Perspectives on Psychological Science

Environmental cues that signal aging may directly and indirectly prime diminished capacity. Similarly, the absence of these cues may prime improved health. The authors investigated the effects of age cues on health and longevity in five very different settings. The findings include the following: First, women who think they look younger after having their hair colored/cut show a decrease in blood pressure and appear younger in photographs (in which their hair is cropped out) to independent raters. Second, clothing is an age-related cue. Uniforms eliminate these age-related cues: Those who wear work uniforms have lower morbidity than do those who earn the same amount of money and do not wear work uniforms. Third, baldness cues old age. Men who bald prematurely see an older self and therefore age faster: Prematurely bald men have an excess risk of getting prostate cancer and coronary heart disease than do men who do not prematurely bald. Fourth, women who bear children later in life are surrounded by younger age-related cues: Older mothers have a longer life expectancy than do women who bear children earlier in life. Last, large spousal age differences result in age-incongruent cues: Younger spouses live shorter lives and older spouses live longer lives than do controls.

People often form and retrieve memories in the company of others. Yet, nearly 125 years of cognitive research on learning and memory has mainly focused on individuals working in isolation. Although important topics such as eyewitness memory and autobiographical memory have evaluated social influences, a study of group memory has progressed mainly within the provinces of history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. In this context, the recent surge in research on the cognitive basis of collaborative memory marks an important conceptual departure. As a first aim, we review these empirical and theoretical advances on the nature and influence of collaborative memory. Effects of collaboration are counterintuitive because individuals remember less when recalling in groups. Collaboration can also lead to forgetting and increase memory errors. Conversely, collaboration can also improve memory under proper conditions. As a second aim, we propose an overarching theoretical framework that specifies the cognitive mechanisms associated with the costs and benefits of collaboration on memory. A study of the reciprocal influences of the group and the individual on memory processes naturally draws upon several disciplines. Our aim is to elucidate the cognitive components of this complex phenomenon and situate this analysis within a broader interdisciplinary perspective.

Recent research has shown that people’s actions can influence how they think. A separate body of research has shown that the gestures people produce when they speak can also influence how they think. In this article, we bring these two literatures together to explore whether gesture has an effect on thinking by virtue of its ability to reflect real-world actions. We first argue that gestures contain detailed perceptual-motor information about the actions they represent, information often not found in the speech that accompanies the gestures. We then show that the action features in gesture do not just reflect the gesturer’s thinking––they can feed back and alter that thinking. Gesture actively brings action into a speaker’s mental representations, and those mental representations then affect behavior––at times more powerfully than do the actions on which the gestures are based. Gesture thus has the potential to serve as a unique bridge between action and abstract thought.

Structural equation models have provided a seemingly rigorous method for investigating causal relations in nonexperimental data in the presence of measurement error or multiple measures of putative causes or effects. Methods have been developed for fitting these very complex models globally and obtaining global fit statistics or global measures of their approximation to sample data. Structural equation models are idealizations that can serve only as approximations to real multivariate data. Further, these models are multidimensional, and the approximation is itself multidimensional. Tests of “significance” and global indices of approximation do not provide an adequate basis for judging the acceptability of the approximation. Standard applications of structural models use a composite of two models—a measurement (path) model and a path (causal) model. Separate analyses of the measurement model and the path model provide an informed judgment, whereas the composite global analysis can easily yield unreasonable conclusions. Separating the component models enables a careful assessment of the actual constraints implied by the path model, using recently developed methods. An empirical example shows how the conventional global treatment yields unacceptable conclusions.

Psychological scientists, like lay people, often think in categorical dichotomies that contrast men and women and exaggerate the differences between groups. These value-laden divides tend to privilege one side over the other, often to the advantage of the scientists' own identity group. Besides balancing perspectives in the academic marketplace of ideas, scientists can recognize the complexity of stigma. Gender, like many categories, entails two fundamental dimensions that characterize intergroup stigma (and all interpersonal perception): perceived warmth and competence. These dimensions identify groups viewed with ambivalence (e.g., traditional women are stereotypically warm but incompetent, whereas professional women are allegedly competent but cold). In gender and in other areas, psychological scientists can go beyond value-laden dichotomies and consider the fundamental, continuous dimensions along which we think about stigma.

This article briefly describes how psychology, psychiatry, and the mental health professions (here collectively referred to as Psychology) treated sexual orientation differences as deficits for much of the 20th century, as well as some of the negative consequences that practice had for sexual minorities. The 1970s witnessed a remarkable turnaround when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the American Psychological Association called for psychologists to work to remove the stigma historically associated with homosexuality. This history illustrates not only how cultural institutions play a central role in legitimating stigma, but also how they can recognize their own complicity in this process and work effectively to undo its harmful effects. It is argued that Psychology still has an important role to play in challenging the differences-as-deficits model in contemporary policy debates.

