The 10 most-cited articles in Annual Review of Psychology, 2020

The cumulative science linking stress to negative health outcomes is vast. Stress can affect health directly, through autonomic and neuroendocrine responses, but also indirectly, through changes in health behaviors. In this review, we present a brief overview of ( a) why we should be interested in stress in the context of health; ( b) the stress response and allostatic load; ( c) some of the key biological mechanisms through which stress impacts health, such as by influencing hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulation and cortisol dynamics, the autonomic nervous system, and gene expression; and ( d) evidence of the clinical relevance of stress, exemplified through the risk of infectious diseases. The studies reviewed in this article confirm that stress has an impact on multiple biological systems. Future work ought to consider further the importance of early-life adversity and continue to explore how different biological systems interact in the context of stress and health processes.

Family members are the primary source of support for older adults with chronic illness and disability. Thousands of published empirical studies and dozens of reviews have documented the psychological and physical health effects of caregiving, identified caregivers at risk for adverse outcomes, and evaluated a wide range of intervention strategies to support caregivers. Caregiving as chronic stress exposure is the conceptual driver for much of this research. We review and synthesize the literature on the impact of caregiving and intervention strategies for supporting caregivers. The impact of caregiving is highly variable, driven largely by the intensity of care provided and the suffering of the care recipient. The intervention literature is littered with many failures and some successes. Successful interventions address both the pragmatics of care and the emotional toll of caregiving. We conclude with both research and policy recommendations that address a national agenda for caregiving.

The past decade has seen rapid growth in research that evaluates methods for reducing prejudice. This essay reviews 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts from 2007 to 2019 to assess which approaches work best and why. Our quantitative assessment uses meta-analysis to estimate average effects. Our qualitative assessment calls attention to landmark studies that are noteworthy for sustained interventions, imaginative measurement, and transparency. However, 76% of all studies evaluate light touch interventions, the long-term impact of which remains unclear. The modal intervention uses mentalizing as a salve for prejudice. Although these studies report optimistic conclusions, we identify troubling indications of publication bias that may exaggerate effects. Furthermore, landmark studies often find limited effects, which suggests the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies with other kinds of psychological or structural interventions. We conclude that much research effort is theoretically and empirically ill-suited to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations…

Self-regulation is a core aspect of human functioning that helps facilitate the successful pursuit of personal goals. There has been a proliferation of theories and models describing different aspects of self-regulation both within and outside of psychology. All of these models provide insights about self-regulation, but sometimes they talk past each other, make only shallow contributions, or make contributions that are underappreciated by scholars working in adjacent areas. The purpose of this article is to integrate across the many different models in order to refine the vast literature on self-regulation. To achieve this objective, we first review some of the more prominent models of self-regulation coming from social psychology, personality psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. We then integrate across these models based on four key elements-level of analysis, conflict, emotion, and cognitive functioning-specifically identifying points of convergence but also points of insufficient emphasis. We close with prescriptions for future research.

Meaning in life has long been a mystery of human existence. In this review, we seek to demystify this construct. Focusing on the subjective experience of meaning in life, we review how it has been measured and briefly describe its correlates. Then we review evidence that meaning in life, for all its mystery, is a rather commonplace experience. We then define the construct and review its constituent facets: comprehension/coherence, purpose, and existential mattering/significance. We review the many experiences that have been shown to enhance meaning in life and close by considering important remaining research questions about this fascinating topic.

This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.

Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that considers how genetic and cultural evolution, and their interaction, may have shaped both the reliably developing features of our minds and the well-documented differences in cultural psychologies around the globe. We review the major evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed to explain human cooperation, including kinship, reciprocity, reputation, signaling, and punishment; we discuss key culture-gene coevolutionary hypotheses, such as those surrounding self-domestication and norm psychology; and we consider the role of religions and marriage systems. Empirically, we synthesize experimental and observational evidence from studies of…

Addiction is commonly identified with habitual nonmedical self-administration of drugs. It is usually defined by characteristics of intoxication or by characteristics of withdrawal symptoms. Such addictions can also be defined in terms of the brain mechanisms they activate; most addictive drugs cause elevations in extracellular levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Animals unable to synthesize or use dopamine lack the conditioned reflexes discussed by Pavlov or the appetitive behavior discussed by Craig; they have only unconditioned consummatory reflexes. Burst discharges (phasic firing) of dopamine-containing neurons are necessary to establish long-term memories associating predictive stimuli with rewards and punishers. Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards.

Events make up much of our lived experience, and the perceptual mechanisms that represent events in experience have pervasive effects on action control, language use, and remembering. Event representations in both perception and memory have rich internal structure and connections one to another, and both are heavily informed by knowledge accumulated from previous experiences. Event perception and memory have been identified with specific computational and neural mechanisms, which show protracted development in childhood and are affected by language use, expertise, and brain disorders and injuries. Current theoretical approaches focus on the mechanisms by which events are segmented from ongoing experience, and emphasize the common coding of events for perception, action, and memory. Abetted by developments in eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computer science, research on event perception and memory is moving from small-scale laboratory analogs to the complexity of events in the wild.

This chapter reviews research on the group identity explanation of social influence, grounded in self-categorization theory, and contrasts it with other group-based explanations, including normative influence, interdependence, and social network approaches, as well as approaches to persuasion and influence that background group (identity) processes. Although the review primarily discusses recent research, its focus also invites reappraisal of some classic research in order to address basic questions about the scope and power of the group identity explanation. The self-categorization explanation of influence grounded in group norms, moderated by group identification, is compared and contrasted to other normative explanations of influence, notably the concept of injunctive norms and the relation to moral conviction. A range of moderating factors relating to individual variation, features of the intragroup and intergroup context, and important contextual variables (i.e., anonymity versus visibility, isolation versus copresence) that are particularly relevant to online influence in the…