From preventing sexual violence to self-censorship and taboos, from evaluating love languages to the observing the ways in which children cooperate, the psychological science research published in 2024 covers an impressive range of topics about our understanding of ourselves and others.
Here are the most downloaded articles published in each of APS’s six peer-reviewed research journals in 2024.
Psychological Science
Children Sustain Cooperation in a Threshold Public-Goods Game Even When Seeing Others’ Outcomes
Patricia Kanngiesser, Jahnavi Sunderarajan, Sebastian Hafenbrädl, and Jan K. Woike
Many societal challenges are threshold dilemmas requiring people to cooperate to reach a threshold before group benefits can be reaped. Yet receiving feedback about others’ outcomes relative to one’s own (relative feedback) can undermine cooperation by focusing group members’ attention on outperforming each other. We investigated the impact of relative feedback compared to individual feedback (only seeing one’s own outcome) on cooperation in children from Germany and India (6- to 10-year-olds, N = 240). Using a threshold public-goods game with real water as a resource, we show that, although feedback had an effect, most groups sustained cooperation at high levels in both feedback conditions until the end of the game. Analyses of children’s communication (14,374 codable utterances) revealed more references to social comparisons and more verbal efforts to coordinate in the relative-feedback condition. Thresholds can mitigate the most adverse effects of social comparisons by focusing attention on a common goal.
Clinical Psychological Science
Miriam K. Forbes, Andrew Baillie, Philip J. Batterham, Alison Calear, Roman Kotov, Robert F. Krueger, Louise Mewton, Elizabeth Pellicano, Matthew Roberts, Craig Rodriguez-Seijas, Matthew Sunderland, David Watson, Ashley L. Watts, Aidan G. C. Wright, and Lee Anna Clark
In this study, we reduced the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to its constituent symptoms and reorganized them based on patterns of covariation in individuals’ (N = 14,762) self-reported experiences of the symptoms to form an empirically derived hierarchical framework of clinical phenomena. Specifically, we used the points of agreement among hierarchical principal components analyses and hierarchical clustering as well as between the randomly split primary (n = 11,762) and hold-out (n = 3,000) samples to identify the robust constructs that emerged to form a hierarchy ranging from symptoms and syndromes up to very broad superspectra of psychopathology. The resulting model had noteworthy convergence with the upper levels of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) framework and substantially expands on HiTOP’s current coverage of dissociative, elimination, sleep–wake, trauma-related, neurodevelopmental, and neurocognitive disorder symptoms. We also mapped some exemplar DSM-5 disorders onto our hierarchy; some formed coherent syndromes, whereas others were notably heterogeneous.
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors
Cory J. Clark, Matias Fjeldmark, Louise Lu, Roy F. Baumeister, Stephen Ceci, Komi Frey, Geoffrey Miller, Wilfred Reilly, Dianne Tice, William von Hippel, Wendy M. Williams, Bo M. Winegard, and Philip E. Tetlock
We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.
Current Directions in Psychological Science
Emily A. Impett, Haeyoung Gideon Park, and Amy Muise
The public has something of an obsession with love languages, believing that the key to lasting love is for partners to express love in each other’s preferred language. Despite the popularity of Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, there is a paucity of empirical work on love languages, and collectively, it does not provide strong empirical support for the book’s three central assumptions that (a) each person has a preferred love language, (b) there are five love languages, and (c) couples are more satisfied when partners speak one another’s preferred language. We discuss potential reasons for the popularity of the love languages, including the fact that it enables people to identify important relationship needs, provides an intuitive metaphor that resonates with people, and offers a straightforward way to improve relationships. We offer an alternative metaphor that we believe more accurately reflects a large body of empirical research on relationships: Love is not akin to a language one needs to learn to speak but can be more appropriately understood as a balanced diet in which people need a full range of essential nutrients to cultivate lasting love.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
Preventing Sexual Violence: A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally Informed Solution
Roni Porat, Ana Gantman, Seth A. Green, John-Henry Pezzuto, and Elizabeth Levy Paluck
What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird’s-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.e., ideas) to reduce sexual-violence perpetration and victimization. Our meta-analysis of these studies tests the efficacy of this approach directly and finds that although many interventions are successful at changing ideas, behavior change does not follow. There is little to no relationship between changing attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge and reducing victimization or perpetration. We also observe trends over time, including a shift from targeting a reduction in perpetration to targeting an increase in bystander intervention. We conclude by highlighting promising new strategies for measuring victimization and perpetration and calling for interventions that are informed by theories of behavior change and that center sexually violent behavior as the key outcome of interest.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
So You Want to Do ESM? 10 Essential Topics for Implementing the Experience-Sampling Method
Jessica Fritz, Marilyn L. Piccirillo, Zachary D. Cohen, Madelyn Frumkin, Olivia Kirtley, Julia Moeller, Andreas B. Neubauer, Lesley A. Norris, Noémi K. Schuurman, Evelien Snippe, and Laura F. Bringmann
The experience-sampling method (ESM) captures psychological experiences over time and in everyday contexts, thereby offering exciting potential for collecting more temporally fine-grained and ecologically valid data for psychological research. Given that rapid methodological developments make it increasingly difficult for novice ESM researchers to be well informed about standards of ESM research and to identify resources that can serve as useful starting points, we here provide a primer on 10 essential design and implementation considerations for ESM studies. Specifically, we (a) compare ESM with cross-sectional, panel, and cohort approaches and discuss considerations regarding (b) item content and phrasing; (c) choosing and formulating response options; (d) timescale (sampling scheme, sampling frequency, survey length, and study duration); (e) change properties and stationarity; (f) power and effect sizes; (g) missingness, attrition, and compliance; (h) data assessment and administration; (i) reliability; and (j) replicability and generalizability. For all 10 topics, we discuss challenges and—if available—potential solutions and provide literature that can serve as starting points for more in-depth readings. We also share access to a living, web-based resources library with a more extensive catalogue of literature to facilitate further learning about the design and implementation of ESM. Finally, we list topics that although beyond the scope of our article, can be relevant for the success of ESM studies. Taken together, our article highlights the most essential design and implementation considerations for ESM studies, aids the identification of relevant in-depth readings, and can thereby support the quality of future ESM studies.
Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or login to comment.