The structure and evolution of social psychology: a co-citation network analysis.

The present study examined the thematic composition and temporal evolution of social psychology through a co-citation network analysis of 80,350 articles published from 1970 through 2022. Six primary thematic clusters were identified: a broad "Classic Social Psychology" cluster most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s; "Traits & Affect" and "Social Cognition" clusters most influential in the 1990s; and "The Self," "Intergroup Relations," and "Big Five" clusters emerging after 2000. A small seventh cluster dedicated to COVID-19 and conspiracy theories emerged around 2021. These trends fit a narrative of generational shifts within distinct social and personality psychology traditions.

Himpathy and status: Attitudes to social hierarchy predict reactions to sexual harassment.

In three studies, we tested whether hierarchical preferences could explain differences in punishment recommendations for sexual harassment. Building on research that suggests punishment is used to regulate social hierarchies, we argue that individuals who are motivated to maintain existing hierarchies will treat male perpetrators of sexual harassment with greater leniency, especially when judging perpetrators of high social status. Conversely, we predict that egalitarians-who are motivated to reduce group-based hierarchies-will judge male perpetrators more harshly, especially those of high social status. Given competing theories in the existing literature, we make no predictions about how perpetrator status will affect punishment recommendations overall. Supporting our hypotheses, we found that individuals high on gender system justification and social dominance orientation recommended more lenient punishments to perpetrators. Moreover, an integrative data analysis uncovered an interaction between social dominance orientation and perpetrator status. This interaction was primarily driven by egalitarians, who provided more lenient punishment recommendations to low status perpetrators when compared to high status perpetrators. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find strong evidence that individuals high on social dominance orientation provided harsher judgements to low status perpetrators. Nor did we find strong evidence for a main effect of perpetrator status on punishment recommendations. Taken together, these findings suggest that people punish sexual harassment to bolster or attenuate power structures. This is particularly true of egalitarians, whose emphasis on social equality leads them to judge high status perpetrators of sexual harassment with particular severity.

Psychological factors underlying attitudes toward AI tools.

What are the psychological factors driving attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and how can resistance to AI systems be overcome when they are beneficial? Here we first organize the main sources of resistance into five main categories: opacity, emotionlessness, rigidity, autonomy and group membership. We relate each of these barriers to fundamental aspects of cognition, then cover empirical studies providing correlational or causal evidence for how the barrier influences attitudes toward AI tools. Second, we separate each of the five barriers into AI-related and user-related factors, which is of practical relevance in developing interventions towards the adoption of beneficial AI tools. Third, we highlight potential risks arising from these well-intentioned interventions. Fourth, we explain how the current Perspective applies to various stakeholders, including how to approach interventions that carry known risks, and point to outstanding questions for future work.

Individual differences in the expansiveness of mental disorder concepts: development and validation of concept breadth scales.

BACKGROUND: What people consider to be a mental disorder is likely to influence how they perceive others who are experiencing problems and whether they seek help for their own problems. However, no measure is available to assess individual differences in the expansiveness or breadth of concepts of mental disorder. Four studies aimed to develop and validate two such measures. The Concept Breadth-Vertical (CB-V) scale assesses variability in the severity threshold at which unusual behavior or experience is judged to reflect disorder, whereas the Concept Breadth-Horizontal (CB-H) scale assesses variability in the range of phenomena judged to be disorders. METHODS: In a pilot study (N = 201) for the CB-V, participants read vignettes of varying severity for each of the 10 mental disorders, and rated whether the subject had a disorder. Study 1 (N = 502) used exploratory factor analyses to examine 10 CB-V items from the pilot study and 20 vignette-based items for constructing the CB-H. Study 2 (N = 298) employed confirmatory factor analysis to validate the scales' structure and examined their convergent validity with a measure of harm concept breadth and their discriminant validity with measures of mental health literacy. Study 3 (N = 298) explored associations of the scales with other mental health variables, including stigma and help-seeking attitudes. RESULTS: Study 1 supported the unifactorial structure of each item set, refined each set into a scale, and demonstrated acceptable reliabilities. Study 2 provided support for the scales' convergent and discriminant validities. Study 3 showed that the scales were associated negatively with stigma, and positively with help-seeking attitudes and self-reported mental health problems. Studies 2 and 3 further indicated that younger and more politically liberal participants hold broader concepts of mental disorder. CONCLUSIONS: The new concept breadth scales are psychometrically sound measures of a promising new concept in the study of beliefs and attitudes about mental health. Potential future research directions are discussed.

