🗣 Communication Paper Picnic 🧺: Psychology

I checked 15 psychology journals on Friday, July 10, 2026 using the Crossref API. For the period July 03 to July 09, I found 44 new paper(s) in 11 journal(s).

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science

Methodological Refinement and Optimization in Service of Theory Specification and Development: A Commentary on Calderon et al. (2026)

Cheryl J. Wakslak, Kentaro Fujita

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Rethinking the Evaluation of Psychological Theories: A Commentary on Calderon et al.’s Registered Replication Report

Ihnwhi Heo, Minjeong Jeon

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Construal-level theory (CLT) is a well-established theory in social psychology that posits a relationship between psychological distance and mental abstraction such that greater distance is associated with more abstract representations. In a registered replication report, Calderon et al. presented findings that call into question the strength and generality of this relationship, including effects that were attenuated, null, or even opposite to those predicted by CLT across multiple domains of psychological distance. In this commentary, we engage with these findings at two complementary levels. We first reflect on design and measurement considerations that shape the evidentiary value of the current replication. We then situate the findings in discussions of theory evaluation amid ongoing discourse on the theory crisis in psychology. Rather than framing the results in terms of theoretical success or failure, we invite researchers to reconsider how psychological theories are evaluated, revised, and sustained as evidence accumulates. We outline how a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR)-informed approach, applied to CLT, may support more transparent and cumulative theory development.

The Effect of Psychological Distance on Level of Construal: What Can Be Learned From the Failed Replication by the Construal Level International Multilab Replication?

Nira Liberman, Ori Levit-Mor

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Calderon and her colleagues failed to replicate construal-level theory’s finding that psychologically more distant actions—actions that are planned for the more distant future, more distant places, and less likely situations and performed by more socially distant persons—are construed more abstractly. There is considerable evidence for the effect of psychological distance on construal level, including recent well-powered, preregistered studies. There is also a theory behind this effect: Higher-level constructs change less over distance. So why did the replication fail? What can be learned from it about (studying) distance and level of construal and more generally, about multilab replications? In this commentary, we suggest that in several respects, the replication project fell short of meeting established standards of psychological research. The results of the project are partly based on samples that included many inattentive participants; responders who were not native speakers of the language in which the study was presented; translations that did not preserve the original intent of the materials; manipulations of distance that were confusing, weak, or confounded with valence; and manipulation checks that did not check the actual manipulations. We also offer a reanalysis of some of Calderon and colleagues’ data and a new replication study, both of which show an effect of temporal distance on construal level. Finally, we suggest two ways in which the Registered Replication Report format may be improved.

CyberballOS: An Updated, Easily Implemented, Open-Source Virtual Ball-Toss Game to Study Social Interactions

James H. Wirth, Andrew H. Hales, Sydney G. Wicks, Bradley M. Okdie

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Researchers continually face challenges finding ways to test the fundamentals of psychology: affect, behavior, and cognition. Since 2000, researchers have used a universal tool called Cyberball to investigate these outcomes. Cyberball is a virtual ball-toss game played with computer-controlled players. We updated the Cyberball paradigm, creating CyberballOS (Open Source), to make it require no special resources, have easy-to-set-up games, and record behavioral data. In addition, we developed CyberballOS as open-source software, making its code transparent, accessible, and extendable, which enhances reproducibility of findings and enables limitless program modifications. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of CyberballOS and instructions on how to create a new game, how to load a previous game, and where to find detailed help. We illustrate the process, step by step, for configuring a game (e.g., characteristics of the players, who the computer-controlled players throw to) for both typical use cases (with ready-to-go presets) and newer, more advanced CyberballOS features (e.g., the participant and other players being able to leave). To implement CyberballOS easily, we incorporated a critical feature: the ability to integrate CyberballOS into the popular online survey platform, Qualtrics (including collecting gameplay data). To demonstrate CyberballOS’s utility and how to use its features, we highlight three example studies based on research from developmental, social, and cognitive psychology. Ultimately, the goal is for researchers to easily and dependably work with CyberballOS to meet their needs and better understand affect, behavior, and cognition across psychology disciplines.

