, with findings generalizing to the theoretical explanation regarding the presence and manifestations of behaviors brought about by the brain-mind interactions, or stated differently, generalization of psychological phenomena to specific behaviors and under specific conditions as proposed by the theory. Instead of the narrow focus on generalization to hypothetical populations, psychological phenomena and associated generalization could more productively be examined from the nine proposed perspectives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Heterogeneity in individuals' physiological stress responses is central to theories linking stress with vulnerability to disease. Although multiple cortisol profiles have been reported in response to acute psychological stress, most prior work focuses on a single, average pattern and relative deviations from it, such as greater or lesser response peaks or reactivity. The present aims were to identify cortisol stress response trajectory classes using a data-driven approach and test whether social-evaluative threat (SET), a reliable elicitor of cortisol, predicted a greater likelihood of membership in the more reactive profiles. Data were pooled from 13 acute laboratory stressor studies from two geographically distinct U.S. university communities. Participants included 1,258 adults ranging from 18 to 52 years (M_age = 20.5; 62% women; 38% men) with diverse racial/ethnic identities and socioeconomic statuses. Studies included a version of the Trier Social Stress Test and at least three salivary cortisol assessments. SET was tested in three ways: study conditions with evaluators present, perceptions of evaluation, and ratings of shame-related emotions. Latent group-based trajectory modeling was applied to identify cortisol response patterns that best fit the data. Results revealed five unique cortisol response profiles. Consistent with hypotheses, SET conditions, greater perceived evaluation, and greater shame-related emotions predicted membership in the most reactive response trajectories. The findings highlight the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes cortisol stress response profiles, which has important implications for theories of stress and health and methodological approaches in future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).