Review Articles

Despite widespread adoption of diversity initiatives grounded in psychological insights, evidence for their effectiveness is mixed. In this Review, He et al. present behavioural design as a promising avenue for bridging individual-level and system-level approaches to organizational diversity.

Adolescents are particularly at risk for social contagion effects of self-harm. In this Review, Chen et al. specify factors that exacerbate self-harm social contagion at the individual, interpersonal, community and societal levels and discuss how to bridge psychological and public health perspectives to mitigate self-harm risk in this age group.

Humans can infer a range of material properties from a brief glance. In this Review, Xiao and Liao discuss the varied facets of visual material perception, including its relationship to action planning and broader cognition.

Social relationships during adolescence, including relationships via social media, are fundamental to identity formation and well-being. In this Review, Sequeira et al. describe the behavioural, emotional and cognitive mechanisms linked to threats to social status, identity, connections and interpersonal security that can negatively influence adolescents’ mental health.

Eye movements are the most frequent movements that humans make. In this Review, Schütz and Stewart integrate evidence regarding the costs of eye movements and discuss considerations for movement dynamics, timing and the spatial control of saccades.

Birds demonstrate complex numerical abilities at levels similar to primates. In this Review, Regolin and colleagues describe the contribution of laboratory, field and neurobiological studies of avian species to our understanding of the evolution and function of numerical cognition.

Striving for positive emotions and avoiding negative emotions are often associated with well-being benefits, but can come with costs for the self, others and the broader community. In this Review, Ford describes these costs in terms of the emotions people value (or devalue) and the emotions they seek to achieve (or avoid) via emotion regulation.

Psychotherapy is liable to negative effects, but the lack of a shared conceptualization of these effects has hindered research and practice. In this Review, Rosendahl et al. provide working definitions of negative psychotherapy outcomes and outline solutions to clinical, methodological and training gaps.

Choice architecture interventions (or ‘nudges’) aim to guide behaviour by changing the proximal physical, social or psychological environment. In this Review, Szaszi and colleagues show that the average effectiveness of these interventions is small and variable and outline how researchers can gather evidence defining this generalizability more efficiently.

There are complex interactions between physical changes during the menopause transition and mental health and wellbeing. In this Review, Thurston et al. integrate these interactions and outline behavioural approaches to managing menopausal symptoms and related mental health concerns.

Facial expressions are ubiquitous among primates and investigation of non-human primate facial behaviour is vital to an understanding of human facial behaviour. In this Review, Waller and colleagues discuss facial expression production and perception in non-human primates, focusing on methodological approaches and challenges.

The term ‘social connection’ is operationalized differently across disparate strands of research. In this Review, Baek et al. highlight four distinct uses of the term ‘social connection’ — as subjective perceptions, social networks, synchrony and interpersonal behaviours — and describe how research based in each conceptualization has contributed to understanding of the concept.

Older adults have the highest suicide rates of any age group, but the mechanisms leading to this behaviour remain understudied. In this Review, Connors et al. integrate epidemiological research with psychological theories and interventions to better understand and prevent suicide and self-harm in older adults.

Social norms are the formal and informal rules that define acceptable and desirable group member behaviour. In this Review, Gonzalez et al. explain how tensions between societal and group norms, between individual and group norms, and between norms of different groups mobilize collective action and promote social change.

Mental health risk and resilience in children who have been forcibly displaced are linked to individual, social and structural factors. In this Review, Pluess et al. synthesize differences across children and communities impacted by war and other conflicts, and discuss the effectiveness of mental health interventions.

Perception of emotional stimuli involves a mix of bottom-up stimulus information and top-down information. In this Review, Mohanty and colleague explore how top-down processes, including attention, expectations and context, shape the perception of emotional stimuli.

Human navigation involves encoding spatial relationships among places. In this Review, Mou examines the use of cognitive maps for navigation and the circumstances in which both place and orientation information are encoded.

Dehumanization is typically considered as an intergroup phenomenon, but failures to infer another person’s mental state also occur in everyday interpersonal contexts. In this Review, Harris and Delgado describe the functions of interpersonal dehumanization at three temporal scales and discuss their supporting brain networks.

Researchers have identified several environmental and personal characteristics that might accelerate cognitive decline in older adults but that are not yet listed as established risk factors for dementia. In this Review, Rodriguez et. al. explore the potential of these less well-established factors to prevent dementia and foster healthy cognitive ageing.

People use cognitive offloading (the use of physical action to reduce internal memory demand, such as writing a shopping list) in everyday life. In this Review, Richmond and Taylor describe cognitive offloading for retrospective memory-based tasks and consider factors that might lead to variability in the use and benefits of cognitive offloading.