New Ideas in Psychology最新文献

Playfulness is an individual difference variable that enables people to experience and (re)frame situations of everyday life as interesting, entertaining, and/or stimulating. This definition is consistent with a structural model that includes four different playfulness facets: other-directed, lighthearted, intellectual, and whimsical playfulness. In the work context, playfulness has been shown to be related with various outcomes such as innovative behavior or intrinsic goals. We tested adult playfulness' associations with coping strategies employed at work and whether these coping strategies help to transfer the expected association between playfulness and employees' life satisfaction. Study 1 (N = 185; nursery school trainees) provides support for our hypothesis that playfulness is associated with more positive and less negative coping strategies when being confronted with general and work-specific stress. Study 2 (N = 355; employees from various working fields) confirms our results from study 1 by demonstrating that playfulness is related to adaptively coping with work stress. Further, study 2 shows that some playfulness facets were positively related to life satisfaction and that these associations were transferred by coping less negatively with work stress and, to some degree, also by utilizing positive control strategies. Overall, our findings indicate that adults' playfulness is of importance for coping with stress at work and to further explain employees’ life-satisfaction. Directions for future research on playfulness in the work place are discussed.

Psychological research is currently in a phase of transition. The replication crisis has led to the introduction of a number of corrective measures such as preregistration, registered reports, open data and methods in order to make scientific knowledge in psychological science more reliable. In this article, we discuss why these tools remain superficial and provide rather a symptom treatment than a deeper treatment of the causes of the replication crisis. To this end, we address two central misalignments of current psychological research: Confirmation bias, in the sense of overweighting significant, hypothesis-confirming findings over negative ones, and the anthropological oversimplification of the human research subject. We conclude by providing indications of how a paradigm shift in psychological science research and publication practices can help to combat the causes of the replication crisis and poor scientific research practices.

This article seeks to describe in general terms what has become the standard way of conceptualizing moral injury in the clinical psychological and psychiatric literature, which is the key source for applications of the concept in other domains. What we call “the standard model” draws on certain assumptions about beliefs, mental states, and emotions as well as an implicit theory of causation about how various forms of harm arise from certain experiences or “events” that violate persons’ moral beliefs and systems. Our analysis makes these assumptions more explicit and subjects them to critical scrutiny. In so doing, we survey the current literature and identify basic features of how moral injuries are defined, how they are thought to occur, and the forms of treatment or repair that appear to be indicated. We caution that it matters how moral experience is characterized and argue that an alternative understanding of what is the moral in moral injury is important for overcoming critical challenges to the standard model. Moreover, recently evolving approaches to moral repair could be more consistent with an alternative model. Our concluding suggestion is that a more robust account of the nature of moral experience and its relations to self-identity and social experience more generally could advance understanding of the etiology of moral injury and promote rehabilitation.

For several decades scientists and philosophers studying how the mind works have debated the issue of modularity. Their main disagreements concern the massive modularity hypothesis, according to which all (or most) of our cognitive mechanisms are modular in nature. Pietraszewski and Wertz (2022) have recently suggested that the modularity debate is based on a confusion about the levels of analysis at which the mind can be explained. This article argues that their position suffers from three major problems: (1) the argument is unsound, with untrue premises; (2) it glosses over important empirical issues; and (3) the guidelines it offers are not sufficient for avoiding future confusions. As these criticisms are developed, this article will provide a way of making sense of the modularity debate—with an eye for what really is at stake both conceptually and empirically—and, by identifying a false assumption often shared by proponents and opponents of the massive modularity hypothesis alike, it will sketch out some guidelines for moving the debate forward.

The prevalence inflation hypothesis suggests that mental health awareness efforts can lead to an increase in rates of mental illness, first because awareness efforts encourage individuals with subclinical levels of distress to see their problems as mental illnesses (“overinterpretation”), and second because these individuals may then think and act in ways that promote actual mental illness (“self-fulfilling prophecy”). In this discussion paper, I argue that these two components are best understood—and best studied—as two distinct hypotheses. I present each hypothesis, discuss early evidence regarding each one, and outline the benefits of studying them independently.

