New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Internally Triggered Experiences of Hedonic Valence in Nonhuman Animals: Cognitive and Welfare Considerations
Johannes B. Mahr and Bob Fischer

Do nonhuman animals experience pains and pleasures—whether anticipated or previously experienced—as painful and pleasurable, respectively? Reviewing evidence from comparative neuroscience about hippocampus-dependent simulation, Mahr and Fisher found that mammals appear to conserve functional and structural features of hippocampal simulation. This makes it reasonable to assume that internally triggered experiences of hedonic valence (IHVs) are also pervasive across all mammals, if not also other animals. This conclusion has important implications for health and happiness. Most prominently, IHVs act as a kind of “welfare multiplier” through which each subsequent retrieval increases the welfare impacts of any given experience of pain or pleasure.   

Reckoning With Our Crisis: An Agenda for the Field of Social and Personality Psychology
Sarah R. Schiavone and Simine Vazire  

As a field, psychological science must reckon with the concerns brought to light during the so-called replication crisis and credibility revolution in order to take self-correction seriously and avert future crises, Schiavone and Vazire argue. Proposing an agenda for metascientific research, they review approaches to empirically evaluate and track the science (e.g., analyzing the published literature, surveying researchers). The authors also describe one such project (Surveying the Past and Present State of Published Studies in Social and Personality Psychology) underway in their research group.   

Surprise as an Emotion: A Response to Ortony
Maital Neta and M. Justin Kim

Ortony (2022) wrote that surprise, for all its elevated status as a basic emotion, fails to satisfy his minimal requirements for something to be an emotion. Therefore, if it is not an emotion, it cannot be a basic emotion. Here, Neta and Kim acknowledge Ortony’s concerns but disagree with his conclusion about surprise. Disputing his assertion that surprise is valence-free, they summarize research indicating that surprise is indeed valenced as positive or negative—in a specific manner (i.e., ambiguously valenced)—and that it thus meets all of Ortony’s criteria for an emotion.   

Understanding the Leaders of Tomorrow: The Need to Study Leadership in Adolescence
Jennifer L. Tackett et al.

Tackett and colleagues add a developmental perspective to leadership research that, they say, has previously excluded it. They (a) highlight adolescence as a critical developmental period for leadership emergence and development, (b) argue that leadership among youths is poorly understood and critically understudied, (c) provide exemplars of synergy between research on leadership and adolescent development that merit  focused inquiry, and (d) underscore some of the positive consequences of accelerating empirical research on leadership in adolescence, including implications for a deeper understanding of leadership in adult working populations.  
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The Myth of Normal Reading
Falk Huettig and Fernanda Ferreira

The educational and psychological sciences must embrace the diversity of reading rather than chase the “phantom” of normal reading behavior, Huettig and Ferreira argue. Drawing attention to the significant diversity of cultures, languages, brains, and experiences that people bring to reading, they identify four implications for researchers and practitioners. They must: take diversity into account when conducting psycholinguistic experiments; produce models of reading that reflect cross-cultural diversity; acknowledge that there is no “gold standard” for reading; and focus more on teaching the ability to extract information relevant to the person’s goals.   

Reasons to Remain Critical About the Literature on Habits: A Commentary on Wood et al. (2022)
Jan De Houwer, Eike K. Buabang, Yannick Boddez, Massimo Köster, and Agnes Moors

Wood and colleagues (2022) reanalyzed data from De Houwer and colleagues (2018) and reviewed arguments supporting the idea that much of human behavior is habitual. In this commentary, De Houwer and colleagues note ambiguities in the way Wood and colleagues referred to habits. They then clarify the question at the core of the debate on habits: To what extent is habitual behavior mediated by stimulus–response associations or by goal representations? They argue that Wood and colleagues too easily dismissed goal-directed explanations of habitual behavior, and that their data reanalysis misleadingly argues that a more fine-grained analysis supports rather than questions goal-directed accounts. 

Media-Induced War Trauma Amid Conflicts in Ukraine
Zhaohui Su et al.

Advances in information and communication technologies, such as the speed, scale, and scope at which people worldwide are exposed to the near-time happenings of war, mean that an unprecedented number of people could face media-induced war trauma. Su and colleagues examine the implications of media-induced war trauma on people’s health and well-being. They discuss the media’s duties and responsibilities amid and beyond the current conflicts in Ukraine and argue that the media industry should factor audiences’ mental health into their coverage decisions. 

Family Constellation Therapy in the Context of Esotericism
Júlia Gyimesi

In the past decades, Bert Hellinger’s family constellation method has become a highly popular psychotherapeutic modality. Gyimesi argues that although some research has emerged concerning the foundations, effectiveness, and ethical aspects of family constellation therapy, psychological inquiry has neither reflected on the method’s popularity nor addressed its specific content in detail. Gyimesi traces and interprets family constellation therapy within the context of esotericism, describing possible connections between the two. By exploring family constellation therapy and thus broadening the scope of esoteric spirituality, this analysis contributes to contemporary research on Western esoteric thought. 

Contextualizing Gender Disparity in Editorship in Psychological Science
Zhicheng Lin and Ningxi Li

Lin and Li document and contextualize gender disparity in journal editorship by analyzing 68 top psychology journals in 10 subdisciplines. Relative to ratios of students and faculty within academia, women are underrepresented as editorial-board members (41%) and as editors-in-chief (34%). Female ratios in editorship vary across subdisciplines, genres of scholarship (higher in empirical and review journals than in method journals), continents/countries/regions (e.g., higher in North America than in Europe), and journal countries of origin (e.g., higher in U.S. journals than in European journals). Also, women are better represented as editorial-board members under female (47%) vs. male (36%) editors-in-chief, but the geographical diversity of editorial-board members and authorship decreases under female editors-in-chief.   

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