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Universals of thought and behaviour across variable cultural experiences can reveal uniquely human cognition. However, culturally informed and theoretically motivated sampling is needed to reveal true universals.
Authoritarianism weakens democratic institutions and fosters societal divisions. In this Review, Osborne et al. describe the psychological processes and situational factors that give rise to authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population.
From infancy, humans learn the regularities of their world using statistical learning. In this Review, Forest et al. consider how statistical learning changes quantitatively and qualitatively across development, considering influences on the input to learning and the resulting memory representations.
The majority of content at Nature Reviews Psychology is invited by the editors. But we are open to (and welcome!) unsolicited proposals. Here are some tips for writing a great pitch.
Neurocognitive evidence indicates that episodic memory and semantic memory have a more extensive role in creative ideation. In this Perspective, Benedek et al. integrate this memory research within existing creativity theorizing to present a framework whereby creative ideas arise across four distinguishable stages.
Formal onboarding materials help to introduce new undergraduate researchers to a specific laboratory and the broader culture of the field. Research faculty members should be supported and encouraged to create these materials.
Fear is an adaptive response to threat, but is also implicated in clinical conditions. In this Perspective, Beckers et al. argue that harnessing the potential of Pavlovian fear conditioning as a laboratory model of clinical anxiety requires moving beyond the study of fear acquisition to associated phenomena: extinction, generalization and avoidance.
Developments in information and communication technologies have substantially changed daily life. In this Review, Flayelle et al. formulate a theory-driven taxonomy that explains how the design features of online applications might lead to problematic usage patterns based on reinforcement learning and behavioural control theories.
Whether human face-processing specialization arrives innately at birth or arises through experience across development is an enduring debate. In this Perspective, Scott and Arcaro argue for an experience-based account whereby face-processing specialization emerges from associative and non-associative learning constrained by intrinsic neurobiological mechanisms.
Distortions of autobiographical memory recollection characterize a variety of mental health disorders. In this Review, Dalgleish and Hitchcock summarize key basic research findings in three domains of autobiographical memory distortion, and describe how these have been leveraged in pre-clinical and clinical interventions.
Working memory, or the ability to temporarily hold information in mind, underlies many everyday behaviours. In this Review, Naveh-Benjamin and Cowan discuss age-related changes in working memory capacity and how working memory interacts with other cognitive capacities, relating both to theories of working memory.