Annual review of psychology最新文献

The generalized social concern with sexual harassment and nonconsensual sex makes it imperative to incorporate notions of consent in any analysis of human sexual interactions. Such interactions follow an ordered sequence of events, starting with the perception of a sexual incentive, followed by an approach to it, genital interaction, and eventually orgasm. Consent from the partner is needed at every stage. At some points in this chain of events, the individuals involved make cognitive evaluations of the context and predictions of the likelihood for obtaining consent for proceeding to the next phase. Processes such as communication of consent or lack thereof, sexual decision making, and interpretation of cues emitted by the partner are decisive. Increased sexual motivation may influence these processes. However, available data make it possible to ascertain that enhanced motivation has no, or at most minor, effects, thereby invalidating the old assumption that heightened sexual motivation leads to impaired control.

Much evidence has shown that perception is biased towards previously presented similar stimuli, an effect recently termed serial dependence. Serial dependence affects nearly every aspect of perception, often causing gross perceptual distortions, especially for weak and ambiguous stimuli. Despite unwanted side-effects, empirical evidence and Bayesian modeling show that serial dependence acts to improve efficiency and is generally beneficial to the system. Consistent with models of predictive coding, the Bayesian priors of serial dependence are generated at high levels of cortical analysis, incorporating much perceptual experience, but feed back to lower sensory areas. These feedback loops may drive oscillations in the alpha range, linked strongly with serial dependence. The discovery of top-down predictive perceptual processes is not new, but the new, more quantitative approach characterizing serial dependence promises to lead to a deeper understanding of predictive perceptual processes and their underlying neural mechanisms.

Historically, the human sense of smell has been regarded as the odd stepchild of the senses, especially compared to the sensory bravado of seeing, touching, and hearing. The idea that the human olfaction has little to contribute to our experience of the world is commonplace, though with the emergence of COVID-19 there has rather been a sea change in this understanding. An ever increasing body of work has convincingly highlighted the keen capabilities of the human nose and the sophistication of the human olfactory system. Here, we provide a concise overview of the neuroscience of human olfaction spanning the last 10-15 years, with focus on the peripheral and central mechanisms that underlie how odor information is processed, packaged, parceled, predicted, and perturbed to serve odor-guided behaviors. We conclude by offering some guideposts for harnessing the next decade of olfactory research in all its shapes and forms.

Motivational processes are complex and multifaceted, with both directional and activational aspects. Behavioral activation and exertion of effort are functions that enable organisms to overcome obstacles separating them from significant outcomes. In a complex environment, organisms make cost/benefit decisions, assessing work-related response costs and reinforcer preference. Animal studies have challenged the general idea that dopamine (DA) is best viewed as the reward transmitter and instead have illustrated the involvement of DA in activational and effort-related processes. Mesocorticolimbic DA is a key component of the effort-related motivational circuitry that includes multiple neurotransmitters and brain areas. Human studies have identified brain areas and transmitter systems involved in effort-based decision making and characterized the reduced selection of high-effort activities associated with motivational symptoms of depression and schizophrenia. Animal and human research on the neurochemistry of behavioral activation and effort-related processes makes an important conceptual contribution by illustrating the dissociable nature of distinct aspects of motivation.

Nearly five billion people around the world now use social media, and this number continues to grow. One of the primary goals of social media platforms is to capture and monetize human attention. One means by which individuals and groups can capture attention and drive engagement on these platforms is by sharing morally and emotionally evocative content. We review a growing body of research on the interrelationship of social media and morality as well its consequences for individuals and society. Moral content often goes viral on social media, and social media makes moral behavior (such as punishment) less costly. Thus, social media often acts as an accelerant for existing moral dynamics, amplifying outrage, status seeking, and intergroup conflict while also potentially amplifying more constructive facets of morality, such as social support, prosociality, and collective action. We discuss trends, heated debates, and future directions in this emerging literature.

Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition. While a neuroscience of confidence has focused on the mechanisms underpinning subpersonal phenomena such as representations of uncertainty in the visual or motor system, metacognition research has been concerned with personal-level beliefs and knowledge about self-performance. I provide a road map for bridging this divide by focusing on a particular class of confidence computation: propositional confidence in one's own (hypothetical) decisions or actions. Propositional confidence is informed by the observer's models of the world and their cognitive system, which may be more or less accurate-thus explaining why metacognitive judgments are inferential and sometimes diverge from task performance. Disparate findings on the neural basis of uncertainty and performance monitoring are integrated into a common framework, and a new understanding of the locus of action of metacognitive interventions is developed.

Moral psychology was shaped around three categories of agents and patients: humans, other animals, and supernatural beings. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has introduced a fourth category for our moral psychology to deal with: intelligent machines. Machines can perform as moral agents, making decisions that affect the outcomes of human patients or solving moral dilemmas without human supervision. Machines can be perceived as moral patients, whose outcomes can be affected by human decisions, with important consequences for human-machine cooperation. Machines can be moral proxies that human agents and patients send as their delegates to moral interactions or use as a disguise in these interactions. Here we review the experimental literature on machines as moral agents, moral patients, and moral proxies, with a focus on recent findings and the open questions that they suggest.

Music training is generally assumed to improve perceptual and cognitive abilities. Although correlational data highlight positive associations, experimental results are inconclusive, raising questions about causality. Does music training have far-transfer effects, or do preexisting factors determine who takes music lessons? All behavior reflects genetic and environmental influences, but differences in emphasis-nature versus nurture-have been a source of tension throughout the history of psychology. After reviewing the recent literature, we conclude that the evidence that music training causes nonmusical benefits is weak or nonexistent, and that researchers routinely overemphasize contributions from experience while neglecting those from nature. The literature is also largely exploratory rather than theory driven. It fails to explain mechanistically how music-training effects could occur and ignores evidence that far transfer is rare. Instead of focusing on elusive perceptual or cognitive benefits, we argue that it is more fruitful to examine the social-emotional effects of engaging with music, particularly in groups, and that music-based interventions may be effective mainly for clinical or atypical populations.

Achievement goals have been defined as the purpose of competence-relevant behavior. In this respect they connect one of the basic human needs, i.e., competence, to one of society's core values, i.e., achievement. We propose to look at achievement goals through the lens of social influence. We review both the influence that cultural, structural, and contextual factors have on achievement goal endorsement and the influence that endorsing achievement goals allows people to have within their social space. The review allows us to propose a circular model of the influence on and of achievement goals: The culture, social structures, and contexts that are typical of a certain society shape the specific environments in which individuals develop their achievement goals, which in turn has an influence on the expression and circulation of these achievement goals into society, in a social influence cycle.