Artificial-Intelligence-Mediated Contamination in Online Research: Taxonomy, Risk Gradient, and Recommendations

Zhicheng Lin

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For 2 decades, online research has relied on a quality heuristic: Careful, coherent responding is good data. That heuristic is no longer reliable. Autonomous artificial-intelligence (AI) agents can now pass nearly all conventional quality checks, and in text-rich crowd-work tasks, reported use of large language models approaches one third. When such consultation shapes the response process itself—not just its surface expression—the resulting data appear human-generated while embedding systematic, model-shaped distortions. I synthesize emerging evidence on how AI-mediated contamination varies across research settings in prevalence, mechanism, and inferential consequence; and distinguish three contamination pathways (full delegation, partial mediation, and spillover) and three vulnerability zones (text-rich tasks at highest risk, browser-based cognitive paradigms as an emerging vulnerability, and supervised or identity-vetted settings at lower risk). Even modest contamination can shift estimated public opinion, compress attitudinal extremes, and, over time, feed back into the training data for future models. Current platform countermeasures may raise the cost of contamination but have not been independently validated under adversarial conditions. I argue for a shift from ad hoc detection to infrastructure redesign: contamination-aware sensitivity analyses, explicit stratification of data collection by evidential role, transparency norms that balance open science with adversarial robustness, and a minimum reporting checklist for online studies in vulnerable settings. I close by asking when AI mediation should be treated not as contamination but as part of the ecological baseline of human responding—a question that requires the field to specify the target cognitive system in any given study.

Common Evidence, Multiple Interpretations: Commentaries on a Multilab Study on Musicians’ Short-Term Memory

Rafael Román-Caballero, Deniz Başkent, Anne Caclin, Laura Ferreri, Anna Fiveash, Clément François, Massimo Grassi, Eleanor E. Harding, César F. Lima, Katie Overy, Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, M. Paula Roncaglia, E. Glenn Schellenberg, L. Robert Slevc, Francesca Talamini, Barbara Tillmann, Laurel J. Trainor, Ana Zappa

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The multilab registered report by Grassi et al. represents the largest collaborative effort to date to estimate differences in short-term memory between musicians and nonmusicians, testing 1,200 participants across 33 units in 15 countries in an a priori registered design that adhered to open-science practices. Beyond providing precise effect-size estimates, the project exposed substantial diversity in how experts interpret the same data set, particularly regarding the causal status and practical significance of musicians’ cognitive advantages. Here, we present six independent commentaries, each authored by a subset of researchers of the original team, that articulate these contrasting perspectives. Lima and Schellenberg argue that cross-sectional advantages are best explained by preexisting differences rather than training. Román-Caballero et al. emphasize small but reliable far-transfer effects of musical training on domain-general cognition. Zappa et al. call for greater caution in policy claims about music as a cognitive intervention, and Roncaglia et al. situate musical training alongside other forms of expertise (e.g., chess, physical exercise, bilingualism) as one of several routes to cognitive enhancement. Slevc highlights how coordinated multilab projects can help generate specific and testable predictions in a field that often lacks them, and Grassi and Talamini reflect on the broader methodological value of multilab initiatives for building a more accountable and replicable cognitive science. Together, these commentaries showcase productive theoretical pluralism and outline key directions for future research on musical training, cognition, and large-scale collaborative methods.

Behavior Research Methods

Relations of social cognition with affective states: Insights from an expanded 2650-word database on warmth and competence

Dawid Żuk, Michał Chęciński, Adrianna Wielgopolan, Kamil K. Imbir

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We expanded an existing database of affectively charged words by adding ratings of warmth and competence. We also examined the relationships between these two dimensions and previously established ones – positivity, negativity, automaticity, reflectiveness, arousal, and subjective significance. In this study, 948 participants evaluated 2650 words on warmth and competence using a modified version of the Self-Assessment Manikin scale. This allowed us to obtain ratings of perceived warmth and competence for each word. We also identified the type, direction, and strength of the relationships between warmth and competence and each affective dimension. The results provide a detailed mapping of these associations, and the database may serve as a valuable resource for future research. The findings, possible usage of our database, and limitations are discussed.