Developing key performance indicators for adult critical care transfer services: Scoping review and Delphi technique.

In 2021 NHS England commissioned regional Adult Critical Care Transfer Services. These services will replace a historically predominant ad hoc approach to adult critical care transfers nationally. It is anticipated that these new formal services will provide a system of robust regional & national governance previously acknowledged to be deficient. As part of this process, it is important that an agreed set of transfer service quality indicators are developed to drive equitable improvement in patient care. We used a Delphi technique to develop a set of key performance indicators through consensus for a recently established London critical care transfer service. We believe this may be the first-time key performance indicators have been developed for adult critical care transfer services using a consensus method. We hope services will consider tracking similar measures to enable benchmarking and drive improvements in patient care.

Categorical versus dimensional structure of autism spectrum disorder: A multi-method investigation.

Background: A key question for any psychopathological diagnosis is whether the condition is continuous or discontinuous with typical variation. The primary objective of this study was to use a multi-method approach to examine the broad latent categorical versus dimensional structure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method: Data were aggregated across seven independent samples of participants with ASD, other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), and non-ASD/NDD controls (aggregate Ns = 512-16,755; ages 1.5-22). Scores from four distinct phenotype measures formed composite "indicators" of the latent ASD construct. The primary indicator set included eye gaze metrics from seven distinct social stimulus paradigms. Logistic regressions were used to combine gaze metrics within/across paradigms, and derived predicted probabilities served as indicator values. Secondary indicator sets were constructed from clinical observation and parent-report measures of ASD symptoms. Indicator sets were submitted to taxometric- and latent class analyses. Results: Across all indicator sets and analytic methods, there was strong support for categorical structure corresponding closely to ASD diagnosis. Consistent with notions of substantial phenotypic heterogeneity, the ASD category had a wide range of symptom severity. Despite the examination of a large sample with a wide range of IQs in both genders, males and children with lower IQ were over-represented in the ASD category, similar to observations in diagnosed cases. Conclusions: Our findings provide strong support for categorical structure corresponding closely to ASD diagnosis. The present results bolster the use of well-diagnosed and representative ASD groups within etiologic and clinical research, motivating the ongoing search for major drivers of the ASD phenotype. Despite the categorical structure of ASD, quantitative symptom measurements appear more useful for examining relationships with other factors.

Have the concepts of 'anxiety' and 'depression' been normalized or pathologized? A corpus study of historical semantic change.

Research on concept creep indicates that the meanings of some psychological concepts have broadened in recent decades. Some mental health-related concepts such as 'trauma', for example, have acquired more expansive meanings and come to refer to a wider range of events and experiences. 'Anxiety' and 'depression' may have undergone similar semantic inflation, driven by rising public attention and awareness. Critics have argued that everyday emotional experiences are increasingly pathologized, so that 'depression' and 'anxiety' have broadened to include sub-clinical experiences of sadness and worry. The possibility that these concepts have expanded to include less severe phenomena (vertical concept creep) was tested by examining changes in the emotional intensity of words in their vicinity (collocates) using two large historical text corpora, one academic and one general. The academic corpus contained >133 million words from psychology article abstracts published 1970-2018, and the general corpus (>500 million words) consisted of diverse text sources from the USA for the same period. We hypothesized that collocates of 'anxiety' and 'depression' would decline in average emotional severity over the study period. Contrary to prediction, the average severity of collocates for both words increased in both corpora, possibly due to growing clinical framing of the two concepts. The study findings therefore do not support a historical decline in the severity of 'anxiety' and 'depression' but do provide evidence for a rise in their pathologization.

