Reviews & Analysis

Dual- and single-process theories have been proposed to explain how attitudes arise from stimulus co-occurrence via evaluative conditioning. In this Review, Hütter appraises these theoretical views in light of the empirical evidence and considers how dual- and single-process accounts can be integrated.

People often look for objects in their immediate environment, engaging in a behaviour known as visual search. In this Review, Lleras and colleagues discuss how visual processing influences visual search, focusing on theories that incorporate constraints from peripheral vision.

A key factor that instigates and perpetuates intergroup conflict is people’s support for violence against the outgroup. In this Review, Saguy and Reifen-Tagar consider the sources of support for violent conflict: basic cognitive-motivational roots, personal inclinations, group-level influences, situational influences and post-hoc justifications of violence.

Decades of research have uncovered effective learning strategies to support student learning. In this Review, Carpenter et al. summarize the literature on spaced learning and retrieval practice strategies, and describe how metacognition guides strategy use in realistic learning situations.

A variety of mindfulness-specific psychological mechanisms have been proposed to account for the beneficial effects of mindfulness-based interventions. In this Perspective, Goldberg argues that emphasizing the commonalities rather than differences between mindfulness-based interventions and other treatments might help to guide future research.

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.