Articles in 2022

Fiona Charlson and colleagues review direct and indirect ways in which climate change impacts mental health. The authors provide an overview of the current evidence to inform the mental health field’s response to climate change and identify promising approaches for health professionals for individual-level, community-level and system-wide responses, as well as advocacy and education.

Hornsey and Lewandowsky examine psychological and structural reasons for climate change scepticism and describe strategies for reducing the destructive influence of such scepticism.

When and why are interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour effective? van Valkengoed and colleagues introduce a classification system that links different interventions to the determinants of environmental behaviour. On the basis of this classification system, they provide guidelines for practitioners on how to select interventions that are most likely to change the key determinants of a specific target behaviour.

For a long time, climate models did not account for human behaviour. This Review by Beckage et al. surveys existing social climate models, an emerging class of models that embed human behaviour in climate models, and makes recommendations for how to best represent and integrate human behaviour in climate models.

Leveraging data from a longitudinal field experiment, Taylor and colleagues show that identity cues, such as a username, increase how viewers vote and reply to online content. Their results support a rich-get-richer dynamic when identity cues are salient.

Phylogenetic methods applied to ethnographic data show that systems of religious and political authority have worked synergistically over millennia of Austronesian cultural evolution, without showing a clear tendency to become more or less distinct.

This systematic review on digital media and democracy finds beneficial relationships mostly in emerging democracies but detrimental associations in established democracies for different political variables across methods.

Saltoun et al. reveal undescribed brain-wide dimensions to underlie human brain asymmetry at the population level.

Boundy-Singer and the team studied how people’s confidence can predict the accuracy of their decisions. They found that confidence estimates reflect decision reliability, not accuracy, and that the uncertainty about stimulus uncertainty limits the quality of confidence judgments.

When sharing research data for verification and reuse, behavioural researchers should protect participants’ privacy, particularly when studying sensitive topics. Because personally identifying data remain present in many open psychology datasets, we urge researchers to mend privacy via checks of re-identification risk before sharing data. We offer guidance for sharing responsibly.

Henkel et al. show that people’s identification with their COVID-19 vaccination status is associated with polarization in attitudes, behaviours and acceptance of vaccination policies.

This study uses data on social-distancing compliance from 19 year olds and their parents during two UK-wide lockdowns and finds evidence to suggest that mothers influence their child’s compliance with social-distancing guidelines.

Voelkel et al. find that two interventions designed to reduce affective polarization do not also significantly reduce anti-democratic attitudes.

Across five studies, Spadaro et al. show that perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt is associated with lower interpersonal trust and prosocial behaviour among strangers.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Coles et al. present the results of a multicentre global adversarial collaboration on the facial feedback hypothesis.

In a recent editorial, we announced the adoption of new ethics guidance for research about human groups. In this follow-up editorial, we provide background and examples to clarify why we developed this guidance and how we will be using it.

Danilo Bzdok and Robin I. M. Dunbar review the neurobiology of human and primate social behaviours and how the pandemic may have disrupted these systems.

Life expectancies diverged in 2021, approaching pre-pandemic levels in Western Europe and further worsening in Eastern Europe, USA and Chile. Life expectancy deficits in 2021 are almost solely explained by premature deaths due to COVID-19. Correspondingly, countries with a higher share of vaccinated individuals suffered the least life expectancy deficit.

In 2021, life expectancies returned to pre-pandemic levels in parts of western Europe but further worsened in eastern Europe, the United States and Chile. Life expectancy deficits were negatively correlated with vaccine uptake in later 2021.

Schunk et al. report the results of a randomized controlled field study that integrates a short self-regulation teaching unit based on the concept of mental contrasting with implementation intentions into the school curriculum of first graders. The findings suggest positive effects of the treatment on impulse control and self-regulation as well as lasting improvements in academic skills.