What is a mental disorder? Evaluating the lay concept of Mental Ill Health in the United States.

PURPOSE: How "mental disorder" should be defined has been the focus of extensive theoretical and philosophical debate, but how the concept is understood by laypeople has received much less attention. The study aimed to examine the content (distinctive features and inclusiveness) of these concepts, their degree of correspondence to the DSM-5 definition, and whether alternative concept labels ("mental disorder", "mental illness", "mental health problem", "psychological issue") have similar or different meanings. METHODS: We investigated concepts of mental disorder in a nationally representative sample of 600 U.S. residents. Subsets of participants made judgments about vignettes describing people with 37 DSM-5 disorders and 24 non-DSM phenomena including neurological conditions, character flaws, bad habits, and culture-specific syndromes. RESULTS: Findings indicated that concepts of mental disorder were primarily based on judgments that a condition is associated with emotional distress and impairment, and that it is rare and aberrant. Disorder judgments were only weakly associated with the DSM-5: many DSM-5 conditions were not judged to be disorders and many non-DSM conditions were so judged. "Mental disorder", "mental illness", and "mental health problem" were effectively identical in meaning, but "psychological issue" was somewhat more inclusive, capturing a broader range of conditions. CONCLUSION: These findings clarify important issues surrounding how laypeople conceptualize mental disorder. Our findings point to some significant points of disagreement between professional and public understandings of disorder, while also establishing that laypeople's concepts of mental disorder are systematic and structured.

Twitter misogyny associated with Hillary Clinton increased throughout the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Online misogyny has become a fixture in female politicians' lives. Backlash theory suggests that it may represent a threat response prompted by female politicians' counterstereotypical, power-seeking behaviors. We investigated this hypothesis by analyzing Twitter references to Hillary Clinton before, during, and after her presidential campaign. We collected a corpus of over 9 million tweets from 2014 to 2018 that referred to Hillary Clinton, and employed an interrupted time series analysis on the relative frequency of misogynistic language within the corpus. Prior to 2015, the level of misogyny associated with Clinton decreased over time, but this trend reversed when she announced her presidential campaign. During the campaign, misogyny steadily increased and only plateaued after the election, when the threat of her electoral success had subsided. These findings are consistent with the notion that online misogyny towards female political nominees is a form of backlash prompted by their ambition for power in the political arena.

Trends of research productivity across author gender and research fields: A multidisciplinary and multi-country observational study.

Bibliographic properties of more than 75 million scholarly articles, are examined and trends in overall research productivity are analysed as a function of research field (over the period of 1970-2020) and author gender (over the period of 2006-2020). Potential disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are also investigated. Over the last decade (2010-2020), the annual number of publications have invariably increased every year with the largest relative increase in a single year happening in 2019 (more than 6% relative growth). But this momentum was interrupted in 2020. Trends show that Environmental Sciences and Engineering Environmental have been the fastest growing research fields. The disruption in patterns of scholarly publication due to the Covid-19 pandemic was unevenly distributed across fields, with Computer Science, Engineering and Social Science enduring the most notable declines. The overall trends of male and female productivity indicate that, in terms of absolute number of publications, the gender gap does not seem to be closing in any country. The trends in absolute gap between male and female authors is either parallel (e.g., Canada, Australia, England, USA) or widening (e.g., majority of countries, particularly Middle Eastern countries). In terms of the ratio of female to male productivity, however, the gap is narrowing almost invariably, though at markedly different rates across countries. While some countries are nearing a ratio of .7 and are well on track for a 0.9 female to male productivity ratio, our estimates show that certain countries (particularly across the Middle East) will not reach such targets within the next 100 years. Without interventional policies, a significant gap will continue to exist in such countries. The decrease or increase in research productivity during the first year of the pandemic, in contrast to trends established before 2020, was generally parallel for male and female authors. There has been no substantial gender difference in the disruption due to the pandemic. However, opposite trends were found in a few cases. It was observed that, in some countries (e.g., The Netherlands, The United States and Germany), male productivity has been more negatively affected by the pandemic. Overall, female research productivity seems to have been more resilient to the disruptive effect of Covid-19 pandemic, although the momentum of female researchers has been negatively affected in a comparable manner to that of males.

