New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science

Leveraging the Strengths of Psychologists With Lived Experience of Psychopathology
Sarah E. Victor et al.

Recent research has suggested that a significant proportion of clinical, counseling, and school psychology faculty and graduate students experienced and/or experiences psychopathology. This commentary complements these findings by leveraging the perspectives of the authors, who have personal lived experience of psychopathology, to improve professional inclusivity in these fields. By “coming out proud,” the authors aim to foster discussion, research, and inclusion efforts. To that end, they describe considerations related to disclosure of lived experience, identify barriers to inclusion, and provide concrete recommendations for personal and systemic changes to improve recognition and acceptance of psychopathology lived experience among psychologists.

Advancing the Study of Resilience to Daily Stressors
Anthony D. Ong and Kate A. Leger

Ong and Leger suggest that, besides trauma and extreme adversity, stressors experienced in daily life may also forecast individual health and well-being. They argue that daily process approaches that incorporate intensive sampling of individuals in natural settings can provide insights into adaptational processes to daily stressors. The authors review studies that link intraindividual dynamics with diverse health-related phenomena and support a multiple-levels-analysis perspective that embraces greater unity in resilience constructs across the life span. Ong and Leger propose that more research in this area will deepen understanding of the mechanisms by which individuals’ inherent capacity for change might promote health.

Why Warmth Matters More Than Competence: A New Evolutionary Approach
Adar B. Eisenbruch and Max M. Krasnow

Past research has suggested that there are two major dimensions of social perception, often called warmth and competence, and that warmth is usually prioritized over competence in social decision-making. Eisenbruch and Krasnow suggest that humans’ evolutionary history of cooperative partner choice might explain the prioritization of warmth. They argue that ancestral humans faced greater variance in the warmth of potential cooperative partners than in their competence but greater variance in competence over time within cooperative relationships. These differences in the distributions of these traits made warmth more predictive than competence of the future benefits of a relationship.

Bias, Fairness, and Validity in Graduate-School Admissions: A Psychometric Perspective
Sang Eun Woo, James M. LeBreton, Melissa G. Keith, and Louis Tay

Seeking to enhance equity and diversity in higher education, many schools are considering the removal of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE; a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada and that has been linked to disparities between groups) from their admission processes. Controversies have followed. Using a psychometric perspective, Woo and colleagues argue for a critical need to clarify the measurement of “bias” and “fairness.” They review evidence on the validity, bias, and fairness issues associated with six measurements used to inform graduate-school admissions decisions, including GRE, grade point average, personal statements, resumes/curriculum vitae, letters of recommendation, and interviews.

Epistemic Oppression, Construct Validity, and Scientific Rigor: Commentary on Woo et al. (2022)
Jennifer M. Gómez

Gómez highlights what she considers flaws in the article by Woo and colleagues that undermine its credibility and utility as rigorous science contributing to the field. She discusses epistemic oppression (systemic exclusion of certain types of scholarship) and the importance of including construct validity within a psychometric article. She also highlights that the article contains interpretations that are contrary to relevant scholarship and reinstates arguments that have been made previously. Gómez concludes with a plea to the authors to respectfully consider the matter of anti-Black violence, which they reference.

Improving Graduate-School Admissions by Expanding Rather Than Eliminating Predictors
Christopher D. Nye and Ann Marie Ryan

Nye and Ryan expand on Woo et al.’s review and suggest ways of supplementing the GRE to both increase the predictive validity of admissions decisions and improve the diversity of graduate programs. To inform admissions decisions, they suggest assessing both conscientiousness and vocational interests and combining the scores from these predictors with the GRE. To improve the diversity of the applicant pool, they propose several ways of expanding recruitment efforts to attract qualified underrepresented minority applicants.

Constructs, Tape Measures, and Mercury
C. Malik Boykin

Boykin challenges and offers alternatives to how we define the underlying construct measured by the GRE. As an analogy, Boykin discusses how genomic models predicting height are trained on data from European ancestral populations and systematically underpredict the height of West Africans. The author examines the implications for the GRE’s validity and usability and scrutinizes an analogy Woo and colleagues used to assert that blaming the GRE for disparities in scores across groups is akin to blaming the thermometer for global warming. Boykin describes racism as context for thinking about the limitations of this misguided analogy.

What Was Not Said and What to Do About It
Nathan R. Kuncel and Frank C. Worrell

Kuncel and Worrell go beyond Woo and colleagues’ article and suggest that the inability to provide opportunities and develop talent across all groups is a fundamental problem in education. They would like to dismiss test and grade differences but believe the greatest change will come by investing in expanded gifted-and-talented programs, increasing the flow of underrepresented students into these programs, improving the assessment of psychosocial skills and talents at all levels, and offering career counseling and mentoring early and continuing them through higher education.