New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Cumulative Disadvantage: A Psychological Framework for Understanding How Innocence Can Lead to Confession, Wrongful Conviction, and Beyond
Kyle C. Scherr, Allison D. Redlich, and Saul M. Kassin

How can innocent people end up falsely confessing to a crime? Scherr and colleagues propose that innocent suspects’ naiveté and vulnerability, along with interrogators’ presumptions of guilt, can increase the likelihood of waiving interrogation rights. This increases the likelihood of falsely confessing, which leads to corrupt evidence gathering and biased forensic analysis, which increases the likelihood of wrongful conviction and future denials of appeals and reintegration support. The authors recommend research directions that could lead to reforms addressing these accumulated disadvantages and minimizing wrongful convictions.

A Farewell to Art: Aesthetics as a Topic in Psychology and Neuroscience
Martin Skov and Marcos Nadal

Divorcing scientific aesthetics from the assumptions associated with art might be the only way to precisely define aesthetics and make it a central topic in psychology and neuroscience, according to Skov and Nadal. For them, separating art and aesthetics enables the study of aesthetics to be defined as the study of how and why a specific sensory stimulus causes pleasure. Thus, aesthetics can link hedonics—the study of what hedonic valuation is—and neuroeconomics—the study of how hedonic values shape decisions and behaviors.

Incorporating Social-Marketing Insights Into Prejudice Research: Advancing Theory and Demonstrating Real-World Applications
Mitchell R. Campbell and Markus Brauer

Using principles from social marketing in prejudice research might help to minimize the existing gap between what we know about prejudice and the real-world methods to reduce it, which often fail. Social marketing is mainly concerned with changing behaviors; rather than identifying general principles in human behavior, it is problem-based and addresses specific behaviors in specific contexts. Campbell and Brauer advocate for the combined use of theory-based and problem-based principles to provide additional tools to help practitioners reduce prejudice and advance theory.

Toward an Integrative Psychometric Model of Emotions
Jens Lange, Jonas Dalege, Denny Borsboom, Gerben A. van Kleef, and Agneta H. Fischer

The nature of emotions remains open to debate, but a psychometric model that integrates different theories about emotions may help to clarify emotion properties. Therefore, Lange and colleagues call for an integrative psychometric model of emotions that identifies distinct emotions, their personal and group variations, and the causal relationships between emotion components. They explain that a model that conceptualizes emotions as systems of emotion components that interact and establish causal relationships (i.e., a psychometric network model) would possess all of the abovementioned characteristics and could thus facilitate progress toward a unifying theory of emotion.