Psychology Research Digest
Social Psychological Bulletin
This is an open-access no-APC journal (free for both reader and authors), that publishes original empirical research, theoretical review papers, scientific debates, and methodological contributions in the field of basic and applied social psychology. SPB actively promotes standards of open-science, supports an integrative approach to all aspects of social psychological science and is committed to discussing timely social issues of high importance.
Supporting the status quo is weakly associated with subjective well-being: A comparison of the palliative function of ideology across social status groups using a meta-analytic approach
Research has suggested that the endorsement of ideologies supporting the status quo leads to higher subjective psychological well-being-an idea labeled as the palliative function of ideology within system justification theory. Furthermore, this approach has suggested that this association should be moderated by social status. Specifically, the association between the endorsement of ideologies supporting the status quo and well-being should be positive among high-status groups and negative among...
Publication date: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Defining social reward: A systematic review of human and animal studies
Social rewards are strong drivers of behavior and fundamental to well-being, yet there is a lack of consensus regarding what actually defines a reward as "social." Because a systematic overview of existing social reward operationalizations is currently absent, a review of the literature seems necessary to advance toward a unified framework and to better guide research and theory. To bridge this gap, we preregistered and conducted the first comprehensive systematic review of human and animal...
Publication date: Mon, 21 Oct 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Categories of training to improve empathy: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Due to the vital role of empathy in promoting prosocial behaviors and nurturing social bonds, there is a growing interest in cultivating empathy. Yet, the effectiveness of existing training methods on empathy, especially on different dimensions of empathy (i.e., affective, cognitive, motivational, and behavioral empathy), varies tremendously, and the underlying causes for this heterogeneity remain insufficiently explored. To address this issue, we categorized various training methods into three...
Publication date: Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Fadeout and persistence of intervention impacts on social-emotional and cognitive skills in children and adolescents: A meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials
Researchers and policymakers aspire for educational interventions to change children's long-run developmental trajectories. However, intervention impacts on cognitive and achievement measures commonly fade over time. Less is known, although much is theorized, about social-emotional skill persistence. The current meta-analysis investigated whether intervention impacts on social-emotional skills demonstrated greater persistence than impacts on cognitive skills. We drew studies from eight...
Publication date: Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Early childhood executive function predicts concurrent and later social and behavioral outcomes: A review and meta-analysis
Executive function (EF), the set of mental processes and skills involved in goal-oriented planning, organizing, and controlling behavior, is believed to support child development across many domains of life. However, although ample evidence suggests a relation between childhood EF and academic skills, it is less clear what its role is in domains beyond academics. We report a meta-analysis of relations between early childhood EF (assessed at 36-60 months of age) and social, health, and behavioral...
Publication date: Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Age-related changes in emotion recognition across childhood: A meta-analytic review
Children's ability to accurately recognize the external emotional signals produced by those around them represents a milestone in their socioemotional development and is associated with a number of important psychosocial outcomes. A plethora of individual studies have examined when, and in which order, children acquire emotion knowledge over the course of their development. Yet, very few attempts have been made to summarize this body of work quantitatively. To address this, the present...
Publication date: Thu, 19 Sep 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Gender differences in sex drive: Reply to Conley and Yang (2024)
Our meta-analysis on gender differences in sex drive found a stronger sex drive in men compared to women (Frankenbach et al., 2022). Conley and Yang (2024) criticized how we interpreted the findings and provided suggestions regarding the origins of these gender differences, an undertaking that we had refrained from doing in our original work. We concur with several important points made by Conley and Yang (2024): (a) women's sexual experiences are generally more negative than men's, which could...
Publication date: Thu, 22 Aug 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>"All we have to fear is fear itself": Paradigms for reducing fear by preventing awareness of it
Research on unconscious fear responses has recently been translated into experimental paradigms for reducing fear that bypass conscious awareness of the phobic stimulus and thus do not induce distress. These paradigms stand in contrast to exposure therapies for anxiety disorders, which require direct confrontation of feared situations and thus are distressing. We systematically review these unconscious exposure paradigms. A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses-based...