While first-person methods have made steps in the direction of becoming scientifically recognized, the value of the kind of knowledge such methods uncover may still be regarded as limited. One of the main objectives of scientific research is to deliver insight into causal relationships. First-person research is mostly understood as not providing causal knowledge. Rather, a common view is that phenomenology exclusively seeks to describe and never to explain. Here I will explore a view that is radically opposed to this. I will propose and discuss two claims: (1) Only first-person experience gives us full insight into causal relationships. (2) First-person methods can provide causal knowledge with general applicability. The discussion draws on recent work on the philosophy of dispositions by Mumford and Anjum, as well as ideas proposed by Kiene et al. in the context of clinical case studies. It is also shown how causal investigation may be integrated into the micro-phenomenological interview, one of the most widely used and recognized first-person methods in current research.

Countless definitions of personality have been proposed throughout history. As a consequence, contemporary psychology lacks a definition that elicits broad consensus and avoids ambiguity. To overcome this difficulty it seems beneficial to draw on the field of philosophical anthropology, as an epistemologically prior and more general discipline. Understanding that a single manuscript cannot achieve consensus, an interdisciplinary contribution is proposed through a dialogue between two definitions of personality. On the one hand, that elaborated by the father of personality psychology, Gordon Allport, which is the best known and most cited of all. On the other hand, the one developed by Martín Echavarría, inspired by the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. From this interdisciplinary dialogue, a variant of Echavarría's definition and a brief definition of personality are proposed. It is expected that this contribution would not only help to the study of personality, but also to the interdisciplinary development of the discipline of psychology.

Artwork is a unique tool for studying human memory and its neural underpinnings. This review evaluates the role of art in memory research, employing novel experimental and computational methods to understand how art is stored and retrieved. We underscore the significance of naturalistic neuroimaging and advanced statistical analysis in understanding the memory encoding of artworks. We suggest that the memorability of artwork may be tied to enhanced memory consolidation during rest or sleep. Art triggers more than simple recall; it involves a personalized reconstruction of memories. To measure this reconstruction, we propose using drawing and memory-based writing as innovative memory tests, and Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to compare behavioral and neural patterns during both encoding and retrieval phases. Art thus emerges as a profound medium to probe the complex interactions between memory and cognitive, emotional, and social processes, with implications for disciplines including art and communication.

Some people are more sensitive to environmental threats that are easier to objectify and are generally accepted as serious - hard threats, while others are more sensitive to threats that are more subjective, peculiar, and less predictable - soft threats. Defensive denial of distress creates an illusion of mental health and seems to be related to sensitivity to hard threats. People sensitive to soft threats may be more resilient to hard threats. Data from outpatient visits in the aftermath of the 2020 Zagreb earthquake support these hypotheses and could explain why various patient populations (manifestly distressed) seem to cope better with pandemics and natural disasters (sample examples of hard threats) than the general population which consists of genuinely healthy people and those with illusory mental health.

Depression is characterized by different distortions in interpersonal experience and behavior, ranging from social withdrawal to overt hostility. However, clinical psychological research has largely neglected the need for an integrative framework to operationalize these different phenomena and their dynamic change more accurately in depression. In this article, we draw on active inference theory, a comprehensive theory of perception, action, and learning, to provide a formal model explaining how variations in patients' internal belief-systems lead to differences in social experience and behavior. In this context, we assume that individuals cannot directly grasp the characteristics of their social environment. Instead, they must infer them indirectly from ambiguous social observations, which they themselves generate and alter through their actions. Differences in interpersonal experience and behavior arise from the interplay of patients’ prior expectations, their propensity to infer particular social states from certain observations, and their beliefs in their ability to influence these situations through specific actions. We then use concrete examples to demonstrate how future research can take our approach to identify systematic differences in interpersonal experiences and behaviors among depressed patients (or patient subgroups) and to investigate their changes in response to new social experiences. We also discuss potential applications of our approach in diagnosing and treating depression. This work is a move towards understanding the interpersonal aspects of depression in more detail, recognizing their importance in etiology, diagnosis, and treatment.