I checked 15 psychology journals on Wednesday, March 25, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period March 18 to March 24, I found 43 new paper(s) in 14 journal(s).

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

Google-Search Data for Psychological Scientists: A Tutorial and Best Practices
Jordan W. Moon, Michael Barlev
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Google searches have been described as the most important data set on the human psyche ever assembled. Google-search data—accessible through a tool called Google Trends—can provide new insights on topics as varied as stereotypes and prejudices, political attitudes, religious identity and belief, personality, motivations, psychological well-being, mental health, and culture. Google Trends can generate highly customized data sets: Users can compare the popularity of search terms across most of the world or access longitudinal data as far back as 2004, and they can do so with high geographical and temporal granularity. Notwithstanding these opportunities, Google Trends has significant limitations. Without appropriate caution, users can easily rely on data that are not meaningful or draw mistaken conclusions. We provide a comprehensive overview and tutorial covering (a) opportunities of Google Trends for psychological scientists; (b) how Google Trends scores are calculated, how reliable they are, and why some queries might yield low-quality data; (c) instructions with accompanying R code for creating custom data sets beyond what Google Trends provides by default; (d) example analyses for studies that could be done using Google Trends data; (e) an overview of common pitfalls; and (f) recommendations for safeguarding data quality and their interpretation.
SCORES: A Clustering Tool for Free-Text Responses
Luis Klocke, Thekla Morgenroth, Yanzhe Zeng, Benjamin Paaßen
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Free-text responses are a crucial part of psychological research, enabling participants to respond without bias toward a predefined set of answers. Unfortunately, many established methods for analyzing such responses require extensive manual coding, which is time- and resource-intensive. To address this issue, automatic-processing methods based on word embeddings and clustering techniques have been proposed. In this article, we introduce SCORES (Semantic Clustering of Open Responses via Embedding Similarity), a user-friendly, graphical tool that makes such automatic methods easy to use and understand for psychological researchers.

Behavior Research Methods

Blink parameters are confounded by vertical eye orientation in video-based eye tracking: Comparing pupil- and eyelid-based methods
Wolf Culemann, Ignace T. C. Hooge, Diederick C. Niehorster, Angela Heine, Marcus Nyström
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Blink characteristics such as duration, amplitude, and eyelid velocity are widely used indicators of cognitive and physiological states. While early magnetic search coil studies suggested that vertical eye orientation relative to the head influences blink measurements, subsequent research has largely ignored this factor. No studies have investigated whether vertical eye orientation effects replicate in modern video-based methods or whether different video-based blink-detection approaches show similar sensitivities to changes in vertical eye orientation. In this study, we investigated how vertical eye orientation affects blink parameters estimated using both pupil-based and eyelid-based detection. We recorded pupil diameter and estimated eye openness from video data as seventeen participants performed voluntary blinks from three vertical eye orientations while keeping their heads stationary. Vertical eye orientation systematically influenced all measured blink parameters. Eye openness at blink onset and closing amplitude decreased with downward eye orientation. With more downward eye orientation, closing velocity increased, whereas opening velocity decreased. Crucially, pupil-based measurements of blink duration showed much larger vertical eye orientation effects than measurements of eye openness (32% vs. 8% increase of blink duration from upward to downward eye orientation), though eyelid-based estimates are sensitive to how blink onset and offset are derived. These results show that the vertical eye orientation is a systematic confounding factor in video-based blink measurement, with the measurement method influencing the magnitude of observed effects. The findings have important implications for studies investigating blink characteristics where vertical eye orientation varies, and we conclude with practical recommendations for study design and reporting.
Walking towards the future: Exploring OpenTUG’s validity in automatic walking activity analyses and the relationship to cognition in vestibular patients
Emilie Lacroix, Marius Grandjean, Margaux Huyberechts, Lucie Steenbergen, Seyed Abolfazl Ghasemzadeh, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, NaĂŻma Deggouj, Martin Gareth Edwards
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Correction: Collection of body–object interaction ratings for 5,637 Japanese words
Masaya Mochizuki, Naoto Ota
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Computers in Human Behavior

