American Psychologist

Overcoming the streetlight effect: Shining light on the foundations of learning and development in early childhood.
Developmental theory has long emphasized a range of skills that young children need for healthy development across the life course. Nevertheless, most evaluations of early childhood programs and policies have focused on measuring a somewhat limited set of competencies. In this article, we explore this “streetlight effect” in early childhood intervention research and propose an initial set of skills that we argue should be prioritized alongside traditionally measured outcomes as targets of intervention during the preschool period (i.e., between ages 3 and 5 years). These skills, which we call the foundations of learning and development (FOLD) skills, include both well-studied and emerging constructs such as curiosity, creativity, self-regulation and executive function, critical thinking, perspective taking, and internal representations of self. To better understand FOLD skills’ potential as more practical, effective, and inclusive targets of early childhood programs and policies, we review research regarding each skill’s malleability, measurability, predictive validity, and universality. We end with a set of future directions for the field, including the need to (a) formulate a more inclusive taxonomy of FOLD skills that incorporates currently omitted competencies relevant to marginalized populations, (b) measure these skills in scalable and actionable ways, and (c) enhance or modify intervention strategies to optimize the development of these FOLD skills in the preschool period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Neural specialization with generalizable representations underlies children’s cognitive development of attention.
From childhood to adulthood, the human brain develops highly specialized yet interacting neural modules that give rise to nuanced attention and other cognitive functions. Each module can specialize over development to support specific functions, yet also coexist in multiple neurobiological modes to support distinct processes. Advances in cognitive neuroscience have conceptualized human attention as a set of cognitive processes anchored in highly specialized yet interacting neural systems. The underlying mechanisms of how these systems interplay to support children’s cognitive development of multiple attention processes remain unknown. Leveraging developmental functional magnetic resonance imaging with attention network test paradigm, we demonstrate differential neurocognitive development of three core attentional processes from childhood to adulthood, with alerting reaching adult-like level earlier, followed by orienting and executive attention with more protracted development throughout middle and late childhood. Relative to adults, young children exhibit immature specialization with less pronounced dissociation of neural systems specific to each attentional process. Children manifest adult-like distributed representations in the ventral attention and cingulo-opercular networks, but less stable and weaker generalizable representations across multiple processes in the dorsal attention network. Our findings provide insights into the functional specialization and generalization of neural representations scaffolding cognitive development of core attentional processes from childhood to adulthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The role of social-evaluative threat for cortisol profiles in response to psychosocial stress: A person-centered approach.
Heterogeneity in individuals’ physiological stress responses is central to theories linking stress with vulnerability to disease. Although multiple cortisol profiles have been reported in response to acute psychological stress, most prior work focuses on a single, average pattern and relative deviations from it, such as greater or lesser response peaks or reactivity. The present aims were to identify cortisol stress response trajectory classes using a data-driven approach and test whether social-evaluative threat (SET), a reliable elicitor of cortisol, predicted a greater likelihood of membership in the more reactive profiles. Data were pooled from 13 acute laboratory stressor studies from two geographically distinct U.S. university communities. Participants included 1,258 adults ranging from 18 to 52 years (Mage = 20.5; 62% women; 38% men) with diverse racial/ethnic identities and socioeconomic statuses. Studies included a version of the Trier Social Stress Test and at least three salivary cortisol assessments. SET was tested in three ways: study conditions with evaluators present, perceptions of evaluation, and ratings of shame-related emotions. Latent group-based trajectory modeling was applied to identify cortisol response patterns that best fit the data. Results revealed five unique cortisol response profiles. Consistent with hypotheses, SET conditions, greater perceived evaluation, and greater shame-related emotions predicted membership in the most reactive response trajectories. The findings highlight the high degree of heterogeneity that characterizes cortisol stress response profiles, which has important implications for theories of stress and health and methodological approaches in future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Move past adversity or bite through it? Diet quality, physical activity, and sedentary behavior in relation to resilience.
