Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2024

The current system of peer review drives racial and gender disparities in publication and funding outcomes and can suppress the perspectives of marginalized scholars. Established researchers have an opportunity to help to build a fairer and more inclusive peer review culture by advocating for and empowering their trainees.

Minoritized doctoral students are subject to cultural taxation — disproportionate expectations and obligations based on their race or ethnicity — that negatively impacts their PhD studies. Faculty members and departments should counteract this taxation to support students of colour.

It is normal to deal with difficult situations during PhD studies. Students and their advisors can set themselves up for success and minimize potential challenges with foreknowledge and by making expectations and workflows explicit.

Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Jens Foell about his journey from a research associate to a science journalist for German television.

Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Lauren D. Kendall Brooks about her journey from a postdoctoral research associate to a research scientist.

Nature Reviews Psychology is interviewing individuals with doctoral degrees in psychology who pursued non-academic careers. We spoke with Betty Tuller about her journey from a full professor to a programme director.

Humans can rapidly and accurately recognize visual scenes and objects within them. In this Review, Peelen and colleagues discuss bidirectional interactions between object and scene processing and the role of predictive processing in visual inference.

Laypeople tend to believe that self-esteem influences the quality of relationships, but the empirical evidence is mixed. In this Review, Wood et al. summarize the current state of evidence for simple direct effects, propose that self-esteem is best understood as influencing relationships indirectly through a causal chain of mediators, and review evidence for such mediators.

Some researchers equate insight with cognitive restructuring processes that occur when solvers reinterpret the problem, whereas others equate insight with phenomenological Aha! experiences that accompany solutions. In this Review, Wiley and Danek summarize both approaches to insight problem solving and consider the extent to which Aha! experiences co-occur with restructuring.

Self-control is traditionally viewed as an individual-level struggle, reflecting prevailing notions of individual autonomy and personal responsibility. In this Perspective, Hofmann calls for a multilevel approach to self-control that considers not only how individuals may proactively shape their environments, but also how structural factors often shape individuals’ environments beyond their control.