When tech makes the team: Mind perception as a unifying framework for human and human-agent teams
Alexandra M. Harris-Watson, Lindsay E. Larson
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Formation and Resolution of the Knowledge Sharing Dilemma Under Competitive Pressure: An Evolutionary Game Approach Based on Complex Networks
Maishuang Sun, Huayi Wang
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Self-regulation and overreliance on artificial intelligence: Unpacking a paradox through a mixed-methods study in higher education
HĂ©ctor Galindo-DomĂ­nguez, Nahia Delgado, MartĂ­n Sainz-de-la-Maza, Jose-MarĂ­a Etxabe
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Beyond symptoms: Latent profiles of student burnout and their social-cognitive associations in online learning
Yaxin Tu, Changqin Huang, Chengling Gao, Yun-Fang Tu, Yafeng Pan, Gwo-Jen Hwang
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Polite or playful? How service robot type and apology style influence negative word-of-mouth after service failures
Minjung Cho, Joonheui Bae, Erin Cho, Sung Hung Kevin Bae
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Strategic counter-misinformation engagement on social media: An empirical investigation of corporate response tactics and consumer attitude reconstruction
Xi Han, Xiangxiang Zhou, Tianqi Luo, Yuan Chen, Wenting Han
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Disclosures and Literacy as Determinants of AI-Influencer Recognition and Well-Being
Michaela Forrai, Delia Cristina Balaban, Desirée Schmuck
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Physiological Synchrony in Elite Esports Matches Driven by Competitive Motivation
Ken Watanabe, Sorato Minami, Naoki Saijo, Makio Kashino
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Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