Adverse life experiences are associated with an increased risk of mental disorders. The successful adaptation to adversity and maintenance or quick restoration of mental health despite adversity is referred to as resilience. Identifying factors that promote resilience can contribute to the prevention of mental disorders. Lifestyle behaviors, increasingly recognized for their impact on mental health, are discussed as potential resilience factors. Several studies found that healthy eating and physical activity (PA) are positively associated with resilience. However, most of these studies assessed resilience through questionnaires, which is unsatisfactory given that resilience research is moving toward conceptualizing resilience as the outcome of a dynamic process, which can only be assessed prospectively and longitudinally. The present study is the first to assess the relationship between diet quality, PA, sedentary behavior (SB), and resilience, captured prospectively and longitudinally in a sample of 145 individuals (75.17% female; Mage = 28.88, SDage = 7.80; MBMI = 24.11, SDBMI = 3.97). Resilience was assessed as the relationship between stressor exposure and mental health (i.e., the stressor reactivity score: higher scores indicate lower resilience and vice versa). Diet quality (i.e., the Healthy Eating Index) was assessed on the basis of app-based food records and 24-hr dietary recalls. PA and SB were objectively recorded through accelerometers. Regression analysis showed that neither diet quality nor PA and SB predicted resilience (ps > .30). Profound differences in the conceptualization and operationalization of resilience might explain the contrary findings. Prospective longitudinal studies are needed to replicate the findings of the present study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Responses to political partisans are shaped by a COVID-19-sensitive disease avoidance psychology: A longitudinal investigation of functional flexibility.
How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Americans (on Prolific, N = 1,124, from April 2020 to February 2021), we explored how naturally occurring changes across time in both risks of COVID-19 infection and people’s disease avoidance motivation shaped thoughts about and behaviors toward Republicans and Democrats (e.g., perceived infection threat, feelings of disgust, desires to avoid). We found a significant effect of dispositional level of motivation, over and above powerful effects of in-party favoritism/out-party derogation: Participants with a dispositionally stronger motivation to avoid disease showed greater infection management responses, especially toward Republicans; this held even for Republican participants. More importantly, we also found a significant interactive effect of within-person variability and ecological infection risk: Participants who sensitively upregulated their motivation during the rapid spread of COVID-19 perceived greater infection threat by Republicans and felt less disgust toward and desire to avoid Democrats. This finding, too, held for Republican participants. These results provide evidence of functionally flexible within-person psychological disease avoidance—a theoretically important process long presumed and now demonstrated—and suggest another mechanism contributing to U.S. political polarization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Intergroup psychological interventions: The motivational challenge.
Social scientists have increasingly applied insights from descriptive research to develop psychological interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations. These interventions have achieved marked success—reducing prejudicial attitudes, fostering support for conciliatory social policies, and promoting peacebuilding behaviors. At the same time, intergroup conflict continues to rage in part because individuals often lack motivation to engage with these promising interventions. We take a step toward addressing this issue by developing a framework of approaches for delivering interventions to an unmotivated target audience. Along with (a) directly motivating targets by increasing their values and expectancies for addressing intergroup conflict, researchers can deliver interventions by (b) satisfying other psychological motivations of the target audience, (c) providing an instrumental benefit for engaging with the intervention, (d) embedding the intervention in a hedonically captivating medium, or (e) bypassing motivational barriers entirely by delivering the intervention outside of targets’ conscious awareness. We define each approach and use illustrative examples to organize them into a conceptual framework before concluding with implications and future directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Approaching psychology’s current crises by exploring the vagueness of psychological concepts: Recommendations for advancing the discipline.
Psychology is currently facing a multilayered crisis stemming from the fact that the results of many psychological studies cannot be replicated (replication crisis), that psychological research has neglected cross-cultural and cross-temporal variation (universality crisis), and that many psychological theories are ill-developed and underspecified (theory crisis). In the present article, we use ideas derived from debates in theoretical and philosophical psychology as a basis for responding to all three crises. In short, we claim that psychological concepts are inherently vague in the sense that their meanings and the rules for their application are indeterminate. This does not imply that psychological concepts are ineffable or lack meaning. It implies, however, that hoping to arrive at a finite set of necessary and sufficient criteria that define psychological concepts once and for all is an illusion. From this, we deduce four recommendations for responding to psychology’s crises. First, we argue that the replication crisis could be approached by paying more attention to the context conditions under which psychological realities and knowledge about these realities are being created. Second, we claim that the universality crisis can be alleviated by putting more effort into exploring variability across times and cultures. Third, we contend that acknowledging the language dependence of psychological research could be a fruitful way of addressing the theory crisis. Last, we show that embracing theoretical and methodological pluralism would be an antidote against psychology’s crises in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Psychologists return to the first question of Western philosophy.