Mitigating the slipping effect in polytomous scales: The Generalized Conditional Reliability Weighting (G-CRW) Algorithm and the WeightMyItems R package

Abdullah Faruk Kılıç

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Semantic properties and categorization norms for the 260 Snodgrass and Vanderwart objects: A 45-year conceptual update to a classic set

Caitlyn Antal, Roberto G. de Almeida

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We present a new set of English property norms for 260 object concepts based on the standardized Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) picture set. For each object, 100 participants provided a basic-level label ( dog ), a superordinate category ( animal ), and three features ( bark , tail , fur ), yielding a dataset of 78,000 features. Our norms differ from other datasets in four important ways: they (1) probe basic-level information, (2) separate taxonomic and feature information, (3) use open-ended responses for natural descriptions, and (4) include a larger number of responses per object (100 vs. ~ 30 participants in other norms). We analyzed feature statistics such as frequency, distinctiveness, and co-occurrence, and contrasted our norms with those of McRae et al. (2005), CSLB (Devereux et al., 2014), and Hovhannisyan et al. (2021). Compared to picture-based norms, our data—derived from black-and-white line drawings—elicited more diverse features and aligned more closely with language-based norms, particularly CSLB. We assessed the generalizability of our norms using an object-property congruency task, where 144 participants judged whether properties (basic level, superordinate, and features) were related to objects. Objects were shown in three picture formats with increasing ecological validity: (1) colored line drawings, (2) realistic photographs, and (3) realistic photographs of objects in scenes. We then contrasted these data with those of Antal & de Almeida (2024) employing the original line-drawing set. Agreement rates for object-property pairs remained high across picture formats and property types. Bayesian inference revealed minimal variability in congruency judgments across picture formats, with responses tightly clustered around zero. Results show that our norms are generalizable to realistic visual stimuli. Norms are available at https://osf.io/c6brw/overview .

Author Correction: TCBLex - A lexical database of Finnish literary texts for children

Tapio Nojonen, Kiia Korsu, Filip Ginter, Veronika Laippala, Jenna Kanerva

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The evaluation of devaluation: Deficient outcome devaluation leads to wrongly considering goal-directed actions as habits

Antonio Vázquez-Millán, Pablo Martínez-López, María Rueda, José J. León, David Luque

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Habits are stimulus-driven responses that are produced independently of the current outcome value. They enable efficient actions in familiar contexts while freeing up cognitive resources. Habits are expected to influence behavior after substantial experience, whereas limited training leaves behavior under goal-directed control. This transition from goal-directed to habitual control has been documented in animal research but remains challenging to replicate in humans. Using a free-operant task, recent studies have suggested that human habits can be fully learned even after short training. This would produce a ceiling effect, explaining null results when the amount of training is manipulated. Here, we propose an alternative explanation: the devaluation protocol was ineffective for a subset of participants who appeared “habitual”. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a preregistered conceptual replication of the free-operant task with improved devaluation. As in previous research, we found no difference in habitual responses between short and extended training. In contrast to prior reports, most participants were sensitive to outcome devaluation. Habitual responding was strongly correlated with the effectiveness of the outcome devaluation protocol; habit-like responses were mostly produced by the few participants for whom the devaluation did not work. We further supported our hypothesis by reanalyzing previous datasets, finding that, across all studies, participants who showed more habit-like responses were those for whom the devaluation was less effective. Taken together, our findings suggest that suboptimal outcome devaluation protocols may have biased previous results, leading to habit-like goal-directed responses regardless of the amount of previous instrumental training.