Social pain minimization mediates weight discrimination’s effects on interpersonal well-being in the workplace
Brielle N. Johnson, Gargi Sawhney, Jonathan W. Kunstman
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Workplace weight discrimination is pervasive and negatively impacts employees and organizations. Yet, little is known about the psychological processes linking weight discrimination and work outcomes. The current research addresses this gap in the research literature by testing emotion invalidation as a mediator of weight stigma’s negative effects on employees. Dehumanizing aspects of weight stigma include the denial of complex emotions, higher-order mental faculties, and professional potential, which were theorized to leave heavy employees feeling invalidated, an experience termed social pain minimization (SPM). Three studies ( N total = 1,097) with cross-sectional, experimental, and multi-wave designs provide convergent support that workplace weight discrimination triggered actual and expected SPM, which in turn negatively impacted perceived organizational support (POS), workplace belonging, and workplace ostracism. These results offer insights into psychosocial processes linking workplace weight discrimination and key indicators of worker well-being. In conjunction with efforts to eliminate workplace weight stigma, organizations need to foster a supportive and emotionally validating climate.
The importance of antiprejudice in protesting and collective action for disadvantaged groups’ rights
Danielle R. Krusemark, Jennifer LaCosse, E. Ashby Plant
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In the past decade, collective action advocating for a disadvantaged group’s rights has increased exponentially. However, only a fraction of supporters of a disadvantaged group’s rights takes collective action. What drives some to take collective action for a disadvantaged group’s rights while others do not? We argue that antiprejudice, the belief that one should proactively fight discrimination and injustice faced by a group, is a critical component of promoting collective action for that group and differentiating between those who are engaged and those who are not. Across field and online studies, we examined antiprejudice’s role in driving protesting and intentions to take collective action for a disadvantaged group’s rights among causes associated with liberals (e.g., racial equality) and conservatives (e.g., pro-life rights). Antiprejudice repeatedly emerged as a key construct for differentiating between protestors and non-protestors and for predicting collective action intentions.
Presidential candidate endorsements by scientific journals decrease trust in science especially for moderate and conservative Americans
Stylianos Syropoulos, Kyle Fiore Law, Crystal Li, Bernhard Leidner, Kevin L. Young
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Before the 2020 and 2024 US Presidential elections, several scientific journals publicly endorsed the Democratic candidates or opposed the Republican candidate. We conducted three highly-powered, pre-registered online experiments ( N = 6,281) to examine how these endorsements affected trust in science. Results revealed significant declines in trust in science, driven primarily by moderate and conservative Americans. Drawing upon on the theoretical perspective that trust in science is not monolithic, but rather composed of distinct dimensions, we examined and observed effects across a range of trust-related domains, including perceptions of scientific integrity (impartiality), competence (ability), benevolence, and generalized trust in scientific institutions. These findings highlight how motivated reasoning can amplify existing skepticism when individuals who already perceive science as aligned with opposing political ideologies read political endorsements from within the scientific community. Amidst increasing science-skepticism and politicization, journals must consider the unintended consequences of political messaging on public perceptions of science.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Generic title: Not a research article
Corrigendum to “A trust inoculation to protect public support of governmentally mandated actions to mitigate climate change” [Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 115 (2024) 104656]
Tobia Spampatti, Tobias Brosch, Evelina Trutnevyte, Ulf J.J. Hahnel
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Gossip or confrontation? Sanctioning environmental norm violations and the reputation of punishers
Xiyan Song, Catherine Molho, Paul A.M. Van Lange
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Registered report stage I: Defending or defying democracy? Investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and support for democratic principles [registered report - stage I]
Tisa Bertlich, Felicitas Flade, Roland Imhoff
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Managing threatened identities across everyday situations
N. Derek Brown, Drew S. Jacoby-Senghor, Allyson P. Mackey, Michael L. Slepian
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Just a means to an end? Individuals support direct democracy instrumentally, irrespective of conspiracy mentality
Tisa Bertlich, Fiona Kazarovytska, Roland Imhoff
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Not all stimuli are conditioned equal – Larger evaluative conditioning effects for fluent stimuli
Claudine Pulm, Anne Gast
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Using intersectional implicit association measures does not consistently improve the predictive validity of the implicit association test
Jeffrey To, Jordan Axt
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Approach-avoidance action tendencies: A replicable approach/avoidance compatibility effect can be found when valence is task irrelevant
Yoann Julliard, Cédric Batailler, François Ric, Marine Rougier, Maude Tagand, Mae Braud, Dominique Muller
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The unexpected importance of expectations in self-conscious emotions.
Jessica L. Tracy, Gabrielle C. Ibasco
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Individual differences in risk preference: Selection and socialization effects.
Yunrui Liu, David Richter, Rui Mata
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Multivariate Behavioral Research

Evaluating the Performance of R-Squared Measures in Multilevel Models
Diego Iglesias, Miguel A. Sorrel, Ricardo Olmos
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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Narratives About Deported Migrants Who Served in the U.S. Military Reduce Animosity Toward Migrants in the United States
Samantha L. Moore-Berg, Opeyemi S. Adeojo, Roman A. Gallardo, Nour Kteily, Boaz Hameiri
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Animosity toward immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, has reached high levels in many parts of the United States. What can be done to counteract anti-immigrant hostility? One solution is to implement media interventions, which are uniquely positioned to reduce animosity. We thus conducted two studies to assess the efficacy of three media interventions to reduce anti-immigrant attitudes. In Study 1 ( N = 2,050), we conducted an intervention tournament and found that one video was particularly effective at reducing anti-immigrant hostility and support for anti-immigrant policies, especially among Republicans. This video shared the story of undocumented immigrants who served in the U.S. military but were subsequently deported due to their legal status. In Study 2 ( N = 3,000), we replicated these findings among nationally representative partisan voters. These results suggest that a simple media intervention has the power to improve attitudes toward undocumented immigrants across the political spectrum.