Whether motivated by racist intent, ethnocentric arrogance, or data analytic myopia, research that systematically stigmatizes specific human groups is destructive. The racist assumptions of the inferiority of African culture and persons of African descent have contributed substantially to stigmatizing beliefs about African Americans. This article presents historical examples of several kinds of motivated or myopic theoretical and empirical projects that stigmatize African Americans and examples of how an examination of culture and social context may alleviate these problems. A discussion of ways to diversify psychological science includes diversifying those who do it, broadening the cultural perspectives and problems from which psychological concepts emanate (particularly in the United States), and formalizing diversity science as a system of theoretical and empirical research.

The home-field disadvantage refers to the disadvantage inherent in research that takes a particular cultural group as the starting point or standard for research, including cross-cultural research. We argue that home-field status is a serious handicap that often pushes researchers toward deficit thinking, however good the researchers' intentions may be. In this article, we aim to make this home-field bias more explicit and, in doing so, more avoidable. We discuss three often-overlooked disadvantages that result from this home-field status: the problem of marked versus unmarked culture, the problem of homogenous versus heterogeneous culture, and the problem of regression toward the mean. We also recommend four interventions researchers can apply to avoid the home-field disadvantage or, at the least, attenuate its deleterious effects.

We systematically mistreat psychological phenomena, both logically and clinically. This article explores three contentions: that the dominant discourse in modern cognitive, affective, and clinical neuroscience assumes that we know how psychology/biology causation works when we do not; that there are serious intellectual, clinical, and policy costs to pretending we do know; and that crucial scientific and clinical progress will be stymied as long as we frame psychology, biology, and their relationship in currently dominant ways. The arguments are developed with emphasis on misguided attempts to localize psychological function via neuroimaging, misunderstandings about the role of genetics in psychopathology, and untoward constraints on health-care policy and clinical service delivery. A particular challenge, articulated but not resolved in this article, is determining what constitutes adequate explanation in the relationship between psychology and biology.

The recent, rapid expansion of the application of neuroimaging techniques to a broad variety of questions about the structure and function of mind and brain has led to much necessary and often critical introspection about what these techniques can actually tell us about cognitive processes. In this article, we attempt to place neuroimaging within the broader context of the cognitive neuroscience approach, which emphasizes the benefits of converging methodologies for understanding cognition and how it is supported by the functioning of the brain. Our arguments for what neuroimaging has to offer are supported by two specific examples from research on memory that, we believe, show how neuroimaging data have provided unique insights not only into brain organization, but also into the organization of the mind.

The goal of cognitive neuroscience is to identify the mapping between brain function and mental processing. In this article, I examine the strategies that have been used to identify such mappings and argue that they may be fundamentally unable to identify selective structure–function mappings. To understand the functional anatomy of mental processes, it will be necessary for researchers to move from the brain-mapping strategies that the field has employed toward a search for selective associations. This will require a greater focus on the structure of cognitive processes, which can be achieved through the development of formal ontologies that describe the structure of mental processes. In this article, I outline the Cognitive Atlas Project, which is developing such ontologies, and show how this knowledge could be used in conjunction with data-mining approaches to more directly relate mental processes and brain function.

Since the advent of human neuroimaging, and of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in particular, the popular press has shown an increasing interest in brain-related findings. In this article, I explore possible reasons behind this interest, including recent data suggesting that people find brain images and neuroscience language more convincing than results that make no reference to the brain (McCabe & Castel, 2008; Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008). I suggest that part of the allure of these data are the deceptively simply messages they afford, as well as general, but sometimes misguided, confidence in biological data. In addition to cataloging some misunderstandings by the press and public, I highlight the responsibilities of the research scientist in carefully conveying their work to the general public.

The development and application of neuroimaging methods offers powerful means to study brain functions, but the resulting knowledge is more likely to be beneficial when combined with conceptual analyses that decompose complex psychological constructs into component structures, representations, processes, and computations; converging measures that gauge neural events at different temporal and spatial scales; behavioral measures that permit fine-grain analyses of brain–behavior associations; and experimental (e.g., lesion studies and/or transcranial magnetic stimulation) and nonhuman animal studies that test the putative role of specific brain structures, circuits, or processes. In addition, quantitative meta-analyses are important to move beyond idiosyncrasies of individual studies, and neurodevelopmental investigations can contribute to our understanding of brain–behavior associations.

Revolution or the new phrenology—the advent of functional neuroimaging has led some psychologists to address issues of structure-function relations that only two decades ago would have been relegated to science fiction. Others, however, are skeptical of recent bridges between psychological and biological science and consider these advances as misguided and leading us astray. With any new advancement comes problems and pitfalls, and constructive criticisms help to sharpen the research program. Here I offer commentary on the state of the art and identify both advances and concerns in bridging psychological and biological science.