New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Why Antibias Interventions (Need Not) Fail
Toni Schmader, Tara C. Dennehy, and Andrew S. Baron

Schmader and colleagues argue that there are multiple pathways to biased behavior, and each requires different types of interventions. They introduce a visual typology of bias that spotlights cognitive, motivational, and situational variables affecting the expression of biases. They also address how norms modulate how biases unfold and are perceived by targets. Using this typology as a framework, they suggest that changing associations, increasing motivation, raising awareness, and changing norms are distinct goals that require different types of interventions targeting individual, interpersonal, and institutional structures. Schmader and colleagues close with recommendations for antibias training.

The Cooperation Databank: Machine-Readable Science Accelerates Research Synthesis
Giuliana Spadaro et al.

Spadaro and colleagues developed the Cooperation Databank (CoDa), which contains 2,636 studies on human cooperation. The researchers designed an ontology that defines and relates concepts in cooperation research and created a research platform that enables users to retrieve studies that test how variables relate to cooperation. Users can then visualize these study results and perform (a) meta-analyses, (b) metaregressions, (c) estimates of publication bias, and (d) statistical power analyses for future studies. Spadaro and colleagues also leveraged the data set with visualization tools. CoDa offers a vision of how publishing studies in a machine-readable format may improve scientific practices and knowledge.

What Do We Know About Aging and Emotion Regulation?
Derek M. Isaacowitz

Is the general observation that older adults report higher levels of positive affect and well-being due to a better ability to regulate their emotions? Isaacowitz reviews literature on age differences in the use and effectiveness of emotion-regulation strategies and concludes that current evidence does not clearly support the assertion that older adults are better at emotion regulation than younger adults. However, current approaches may be limited in testing possible age-related changes in emotion regulation. Isaacowitz proposes that future work should investigate individual trajectories and consider the possible roles of context, physiological reactivity, neural changes, acceptance, and personality.

Intervention Tournaments: An Overview of Concept, Design, and Implementation
Boaz Hameiri and Samantha L. Moore-Berg

Hameiri and colleagues propose an experimental design that addresses the comparison among interventions. An intervention tournament is a study that compares several different interventions against a single control, uses the same outcome measures during assessment, and has participants drawn from the same population. The researchers describe various approaches to intervention tournaments, which include crowdsourced, curated, and in-house-developed intervention tournaments, and the tournaments’ unique characteristics. They also discuss practical recommendations for conducting such research, including considerations of intervention-tournament deployment, characteristics of included interventions, statistical analysis and reporting, study design, and assessments of longitudinal and underlying psychological mechanisms, as well as theoretical ramifications.

You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach

Do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests they should, this review of the research suggests that learning from failure is hard. Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach present a framework that points to emotional and cognitive barriers that make learning from failure difficult. Emotions undermine learning because people find failure ego-threatening. People tend to look away from failure and not pay attention to it to protect their egos. Cognitively, people also struggle because the information in failure is less direct than the information in success and thus harder to extract. This framework suggests inroads for addressing barriers to learning from one’s failures.

Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry
Harrison J. Kell, Kira O. McCabe, David Lubinski, Camilla P. Benbow

The wrecked-by-success hypothesis, initially formalized by Sigmund Freud, implies that outstanding occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being. Kell and colleagues tested this hypothesis in two studies with samples of high-potential individuals. They compared participants with exceptionally successful careers with their peers with more typical careers on measures of psychological well-being, flourishing, core self-evaluations, medical maladies, family relationships, comfort with aging, and life satisfaction. In both studies, individuals with exceptionally successful careers were similar to or healthier than their intellectual peers across these metrics.

Only Human: Mental-Health Difficulties Among Clinical, Counseling, and School Psychology Faculty and Trainees
Sarah E. Victor et al.

Victor and colleagues analyzed the prevalence of mental-health difficulties among applied psychologists. They found high rates of mental-health difficulties (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) among faculty, graduate students, and others affiliated with accredited doctoral and internship programs in clinical psychology, counseling, and school psychology. More than 80% of respondents (n = 1,395 of 1,692) reported a lifetime history of mental-health difficulties, and nearly half reported a diagnosed mental disorder. Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and suicidal thoughts or behaviors were the most reported concerns. Relative to faculty, graduate students were more likely to report mental-health difficulties.

Is Psychological Science Self-Correcting? Citations Before and After Successful and Failed Replications
Paul T. von Hippel

To examine how replication affects the influence of scientific research, von Hippel analyzed the citation history of 98 articles, published in 2008, that were then subjected to replication attempts published in 2015. Relative to successful replications, failed replications reduced the original studies’ citations by only 5% to 9% on average. Of the articles citing the original studies, less than 3% cited the replication attempt. To increase the influence of replications, von Hippel recommends (a) requiring authors to cite replication studies alongside the original findings and (b) enhancing reference databases and search engines to give higher priority to replication studies.

More What Duchenne Smiles Do, Less What They Express
Eva G. Krumhuber and Arvid Kappas

Krumhuber and Kappas comment on an article by Sheldon and colleagues, which argued that Duchenne smiles (DS; smiles involving the mouth and the eyes and signaling true enjoyment) reliably signal the presence and intensity of positive emotion and chronic positive mood. The authors reexamine the cited literature and argue that the findings are mostly inconclusive, irrelevant, and/or incomplete. They also review additional evidence suggesting that DSs can be displayed deliberately and in the absence of positive feelings. Thus, they propose a functional view that focuses on what DSs do (e.g., favorable interpersonal perceptions) rather than what they express.