Psychological Bulletin

Misogynous messages in the media increase hostility to women: Evidence from a meta-analysis of 257 experimental and nonexperimental studies.
Christa Nater, Lilly Felber, Ronja LĂŒke, Alice H. Eagly, Tobias Greitemeyer, David I. Miller, Angela R. Dorrough
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Psychological Methods

Drawing credible directed acyclic graphs for causal inference.
Nathan J. Quimpo, Peter M. Steiner
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Psychological Science

Commentary: On the Equal-Opportunity Jerk “Defense”: Rudeness Complicates Sexism Attributions but Comes at a Cost
Shiyao Bao, Anna Bajet, RocĂ­o MartĂ­nez, Johannes MĂŒller-Trede, Isabelle Engeler, Sebastian HafenbrĂ€dl
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Sexism is a pervasive and persistent problem. In their 2022 article “The ‘Equal-Opportunity Jerk’ Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias” ( Psychological Science , Vol. 33, pp. 397–411), Belmi et al. argued that sexism can be obfuscated and go unpunished if perpetrators also act rudely toward men: the “equal-opportunity jerk defense.” We introduce a simple Bayesian model that accounts for Belmi et al.’s findings and corroborated their predictions and implications in five preregistered experiments ( N = 6,968 U.S. adults recruited via Prolific). We replicated that being rude toward men decreased perceived sexism but importantly found that it came at the cost of increased punishment (Study 1). Moreover, rudeness primarily decreased actors’ perceived sexism, whereas their actions were still perceived as sexist (Study 2). Sexism ratings were sensitive to prior beliefs about the prevalence of sexism and to the diagnosticity of observed sexist behavior (Supplementary Studies S1-S2), in line with a broader Bayesian perspective. Bias in sexism ratings thus need not implicate fallacious cognitive processes or an “illusion of gender blindness.”
How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa?
Dunigan Folk, Elizabeth Dunn
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Advances in AI have enabled chatbots to provide warm, personalized support. Yet little is known about the long-term consequences of AI companionship. Across a 12-month longitudinal study with more than 2,000 adults from four Western countries, we examined the bidirectional relationships between social chatbot use and loneliness.We found evidence that increased social chatbot use predicted increased loneliness, using a single-item measure of emotional isolation. When we used a broader and more stable measure of social connection, we found evidence that feeling less socially connected predicted subsequent increases in social chatbot use; however, chatbot use did not significantly predict decreases in social connection. Taken together, these findings provide initial evidence that being lonely may spur people to seek companionship through chatbots but that such use may, over time, exacerbate feelings of loneliness. We urge caution, however, in drawing strong conclusions given the exploratory nature of our analyses.
The Relation Between Attributions of Mental Capacities and Moral Standing Across Six Diverse Cultures
Bastian Jaeger, Maarten Bosten
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Whose welfare and interests matter from a moral perspective? This question is at the center of many polarizing debates, for example, on the ethicality of abortion or meat consumption. A widely cited hypothesis holds that attributions of moral standing are guided by which mental capacities an entity is perceived to have. Specifically, perceived sentience (the capacity to feel pleasure and pain) is thought to be the primary determinant, rather than perceived agency (the capacity to navigate the world and social relationships) or other abilities. This has been described as a general feature of moral cognition, but the evidence for this is mixed and overwhelmingly based on Western participants. Here, we examined the link between attributions of mind and moral standing across six culturally diverse countries—Brazil, Nigeria, Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, and the Philippines—using a sample of 1,255 participants (aged 18–74 years old) who were recruited via the online platform Toloka. In every country, entities’ moral standing was most strongly related to their perceived sentience.
From Capture to Control: Initial Capture Increases Learned Suppression
Yue Zhang, Nicholas Gaspelin
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Salient stimuli have the potential to distract us from our immediate goals. Much research has therefore aimed to understand how we learn to use attention to resist distraction by salient stimuli. We propose a new hypothesis whereby an initial instance of distraction can improve future suppression of salient stimuli. Across three experiments ( N = 120 college students, aged 18–35 years), we provide evidence for this hypothesis using a new eye-tracking approach. The results demonstrated that an initial instance of distraction occurred before salient distractors were suppressed. Notably, if this initial instance of distraction was eliminated or weakened via experimental manipulations, learned suppression of the distracting stimuli was greatly reduced. Together, these findings suggest that attentional capture can serve as a learning signal that improves future attentional control. They also indicate that learned suppression emerges rapidly, which has strong implications for models of attention and cognitive control.
Local Economic Inequality and Depression: Evidence From Longitudinal Data on Local Residential Contexts and Antidepressant Use
Kim Mannemar SÞnderskov, Tobias Heide-JÞrgensen, SÞren Dinesen Østergaard, Peter Thisted Dinesen
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We studied the consequences of economic inequality for depression among adults using individual-level longitudinal administrative data from Denmark ( n = 60,654,690 person time points). The data allow us to (a) measure depression without nonresponse (by proxy of redemption of prescriptions for antidepressants), (b) measure income inequality at a low level of aggregation to capture individuals’ everyday experiences, (c) conduct within-individual analyses from stable individual characteristics to address confounding, and (d) test whether inequality has similar consequences for people located differently in the local income distribution. In contrast to previous work, we found a modest negative average effect of economic inequality (a 1- SD increase in inequality is associated with a 1%–2% relative decrease in the probability of depression). However, this average masks substantial heterogeneity: The negative effect was confined to the locally relatively well-off, whereas those with the lowest relative income tended to become more depressed as inequality rose.