When ancient humans gained the ability to investigate abstract questions, what first question did they pose? This article offers a novel, sweeping, historical analysis with important implications for psychological theory. The story begins with identifying the first question in Ancient Greek philosophy as “Where am I?” with particular interest in the world’s overarching basic traits. For example, Pythagoras proposed the world was defined by beauty and Heraclitus suggested change. Though this discourse has traditionally puzzled historians, recent psychological research suggests it might have been largely a debate over primal world beliefs, an emerging research topic that this article introduces and situates historically. Recently, the latent structure of primal world beliefs was mapped statistically, revealing 26 dimensions. Most of these beliefs were new to psychologists, yet already posed by ancient philosophers—including Pythagoras’ Beautiful world belief and Heraclitus’ Changing world belief. Identifying first questions in early history may have value for psychological theorizing because it hints at something that social psychologists have long suspected: that humans are creatures fundamentally driven to understand their situation and what it calls for. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
WEIRD–Confucian comparisons: Ongoing cultural biases in psychology’s evidence base and some recommendations for improving global representation.
The realization that most behavioral science research focuses on cultures labeled as WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Arnett, 2008; Henrich et al., 2010; Thalmayer et al., 2021)—has given an impetus to extend the research to more diverse populations. Confucian East Asian societies have relatively strong social and technological infrastructure to advance science and thus have gained much prominence in cross-cultural studies. This has inadvertently fostered another bias: the dominance of WEIRD–Confucian comparisons and a tendency to draw conclusions about “non-WEIRD” cultures in general based on data from Confucian societies. Here, analyzing 1,466,019 scientific abstracts and, separately, coverage of 60 large-scale cross-cultural psychological projects (Nsamples = 2,668 from Ncountries = 153 covering nparticipants = 3,722,940), we quantify the dominance of Confucian over other non-WEIRD cultures in psychological research. Our analysis also reveals the underrepresentation of non-European Union postcommunist societies and the almost total invisibility of Pacific Island, Caribbean, Middle African, and Central Asian societies within the research database of psychology. We call for a shift in cross-cultural studies toward midsize (7+ countries) and ideally large-scale (50+ countries) cross-cultural studies, and we propose mitigations that we believe could aid the inclusion of diverse researchers as well as participants from underrepresented cultures in our field. People in all world regions and cultures deserve psychological knowledge that applies to them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Exponential authorship inflation in neuroscience and psychology from the 1950s to the 2020s.
How many researchers does it take to publish an article in top journals in neuroscience and psychology? Manually coding 42,580 articles spanning 1879–2021 from 32 journals, we examined the evolution of authorship size and its rate of change. Moreover, we assessed the driving forces behind these changes. We found that, starting from the 1950s but not earlier, the average authorship size per article in neuroscience and psychology has increased exponentially, growing by 50% and 31% over the last decade and reaching a record high of 10.4 and 4.8 authors in 2021, respectively. Single-authored articles have become a rarity today, particularly in primary research articles: 1.7% in neuroscience and 2.2% in psychology in 2019–2021 (vs. 5.7% and 11.2% in review articles). With the withering of sole authors rises a new type of authorship, group authors (e.g., a consortium). Group authorship was rare before 2000, but in 2019–2021, it appeared in 4.1% of articles in neuroscience, mostly in genetics, neuroimaging, and disease—outnumbering single-authored articles for the first time—and 0.7% in psychology, mostly in developmental and clinical research. The exponential inflation in authorship size could not be attributed to behaviors of professional editors in profit-oriented journals but aligns with a hybrid epistemic–behavioral–cultural account—an account that integrates multidimensional factors, including increased research complexity, the benefits of collaboration, the rise of government-funded research, changing norms in authorship practices, and biased incentives in evaluation. These findings suggest troubling implications for research reproducibility, innovations, equity/diversity, and ethics, calling for policy deliberations to address potential negative ramifications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Veterans health administration leads the way in population mental health science: Commentary on Dodge et al. (2024).
