New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Climate Change and Substance-Use Behaviors: A Risk-Pathways Framework
Francis Vergunst, Helen L. Berry. Kelton Minor, and Nicholas Chadi  

Vergunst and colleagues suggest that climate change could increase harmful substance use through five pathways: psychosocial stress arising from the destabilization of social, environmental, economic, and geopolitical support systems; increased rates of mental disorders; increased physical-health burden; incremental harmful changes to established behavior patterns; and worry about the dangers of unchecked climate change. Also, young people appear to face disproportionate risks because of their high vulnerability to mental-health problems and substance-use disorders and greater number of life years ahead in which to be exposed to current and worsening climate change.   

Improving the Generalizability of Behavioral Science by Using Reality Checks: A Tool for Assessing Heterogeneity in Participants’ Consumership of Study Stimuli
Evan Polman and Sam J. Maglio

How to more effectively test effects in psychology when a study’s scenarios and decisions are particularly relevant to participants in their lives outside the lab? By measuring (and creating) mundane realism, Polman and Maglio suggest. An experiment is said to have mundane realism if its stimuli are familiar to . Polman and Maglio propose that stimuli will vary in their relevance to experiment participants (for instance, based on how much they consume the stimuli outside the lab) and can be assessed using reality checks. They found that accounting for a study’s mundane realism can significantly alter a study’s results. 

Clinical Psychologists as T-Shaped Professionals
Michael Vriesman et al.

Clinical psychologists often work within multidisciplinary teams and in settings outside of traditional mental health. To be competent and effective in these contexts, clinical psychologists could benefit from skills outside of psychology. The T-shaped training model allows individuals to simultaneously acquire the depth of knowledge required for their discipline (e.g., assessment, intervention, supervision) and the breadth required to work effectively in multidisciplinary contexts (e.g., by including training in areas such as medicine, public health, and computer science).   

An Ethics and Social-Justice Approach to Collecting and Using Demographic Data for Psychological Researchers
Christine C. Call et al.

The collection and use of demographic data in psychological sciences has the potential to aid in eliminating inequities brought about by unjust social conditions, Call and colleagues propose. Although some methods now used reduce others may perpetuate harmful stereotypes, invalidate minoritized identities, and exclude key groups from research participation or access to disseminated findings. To help stakeholders in psychology make ethical and socially-just decisions about the collection, analysis, reporting, interpretation, and dissemination of demographic data, Call and colleagues review ethical and social-justice dilemmas inherent to working with demographic data and introduce a framework positioned in ethics and social justice. 

A Review of Multisite Replication Projects in Social Psychology: Is It Viable to Sustain Any Confidence in Social Psychology’s Knowledge Base?
Roy F. Baumeister, Dianne M. Tice, and Brad J. Bushman

Baumeister and colleagues reviewed all 36 multisite social-psychology replications and three articles reporting multiple ministudies. Four of the 36 (11%) provided support for the original hypothesis, and five (14%) had mixed results. The remaining 27 (75%) did not support the original hypothesis. Baumeister and colleagues assessed the evidence for multiple explanations for the generally poor replication record. Besides evidence for the possibility that the original hypothesis was wrong, they also found evidence for operational failure, low participant engagement, and bias toward failure. Low engagement emerged as a widespread problem, reflected in high rates of discarded data and weak manipulation checks. The researchers offer recommendations for improving future multisite projects. 

Threshold Resistance: Adding a Historical Perspective to Hodson’s (2021) Observations on the “Microaggressions Pushback”
Keon West 

In 2021, Hodson identified three trends in psychological science that are coinciding with the academic pushback against research on microaggressions. Concept-creep is the idea that racism once referred to a real problem but now refers to insignificant things. The expansion of right-leaning values in moral judgments is known as moral foundations theory. And an emphasis on prejudice symmetry says the political left is as biased against right-leaning targets (e.g., the rich, police) as the right is against left-leaning targets (e.g., Black people, women, LGBT+ people). Here, West expands on Hodson’s view by situating the current microaggressions pushback within a repeating historical context: research into subtle forms of prejudice followed by pushback that uses very similar, if not the same, arguments to undermine that research. 

Clarifying Eudaimonia and Psychological Functioning to Complement Evaluative and Experiential Well-Being: Why Basic Psychological Needs Should Be Measured in National Accounts of Well-Being
Frank Martela and Richard M. Ryan

The measurement of well-being at a national level usually includes three separate dimensions: evaluative well-being, experiential well-being, and eudaimonia. Whereas there are relatively standard ways to measure the first two dimensions, the third category lacks consensus on how to define and operationalize it. Martela and Ryan propose that eudaimonia should focus on psychological functioning and the identification of key psychological factors humans need to live well, such as the satisfaction of basic psychological needs. Among the basic psychological needs, the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness have received broad empirical support. Being able to measure them might improve understanding of citizens’ well-being. 

The Role of Subjective Expectations for Exhaustion and Recovery: The Sample Case of Work and Leisure
Victoria Schüttengruber and Alexandra M. Freund

Schüttengruber and Freund propose a new model of exhaustion and recovery that posits that people evaluate an activity as exhausting or recovering on the basis of their subjective expectation about the activity. The researchers assume that an activity related to a life domain associated with exhaustion (e.g., work) leads people to monitor their experiences and selectively attend to signs of—and thus to experience—exhaustion. In contrast, an activity related to a life domain associated with recovery (e.g., leisure) leads people to preferentially process signs of—and thus to experience—recovery.   

A New Way to Think About Internal and External Validity
David Trafimow  

Trafimow proposes that there are more and less important ways in which researchers can interpret internal and external validity, and these can be integrated with a taxonomy that includes theoretical, auxiliary, statistical, and inferential assumptions (TASI taxonomy). The integration suggests that an internal–external validity trade-off is false for more important ways of internal and external validity. Instead, internal and external validity increase or decrease together when there is an emphasis on underlying theories. The integration also implies the desirability of some changes in typical research advice and practice. 

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