Psychology of Music

Gaze behavior, attention allocation, and automaticity in expert chamber music coaches
Robin S Heinsen, Robert A Duke
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Two artist-level chamber music coaches wore eye-tracking glasses while teaching a chamber rehearsal, then participated in two interviews to discuss their teaching – first, immediately after the rehearsal, then approximately 2 weeks later, while watching their lesson videos and eye-tracking recordings. Teachers’ eye movements revealed rich networks of rapid information tracking and goal-directed attention, but both teachers struggled to articulate details of their thinking or their attention allocation, suggesting that they conceive of their teaching behaviors in a broad construal, and the complex attentional behaviors detected in their gaze behavior occurred unconsciously. This is among the first studies to explore attentional mechanisms that underlie expert music teaching in context, specifically analyzing teachers’ momentary attention allocation among several students in relation to specific proximal performance goals. Results illustrate how teachers solved intricate problems, decided what to pursue, and kept track of multiple students in ways that are inaccessible via overt behavior observation. Comparing gaze behavior to interview data suggests that these teachers’ descriptions of their thinking may be incomplete representations of their pedagogical expertise.

Psychology of Popular Media

Interrelational dynamics in problematic video game use: A network analysis.
Chloé Nguyen, Valentin Flaudias, Quentin Hallez
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Once upon a swipe: The impact of storytelling on dating profile appeal.
Gurit E. Birnbaum, Kobi Zholtack
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Technology, Mind, and Behavior

Emotional and cognitive factors in the relationship between autistic traits and emotional attachment to AI chatbots.
Rossella Suriano, Alessio Plebe, Valentina Furfari, Rosa Angela Fabio
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The role of online disinhibition on social media users’ privacy concerns and behaviors.
Lisa M. Thompson Lee, Sinyong Choi
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From virtual sparks to reality: How virtual reality exposure influences skill learning intentions.
Daphne Xin Hou, Meaghan Tracy, Bradley D. Pitcher, Benjamin Blachly, Ahleah F. Miles, Tara S. Behrend
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God or the machine? Personal religiosity and negative attitudes to AI.
Cristian G. Rodriguez, Allon Vishkin, Yochanan E. Bigman
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Psychological interventions for mis/disinformation detection: A systematic–narrative review of their effectiveness for older adults.
Holly K. Barnett, Lara Warmelink, Sophie J. Nightingale, Faraz Ahmed, Trevor Crawford
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Psychology-in-the-loop.
Richard N. Landers
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