The Rhythm Reproduction Task for children: A psychometric examination

Katharina Schaaf, Klaus Frieler, Franziska Degé

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Rhythmic ability includes various subskills, such as rhythm production and perception of beat, meter, and pattern. Among these, reproducing rhythmic patterns is a key measure of productive rhythmic skills. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Rhythm Reproduction Task for children (Jungbluth & Hafen, 2005) and an extended version including permuted item variants. A total of 151 children aged 5 to 8 completed the task across five response modalities (drumming after the experimenter, clapping, tapping, drumming after a loudspeaker, and vocal reproduction). Analyses showed appropriate item difficulty and variance, good internal consistency ( α = .86, ω = .77), and strong correlations between original and permuted items ( r = .84–.89). Structural equation modeling indicated partial metric invariance across item versions and response modalities. Results support the Rhythm Reproduction Task as a reliable measure of rhythmic pattern reproduction in children, with permuted items expanding its applicability.

Joint partial credit and time model

Inhan Kang

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QualGames: A Qualtrics implementation and a database of behavioral game theory tasks

Shengchuang Feng, Nadhilla Melia, Akshay Abraham, Yuan Ni Chan, Li Ling Lee, Jia Ying Pei, Hui Shan Yap, David Hung, John Suckling, Chew Lee Teo, Trevor Robbins, Barbara Sahakian, Zoe Kourtzi, Victoria Leong, Annabel Chen, Henriette Hendriks, Georgios Christopoulos, character(0)

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Subjective norms of paintings: Integrating perceptual, cognitive, and emotional dimensions

Khaoula Ennahli, Cristiane Souza, Margarida Vaz Garrido

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Artworks, such as paintings, are frequently utilized as stimuli in research and interventions. However, the complexity of their perceptual, emotional, and cognitive properties necessitates rigorous validation to ensure the reliability of research outcomes and the efficacy of their application in real-world contexts. A few studies have already established norms for paintings. Still, the type of stimuli (e.g., artificial intelligence [AI]-generated) and the comprehensiveness of the assessed dimensions may not entirely capture the complexity of human-made ecological artworks. The current study establishes norms for a diverse set of 144 human-made paintings retrieved from the publicly accessible WikiArt database and thematically clustered into four categories: objects ( n = 36), places ( n = 36), people ( n = 36), and abstract ( n = 36) works. European Portuguese native speakers ( N = 361) rated the paintings in 11 perceptual, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. Participants also provided qualitative descriptions of the paintings, detailing their content and recognized elements. Descriptive data for each painting are provided by dimension and category. Correlations among the dimensions and between individual variables (e.g., personality traits, prior experience with the arts) and the evaluative ratings are also reported. The results indicate that this painting set is diverse, allowing for the selection of artworks that represent different levels of the evaluated dimensions across stimulus categories. These norms fill a critical gap in the standardized evaluation of paintings, facilitating a more precise and controlled use of these stimuli in experimental, clinical, and creative expression applications.

“It makes sense to me”: Examining data file column names in the visual cognitive literature

Giovanna C. Del Sordo, Haden Dewis, Peter T. Darch, Michael C. Hout, Hayward J. Godwin

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PyLossless: A non-destructive EEG processing pipeline

Scott Huberty, James Desjardins, Tyler Collins, Mayada Elsabbagh, Christian O’Reilly

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EEG recordings are typically long and contain large amounts of data, making manual cleaning a time-consuming and error-prone task. Automated preprocessing pipelines can facilitate the efficient and objective extraction of artifacts, enabling standardized and reproducible analyses. However, automated preprocessing pipelines typically remove data considered artifacts and return a subset of irreversibly transformed signals. This approach obfuscates preprocessing decisions and often makes it impossible to recover the original data or modify the preprocessing steps. Further, it complicates collaboration among research teams working on a common dataset, as different analyses may require specific preprocessing steps. Given the large amount of resources devoted to collecting EEG, tools that can efficiently and transparently preprocess data are greatly needed. PyLossless addresses this need by creating a non-destructive, automated preprocessing pipeline that maintains the continuous EEG structure. It offers a user-friendly API, is well documented, tested through continuous integration, easily deployable, and integrates with the popular MNE-Python environment. The pipeline also provides a browser-based quality control review (QCR) dashboard that allows researchers to visualize and edit automated artifact flags for sensors, time periods, and independent components. The end product of PyLossless is a lossless annotated data state that can be shared and used with analysis-specific artifact rejection policies, allowing for an optimal balance between flexibility and standardization.