Recently, Dodge et al. (2024) published an article in American Psychologist offering recommendations to the mental health field for changing from an individual-level to a population-level focus. These recommendations included scaling up evidence-based programs, innovating and evaluating population-level interventions, and creating a primary system of care to promote mental health and well-being. For the past 2 decades, the Veterans Health Administration has been successfully engaged in these activities. In this commentary, we describe some of these ongoing efforts to demonstrate that Dodge et al.’s (2024) recommendations are indeed feasible with the proper infrastructure and resources and that the Veterans Health Administration’s efforts can serve as a model for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
A global context for population mental health: Commentary on Dodge et al. (2024).
Dodge et al. (2024) outlined the gap between population mental health needs and the current capacity of the U.S. health care system to provide necessary services. We add international examples and a global perspective to their observations. Unlike some nations, the mental health needs in the United States occur in the context of privatized, for-profit health care. Nations that offer population-based mental health services may have achieved greater success through the use of nontraditional providers and by leveraging technology. We suggest that both proactive and preventive interventions are needed to build a mentally healthy ecosystem in the United States. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024).
This article memorializes Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024), Danny was always fascinated by the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior, beliefs, values, and tastes, if also by the grand problems of philosophy. His pioneering work led to his influential theory of attention as a limited resource that could be allocated to various tasks presented in his first book, Attention and Effort (1974). Prospect theory remained his most cited work by far and was the central work cited in his Nobel Prize award in 2002. Danny’s Nobel Prize Lecture, carried the seeds of his highly influential book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). His research influenced policy and program development in economics, philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Highlights of Kahneman's career and professional contributions are noted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Douglas Candland (1934–2023).
Douglas Candland, founder of the first undergraduate major in animal behavior and long-time editor of the Review in General Psychology, passed away on April 16, 2023. Doug’s influence in the fields of psychology and animal behavior was enormous. Doug was born on July 9, 1934, and grew up in Southern California. He completed his undergraduate degree at Pomona College in 1956, with a very interdisciplinary suite of majors in psychology, philosophy, and history. He then traveled across the country to Princeton University where he completed his PhD in psychology in 1959, and after a year’s postdoc at the University of Virginia, he began a faculty position in psychology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It was here that Doug spent his entire academic career, retiring in 2003. In 1968, Doug established the animal behavior major at Bucknell. For many years, this remained the only undergraduate major in animal behavior in the United States. Doug was a gifted teacher and was recognized by both the Animal Behavior Society and the American Psychological Foundation for his outstanding mentorship and creativity in the classroom. It was not at all unusual for students to gather at his home for a potluck and conversation. Doug had a sharp wit and an infectious laugh. He was gifted at seeing the potential in his students and nurturing it in all ways. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Jean Maria Arrigo (1944–2024).
This article memorializes Jean Maria Arrigo (1944–2024). Jean Maria’s dedication to pursuing truth and accountability led to ethical reforms to the world’s largest organization of psychologists. Despite her success in reforming APA policy, until her death, Jean Maria remained deeply concerned about the weaponization of psychology and the dangers posed by ties between professional associations and the national security establishment. Highlights of Arrigo's career and professional contributions are noted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Susan M. Johnson (1947–2024).
Memorializes Susan M. Johnson (1947-2024). Johnson was a world-leading researcher, therapist, and the primary developer of emotionally focused therapy (EFT), the leading form of couple therapy. Her innovative approach to therapy, which is also used with individuals and families, focuses on the power of emotion to create change and is based in attachment science. Johnson actively used research to develop, refine, and advance EFT. She was a distinguished research professor at Alliant International University, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and a professor emeritus of clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

American Psychologist - Vol 80, Iss 2