Know Thyself

How well do you know yourself? It’s a question many of us struggle with, as we try to figure out how close we are to who we actually want to be. In a new report, Timothy D. Wilson describes theories behind self-knowledge (that is, how people form beliefs about themselves), cites challenges psychologists encounter while studying it, and offers ways we can get to know ourselves a little better.

The study of self-knowledge has tended to focus on how accurate we are at determining our own internal states, such as our emotions, personality, and attitudes. However, Wilson notes that self-knowledge can be broadened to include memory, like recalling how we felt in the past, and prospection, predicting how we will feel in the future. Knowing who we were and who we will be are as important to self-knowledge as knowing who we are in the present. Wilson suggests some ways that can help us learn more about ourselves, such as really attempting to be objective when considering our behaviors and trying to see ourselves through the eyes of other people. In addition, another way of knowing ourselves better is to become more aware of findings from psychological science.

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How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

Thanks to 50 years of research on judgment and decision-making, psychologists are gaining a detailed understanding of what influences our judgment. Despite that, however, many of us still make unwise choices from time to time, such as making the wrong investment or eating that donut while on a diet. Bad decisions can have serious consequences. Is there a way we can improve our decision making abilities? In a new report, Katherine Milkman, Dolly Chugh, and Max Bazerman provide a review of current strategies that may help improve decision making and discuss future directions for this important research (for example, more emphasis on identifying improvement strategies).

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Can We Improve Our Physical Health by Altering Our Social Networks?

We have known for more than 30 years about the positive health benefits associated with having lots of social relationships. Study after study have suggested that being a part of a diverse social network (filled with lots of friends and including membership in a variety of social groups) may result in less dementia, greater resistance to infectious disease, and a longer life. However, the exact nature of this link remains uncertain. Understanding this connection has many important implications for public health, including lowering health care costs and promoting healthier and happier lives of citizens. In a new report, Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts suggest that psychologists (with their unique skills and training) are in the best position to uncover the answer.

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How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False

We remember events, people, and places all the time, but how accurate are those memories? More specifically, how can we identify true memories from false ones? A majority of studies trying to answer this question have tended to focus on one of several possible methods of analysis, concentrating on either groups of memories being reported (e.g., studying word lists and then remembering related words that were not included in the original lists) or the person who is reporting the memories (for example, using a battery of self-report questionnaires and behavioral assessments to predict who may be susceptible to forming false memories). In a new report, Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus suggest that a combined approach — focusing on groups of memories, on the person who is remembering, and on the individual memory — along with taking advantage of a variety of research tools available (such as imaging devices, mathematical models, analysis techniques, and statistical methods) may be the best way to determine if a memory is truth or fiction.

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Psychoneuroimmunology: Psychology’s Gateway to the Biomedical Future

Stress and negative emotions are bad for the mind but they can also wreak havoc on the body. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser reviews findings in the field of psychoneuroimmunology (the study of how stress and negative emotions, such as depression and anxiety, affect our health), and specifically, how stress can damage our immune system. For example, Kiecolt-Glaser notes, vaccines are less effective in stressed individuals and stress and depression increase risk for infection. She argues that our environment, such as our diet and exposure to environmental toxins, should also be taken into account when studying the link between stress and health. Kiecolt-Glaser concludes that to most effectively investigate and understand how stress can compromise the immune system, cross-discipline training needs to be emphasized for students. Psychology students who gain a strong foundation in areas such as biology and physiology will be able to enter into powerful collaborations with scientists conducting immunology research — and the questions answered by these collaborations will advance not just psychoneuroimmunology and psychology, but health in general.

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How Can Evolutionary Psychology Successfully Explain Personality and Individual Differences?

People are different — some are nice, others aggressive; some are conservative, others are liberal. Evolutionary psychology has told us a lot about why members of a particular species or gender will behave in certain ways, but can this field provide any insight into why individuals vary in the things they do? In a new report, David Buss examines why individual differences and personality, although having been neglected by researchers in the past, are evolutionarily important and worth a closer look. Life-history theory (dealing with problems by making certain tradeoffs) may be one way to use an evolutionary framework to understand individual differences. Mating strategies are an example of this theory — males who are sexually attractive to females tend to seek out lots of short-term partners while those with bleaker prospects will focus on attracting a single mate and being good fathers. Buss highlights other promising theoretical approaches which may help to tackle this important, and incredibly relevant, question of why we are all so unique.

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The “Humpty Dumpty Problem” in the Study of Early Cognitive Development

The field of infant cognition has made huge progress — we now know a great deal about how young children perceive, attend to, and remember objects. However, until now, these abilities have been studied in isolation. Although this has made for well-controlled experiments, in the real world, these processes occur in concert. The current report by Lisa M. Oakes tackles this “Humpty Dumpty Problem”: Now that we have separately studied cognitive abilities, how we do put the developing cognitive system back together again? Oakes reviews studies investigating multiple cognitive abilities and offers strategies for examining the development of the cognitive system as a whole.

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The Nature (and Nurture?) of Plasticity in Early Human Development

Recent evidence suggests that genetics helps determine how the environment shapes brain development. Specifically, children with certain genotypes may be more susceptible to both positive and negative environments. However, as Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess observe in a new article, research has tended to disproportionately focus on negative experiences that result in developmental problems, which may obscure our understanding of brain development. Belsky and Pluess note that investigating positive experiences (such as the effect of being raised in a supportive environment) will also tell us a lot about how the brain develops over time.

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Naïve and Obvious Questions

Psychology has some of the most tantalizing (and daunting) questions to answer (e.g., “why do people do what they do?”). Surprisingly, many researchers shy away from answering these big-picture questions, focusing instead on specific aspects of certain behaviors with an emphasis on theory testing. In his new report, David C. Funder calls for more descriptive research in psychology — research that measures the elements of real-life situations and correlates them with the resulting real-life behaviors. Funder predicts that employing this new research strategy, and shaping theory to data and not the other way around, will allow more interesting and relevant theories to emerge — theories based on observations of compelling behaviors that occur in interesting and important situations. In this way, psychologists may be able to answer the biggest and most fascinating questions in the field.

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What Kind of Empirical Research Should We Publish, Fund, and Reward? A Different Perspective

Academic psychology has long emphasized the hypothesis-experiment model of research. While this approach has been critical to broadening our understanding of human nature, this essay by Paul Rozin asserts that results garnered from hypothesis-testing experiments should not be the only kind of data we publish and fund. There should be more focus on examining and describing basic phenomena, a method that has led to important advances in other natural sciences. For example, detailed, empirical descriptions, and not experiment and hypothesis testing, led to Darwin’s theory of evolution and Watson and Crick’s theory of the structure of DNA. Paul Rozin argues that there should be more distinction between studies investigating a new concept (which may not be ready for complex tests) and studies on highly developed problems that should employ advanced methodologies.

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