Has Psychology Become More Positive? Trends in Language Use in Article Abstracts.

The positive psychology movement, launched near the start of the twenty-first century, aimed to shift the focus of psychology away from misery, conflict, and pathology toward happiness, human flourishing, and wellbeing. However, there have been few attempts to gauge whether psychology as a whole has become more positive in its focus. This study tested this possibility by examining a corpus of 829,701 abstracts from articles published in 875 psychology journals between 1970 and 2017. Positivity was indexed by the positive emotion dictionary using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool and a newly constructed positive character dictionary. Both indices showed a steep rise through the study period, with the positive character index's rise occurring since 2000. A Negative Emotion index also rose linearly over the study period, suggesting that the rise in positive emotion might reflect in part a general increase in affective or evaluative language use. While there appears to have been an increase in psychology's positivity, that increase is complex, non-linear, and the degree to which it can be ascribed to positive psychology remains uncertain.

Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability.

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three everyday singing tasks in Australian twins (n = 1189) to explore the relative genetic and environmental influences on singing ability. We derived a reproducible phenotypic index for singing ability across five performance measures of pitch and interval accuracy. Using this index we found moderate heritability of singing ability (h 2 = 40.7%) with a striking, similar contribution from shared environmental factors (c 2 = 37.1%). Childhood singing in the family home and being surrounded by music early in life both significantly predicted the phenotypic index. Taken together, these findings show that singing ability is equally influenced by genetic and shared environmental factors.

The Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-Designed Empowerment Programs.

This study documents evaluation of the Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-designed empowerment pilot programs. The programs were designed to support Victorian Aboriginal people to strengthen mental health, social and emotional wellbeing, community connection, and to reduce psychological distress. A second aim was to explore participants' experiences of the programs, including the feasibility and acceptability of the evaluation component. Her Tribe ran for 16 weeks and His Tribe for 12 weeks. In total, 43 women and 26 men completed assessments at pre- and post-program completion, and 17 and 10, respectively, participated in yarning circles at the 6-month follow up. For both programs, there were significant increases in participants' access to personal strengths and resources, relationship-community-cultural strengths and resources, and decreases in psychological distress. These changes were associated with small to moderate effects that were maintained at the 6-month follow up. There was a significant increase in aerobic fitness for female but not male participants, and no significant changes in weight for either group. Participants described a range of benefits from the programs, including positive elements and areas for improvement. They also viewed the evaluation as feasible and acceptable, and the findings of value. The outcomes from both pilot programs provide evidence that Aboriginal-designed programs, with a focus on physical and cultural activities, can help to strengthen mental health and wellbeing, community connection, and reduce psychological distress in Victorian Aboriginal communities.

Ill-defined: Concepts of mental health and illness are becoming broader, looser, and more benign.

OBJECTIVES: We argue that mental health-related concepts have become degraded within professional circles and in the wider community. We identify three trends: concept creep, the rise of broad umbrella concepts (e.g. distress and trauma), and the conflation of mental health with well-being, which marginalises serious mental illness. We speculate on the causes of these trends, including cultural shifts towards greater sensitivity to harm and the rise of wellness industries. Contributing factors within psychiatry include overdiagnosis, dimensional models and transdiagnostic perspectives. CONCLUSIONS: These trends may lead to inflated demands on services from those at the milder end of the psychopathological spectrum. We set out seven measures that mental health professionals can take to resist trends towards broad concepts of mental illness and limit some of their adverse consequences.

The Neuroscientification of Psychology: The Rising Prevalence of Neuroscientific Concepts in Psychology From 1965 to 2016.

