Reviews & Analysis

Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an ‘us versus them’ mentality dominates. In this Review, Jost et al. provide a conceptual framework that integrates scientific knowledge about cognitive–motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted.

Social psychology often emphasizes social categories as the unit of explanation. In this Perspective, Cikara et al. argue that the primacy of categories leads to neglect of contextual features that shape behaviour; they describe alternative frameworks for incorporating context into social psychology theorizing.

Intellectual humility involves acknowledging the limitations of one’s knowledge and that one’s beliefs might be incorrect. In this Review, Porter and colleagues synthesize concepts of intellectual humility across fields and describe the complex interplay between intellectual humility and related individual and societal factors.

Sleep problems are both a symptom and precursor of adolescent depression. In this Review, Gradisar et al. describe how the combination of adolescent sleep biology and psychology predisposes adolescents to develop depression, and describe interventions that improve sleep and depression symptoms in this population.

People spend approximately half of their waking hours inattentive to their surroundings. In this Review, Wamsley describes the beneficial effect that these periods of offline waking rest have on memory, contrasting this benefit and its underlying mechanisms with the effects of sleep.

When people judge an agent’s action, they often look beyond the act itself to infer the agent’s motives. In this Review, Carlson et al. survey research on the role of inferred motives in moral judgement and describe how motive properties serve as inputs to these inferences.

Conscious experiences range from simple experiences of colour to rich experiences that combine sensory input and bodily states. In this Perspective, Lau and colleagues propose that simple experiences depend on similarity encoded in implicit memory and that complex experiences also require replay of explicit memory.

Negative symptoms in schizophrenia correlate with clinical and functional outcomes but respond poorly to treatment. In this Review, Chan et al. summarize theoretical and empirical models of negative symptoms and propose that negative symptoms might be informative for early identification of at-risk individuals.

Children’s individual abilities and environment influence their mathematics skills. In this Review, Silver and Libertus examine how language, socioeconomic status and other environmental factors influence mathematics skills across childhood, with a focus on number word acquisition.

Eating disorders are especially deadly because of high psychiatric comorbidity, heterogeneity within and between diagnoses, and diagnostic migration. In this Perspective, Levinson et al. propose that a network theory approach to eating disorders addresses this complexity, with substantial benefits for conceptualization and treatment.

Technology is changing the nature of work by enabling new forms of automation and communication. In this Review, Gagné et al. describe how self-determination theory can help researchers and practitioners to shape the future of work to ensure that it meets the psychological needs of workers.

Attention is automatically directed to stimuli that have been paired with valuable outcomes, prioritizing these stimuli in decision-making. In this Review, Pearson et al. describe the interactions between value-modulated attention and choice in typical situations as well as in addictive behaviour.

Adolescents’ risk-taking behaviours are shaped by their social environment. In this Review, Kwon and Telzer synthesize research on social contextual risk taking during adolescence and provide an overview of changes in brain systems underpinning this behaviour throughout this period of development.

Collective intelligence emerges in group decision-making, whether it requires a consensus or not. In this Review, Kameda et al. describe cognitive and behavioural algorithms that capitalize on individual heterogeneity to yield gains in decision-making accuracy beyond the wisdom of crowds.

Depressive disorders are among the leading causes of global disease burden. In this Perspective, Fried et al. argue that limited progress in understanding, predicting and treating depression despite a wealth of empirical research stems from issues in the methodological and theoretical foundations of depression measurement.

An assumption of modern institutional justice systems is that transgressors should be punished. In this Review, Marshall and McAuliffe synthesize research on whether children expect bystanders to punish others, favour those who do so, and even pursue certain forms of intervention, such as punishment, in response to wrongdoing.

The ability to recognize identity, emotion and other attributes from faces varies across individuals. In this Review, White and Burton synthesize research on individual differences in face processing and the implications of variability in face processing ability for theory and applied settings.

Economic inequality might influence subjective well-being through psychological mechanisms. However, evidence for this claim is mixed. In this Perspective, Willis et al. suggest that inconsistent findings arise because the psychological effects of economic inequality are driven by perceived — rather than objective — inequality.

Subjective time perception involves processing when an event happens relative to another event versus how long an event lasts. In this Review, Coull and Giersch describe the functional and neural differences between temporal order processing and duration estimation by exploring perturbations in individuals with schizophrenia.

Aberrant emotional processes are evident in various mental disorders. In this Review, Lincoln et al. provide an overview of theoretical models of emotion regulation, synthesize the literature on emotion regulation in psychopathology and provide an overview of interventions that target emotion regulation.