Publication date: Thu, 01 Aug 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Influences of past moral behavior on future behavior: A review of sequential moral behavior studies using meta-analytic techniques
Experimental research on sequential moral behavior (SMB) has found that engaging in an initial moral (or immoral) behavior can sometimes lead to moral balancing (i.e., switching between positive and negative behavior) and sometimes to moral consistency (i.e., maintaining a consistent pattern of positive or negative behavior). In two meta-analyses, we present the first comprehensive syntheses of SMB studies and test moderators to identify the conditions under which moral balancing and moral...
Publication date: Thu, 11 Jul 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Negativity bias in intergroup contact: Meta-analytical evidence that bad is stronger than good, especially when people have the opportunity and motivation to opt out of contact
Seventy years of research on intergroup contact, or face-to-face interactions between members of opposing social groups, demonstrates that positive contact typically reduces prejudice and increases social cohesion. Extant syntheses, however, have not considered the full breadth of contact valence (positive/negative) and have treated self-selection as a threat to validity. This research bridges intergroup contact theory with sequential sampling models of impression formation to assess contact...
Publication date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Evaluating the robustness of parameter estimates in cognitive models: A meta-analytic review of multinomial processing tree models across the multiverse of estimation methods
Researchers have become increasingly aware that data-analysis decisions affect results. Here, we examine this issue systematically for multinomial processing tree (MPT) models, a popular class of cognitive models for categorical data. Specifically, we examine the robustness of MPT model parameter estimates that arise from two important decisions: the level of data aggregation (complete-pooling, no-pooling, or partial-pooling) and the statistical framework (frequentist or Bayesian). These...
Publication date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>A systematic review and meta-analysis of predictors of response to trauma-focused psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder
Although trauma-focused psychotherapy (T-F psychotherapy) is the treatment of choice for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), up to one half of patients do not respond to this treatment. Attempts to improve response to T-F psychotherapy have focused on augmenting fear extinction-based factors. Here, a systematic and meta-analytic review of predictors of T-F psychotherapy outcome was conducted with the goal of using an aggregate data-driven approach to elucidate baseline factors associated with...
Publication date: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Digital data and personality: A systematic review and meta-analysis of human perception and computer prediction
In recent years, our increasing use of technology has resulted in the production of vast amounts of data. Consequently, many researchers have analyzed digital data in attempt to understand its relationship with individuals' personalities. Such endeavors have inspired efforts from divergent fields, resulting in widely dispersed findings that are seldom synthesized. In this two-part study, we draw from two distinct areas of personality prediction across psychology and computer science to explore...
Publication date: Thu, 16 May 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Committed (dis)honesty: A systematic meta-analytic review of the divergent effects of social commitment to individuals or honesty oaths on dishonest behavior
People feel committed to other individuals, groups, organizations, or moral norms in many contexts of everyday life. Such social commitment can lead to positive outcomes, such as increased job satisfaction or relationship longevity; yet, there can also be detrimental effects to feeling committed. Recent high-profile cases of fraud or corruption in companies like Enron or Volkswagen are likely influenced by strong commitment to the organization or coworkers. Although social commitment might...
Publication date: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 06:00:00 -0400 Access the article >>Parental self-regulation and engagement in emotion socialization: A systematic review
Parental emotion-related socialization behaviors (ERSBs)-including reactions to emotions, emotional expressiveness, and emotion-related discussion-can foster or hinder children and adolescents' self-regulation development. Toward a goal of identifying specific mechanisms by which children and adolescents develop skillful, adaptive self-regulation or, conversely, self-regulation difficulties and psychopathology, it is crucial to identify processes that shape and maintain parental engagement in...
Publication date: Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:00:00 -0500 Access the article >>The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
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