Computers in Human Behavior

Generic title: Not a research article

Corrigendum to ‘Perceptions and adoption of AI in public relations: Innovation attributes, threats, and practical implications’ [Computers in Human Behavior 184C (2026) 109087]

Sung-Un Yang, Cen April Yue, Arunima Krishna, Donald K. Wright

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Watch before you Play: The effect of connection to streamer in gaming videos on the viewers’ subsequent Game-playing satisfaction

Soyeon Lee, Andrew Weaver, John Velez

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Mindfulness Training in Virtual Reality for Borderline Personality Disorder symptoms: An Analogue Study

Yaren Chakmak, Crescent Jicol, Karin Petrini

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The Digital Mindfulness Scale: Development and longitudinal validation in the workplace

Elizabeth Marsh, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Alexa Spence

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Is faking it the new making it?: Exploring virtual influencers’ effectiveness in depression awareness campaign

Rachel X. Peng

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Multimodal imaging and transcriptomics reveal the pathway of mindfulness-mediated recovery in internet gaming disorder

Xuefeng Xu, Huabin Wang, Shaoyu Cui, Haosen Ni, Guang-Heng Dong

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The work-related consequences of employees’ media-based political information consumption: A nine-wave weekly study during the 2024 U.S. presidential primary season

Ian M. Hughes, Nathan A. Bowling, Melissa G. Keith, Rebecca M. Brossoit, Andrea Bazzoli

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Substratism: Conceptualizing and Measuring Moral Bias Against AI

Ali Ladak, Janet V.T. Pauketat, Jacy Reese Anthis, Steve Loughnan, Matti Wilks

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Pieces of me: Theorizing affordance-based social media usage styles and their impact on social capital and well-Being

Tammy Jih-Hsuan Lin

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Digital Exploitation and Vulnerability: A Study of Online Exploited Personalities

Dylan Hamza

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Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

Shifting Demographics, Shifting Perceptions: How Race and Politics Shape Reactions to the Majority-Minority Future

Deborah J. Wu, Stylianos Syropoulos, Andrea Y. J. Mah, Kyle F. Law, Katherine L. Dixon-Gordon, Ezra M. Markowitz, Tatishe M. Nteta, Allecia E. Reid, Joel C. Ginn, Se Min Suh, Liane Young, Brian Lickel

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Racial minorities are expected to be a majority of the U.S. population by 2044. We examined predictors of Americans’ perceptions towards this racial demographic shift (RDS), how accurately they estimate others’ perceptions, and whether an intervention corrects people’s misperceptions. In Study 1, in a nationally representative sample ( N = 1,600), most Republicans, Independents, and Democrats viewed the RDS as neutral or good. Being White, conservative, a 2020 Donald Trump voter, endorsing minimization of racism, and endorsing competitive and dangerous worldviews predicted more negative perceptions. Meanwhile, having racially diverse social networks and positive feelings for racial minorities predicted more positive perceptions. In Study 2, a preregistered Prolific experiment ( N = 819), Republicans underestimated other Republicans’ and Democrats’ perceptions of this shift. An information-based intervention corrected this, with this effect persisting 1 week later, albeit weaker. Our research suggests that emphasizing more positive ingroup perceptions of the RDS may help correct misperceptions and increase support for racial diversity.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Is comedy funnier when it is easier to process? The interplay of fluency and coherence in humor appreciation

Drew Gorenz, Norbert Schwarz

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When it is important to be more virtuous: Cultural tightness exacerbates moral superiority

Lipeng Yin, Zaixuan Zhang, Zhansheng Chen

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Stimulus-category confounds reduce, but do not explain, different roles of intent across moral domains: Valid statistical inference helps explain ‘inconsistent’ findings

Joseph Sweetman, Ryan M. McManus

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Tightening up under threat: Social class shapes the strength of norms.