The apparent convergence of psychology and brain science has been the subject of both celebration and critique, but it has never been systematically charted. We examined historical trends in the representation of neuroscientific concepts in a corpus of 798,402 psychology journal articles published over the past half century, from 1965 to 2016. A dictionary of 522 uniquely neuroscience-related terms was developed, and the percentage of article abstracts in which at least one term appeared was calculated for each year. This percentage grew from 9.15% to 16.45% over the study period, whereas the percentage containing a subset of 199 terms containing the prefix "neur-" rose much more steeply, from 2.30% to 10.06%. From the mid-1970s, the growing representation of neuroscience in psychology was linear. Proportions were highest among journals covering neuropsychology and physiological psychology and behavioral neuroscience, lowest in those covering social psychology and developmental and educational psychology, and intermediate in those covering experimental and cognitive psychology and clinical psychology. The steepest rises were found in social and clinical psychology journals. Changes in the most salient neuroscientific terms revealed historical shifts in technology, topic, and anatomical focus, which may contribute to our understanding of relationships among mind, brain, and behavior.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

Dehumanization and the lack of social connection.

Dehumanization is traditionally considered in the context of intergroup conflict. An emerging body of research examines how it also occurs in interpersonal relationships and is associated with social exclusion and disconnection rather than conflict. This article examines how humanness implicates social relatedness, how social distance fosters perceptions of others as less human than the self, and how dehumanizing perceptions undermine close relationships. It then explores how experiences of social exclusion lead people to see themselves and their rejecters as less human, how the belief that one is dehumanized by others promotes rejection of others, and how positive social contact may reduce dehumanization. Finally, it discusses how feeling lonely or socially connected sometimes leads people to anthropomorphize nonhumans and other times leads them to dehumanize people.

Negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion in daily life.

Nonacceptance of emotion is consistently linked with increased levels of psychopathology and diminished well-being. Research has found that negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion are positively associated cross-sectionally but has yet to directly investigate temporal associations between these constructs. Given that negative emotions are frequently the target of negative thoughts and other emotions, and that acceptance of emotion is associated with prospective decreases in negative emotion, we hypothesized that the temporal relation between negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion is bidirectional. The present study examined the association between these variables during people's daily lives using an experience sampling methodology. Multilevel modeling was used for all analyses, including hierarchical generalized linear modeling and log-normal hurdle modeling. A total of 187 women from the United States and Australia reported negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion 14 times a day for 5 days. Negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion were positively associated contemporaneously. Across time, nonacceptance of emotion was prospectively and positively associated with the intensity of negative emotion independent of immediately prior negative emotion, and negative emotion intensity was prospectively and positively associated with nonacceptance of emotion independent of immediately prior nonacceptance. Results support a bidirectional model of negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion wherein each variable predicts increases in the other across time. Our findings elucidate how individuals fall into maladaptive emotional patterns that are difficult to break and could possibly pave the way to the development and maintenance of psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The cultural dynamics of concept creep.

Emerging methods for studying cultural dynamics allow researchers to investigate cultural change with newfound rigor. One change that has recently attracted the attention of social commentators is "concept creep," the semantic inflation of harm-related concepts such as trauma, bullying, and prejudice. In theory, concept creep is driven distally by several recent cultural and societal trends, but psychology also plays a proximal role in developing and disseminating expansionary concepts of harm. However, there have been few systematic attempts to document concept creep and none to explore factors that influence it. The present work reviews concept creep from the perspective of cultural dynamics and lays out a conceptual framework for exploring processes implicated in it. Illustrative analyses are presented that apply computational linguistic methods to very large text corpora, including a new corpus of psychology article abstracts. They demonstrate that harm has risen steeply in prominence both in psychology and in the wider culture in recent decades, and that harm-related concepts have inflated their meanings over this period. The analyses also provide evidence of dynamic relationships between the prominence and semantic breadth of harm-related concepts, and between psychology and the culture at large. Implications are drawn for theory and research on concept creep. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).