Ying Lin, Jesse R. Harrington, Michele J. Gelfand

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Unconscious mental content in implicit evaluation: Evidence from misprediction.

Benedek Kurdi, David E. Melnikoff, Adam Morris

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Psychological Bulletin

How spatial skills relate to science achievement: A meta-analytic review.

Kinnari Atit, Emily Grossnickle Peterson, Katie Gilligan-Lee, Zachary Hawes, Jihyun Lee

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Universal interventions to improve young children’s mental well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Jiying Ling, Sisi Chen, Nancy T. Browne, Melissa G. Gomes

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Does the variance of personality traits change across the lifespan? A meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies.

Peter Haehner, Susanne Buecker, Marco J. Altorfer, Vera V. Bocklet, Wiebke Bleidorn

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Individual differences in personality trait changes across the lifespan: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies.

Peter Haehner, Christopher J. Hopwood, Lukas Schellenberg, Ted Schwaba, Wiebke Bleidorn

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Tackling challenges in large language model–based data extraction via context engineering: A commentary on Jansen et al. (2025).

Junsong Lu, X. T. (XiaoTian) Wang

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Psychological Methods

Addressing selective reporting bias in meta-analysis of dependent effect sizes: A tutorial in R.

Man Chen, James E. Pustejovsky

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Evaluating local structural-after-measurement and traditional approaches for the estimation of complex nonlinear effects among latent variables.

Felipe Fontana Vieira, Kjell Solem Slupphaug, Yves Rosseel

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Heterogeneous variance models with Gaussian processes.

Yvette Baurne, Frédéric Delmar, Jonas Wallin

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Psychological Science

No Evidence for Self-Esteem Effects on Aggression: Findings From a Multi-Year, Multi-Informant Longitudinal Study of Mexican-Origin Families

Ulrich Orth, Jasmin A. Aebi, Richard W. Robins

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Researchers have long debated whether self-esteem is associated with aggression. In this preregistered research, we tested the effects of self-esteem on aggression by using statistical models that control for unmeasured time-invariant confounders. Data came from a multi-wave longitudinal study of 674 Mexican-origin families, including multi-informant assessments of children, mothers, and fathers at 1- or 2-year intervals. There was no evidence of systematic self-esteem effects on aggression, and the results held when we controlled for narcissism and when the influence of shared-method variance could be ruled out. Also, there was little evidence for effects in the reverse direction, that is, from engaging in aggression on self-esteem. One limitation was that in most cases it was not possible to test whether the self-esteem effects were curvilinear because of the nonconvergence of these models. Overall, the findings do not support either low or high self-esteem as a risk factor for aggression.

Boosting Media Literacy Using Lateral Reading and Online Search Interventions

Lisa Oswald, Anastasia Kozyreva, Stefan M. Herzog, Pietro Leonardo Nickl, Ralph Hertwig

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Empowering people to navigate online information competently is essential to complement systemic content moderation and platform regulation. A nationally representative randomized controlled study among adults in Germany ( N = 2,666) compared two media-literacy interventions: a source-focused lateral-reading strategy to help participants distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy news outlets, and a claim-focused search strategy to help them assess the credibility of specific claims. Both interventions showed small improvements in discernment, but not all effects were statistically distinguishable from zero. At a 2-week follow-up, discernment improved in all groups, and differences between the intervention and control groups were no longer statistically distinguishable. We found no evidence of backfire effects. An exploratory analysis of discernment pretreatment indicated the lowest performance for supporters of populist radical-right parties. Behavioral measures suggested increases in information search in both intervention groups. On average, lateral reading reduced trust in untrustworthy sources, and online search increased trust in trustworthy sources.