Knowledge that Transforms

What does it take to become an adult in Africa? Life-span-development literature includes little exploration on this transition outside Western countries. A qualitative approach was used to identify locally relevant topics and variables in an understudied African context. Fifty 18- to 25-year-old Ovambo Namibians from rural and urban areas were interviewed. Results of reflexive thematic analysis suggest the significance of gender and birth order in defining adult roles and the completion of one's education as a new rite of passage. Full adult personhood means providing for and engaging with a larger community as well as one's children and extended family, reflecting the ongoing relevance of African communalism in today's society. Youth in Namibia, and likely in sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, balance traditional and contemporary demands as they come of age in a postindependence, globalizing society. Our findings reflect the centrality of community and the intermingled nature of agentic and communal values in this process.

In later older adulthood, individuals report increased depressive symptoms, whereas gender differences in depressive symptoms narrow. We evaluated whether terminal decline (i.e., accelerated worsening in proximity to death) explained these patterns. We examined the longitudinal trajectories of depressive symptoms in 2,411 participants (baseline age: 29-95 years) from the Interplay of Genes and Environments Across Multiple Studies consortium representing three countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Australia). Joint modeling revealed that individuals reporting larger annual increases in depressive symptoms after age 70 were at increased risk of death. Piecewise linear multilevel models with random changepoints revealed accelerated increases in depressive symptoms approximately 4 years before death. Co-twin control analyses with 98 twin pairs found that the deceased twin had significantly larger accelerations in depressive symptoms compared with the surviving twin. Men experienced more severe mortality-related increases compared with women. Terminal decline partially explains the increase in depressive symptoms in later older adulthood.

Certain emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal) are associated with better well-being and are therefore seen as adaptive (health-promoting) strategies. However, it is unlikely that any strategy is adaptive regardless of context. Indeed, reappraisal is associated with positive outcomes in the context of uncontrollable life stress but negative outcomes in the context of controllable life stress. It follows that individuals who have better “strategy-situation fit” (use reappraisal more during uncontrollable vs. controllable situations) should have better well-being beyond their habitual reappraisal use. A previous test of this hypothesis found that strategy-situation fit in daily life was associated with greater well-being ( N = 74). We conducted a well-powered preregistered direct replication of this study in 285 U.S. adults. We failed to replicate the original findings and found no evidence for the strategy-situation fit hypothesis, including when accounting for key confounders and moderators. We discuss implications for theory and future research.

The prevailing view among scholars has been that the preference for strong leaders is an idiosyncratic feature of right-wing individuals. However, it is unclear whether this inference is accurate given that prior research has largely overlooked the role of ethnicity. We analyzed data from the United States and Western Europe ( N = 34,443) and found that ethnic minorities (and right-wing individuals) preferred strong leaders to a greater extent than Whites (and left-wing individuals). Notably, ethnic minorities across diverse ethnic and political backgrounds were closer to right-wing Whites on strong-leader preference than to left-wing Whites. Our work also provides some evidence, using both measurement-of-mediation (Studies 1–4) and experimental mediation (preregistered Studies 5 and 6), that generalized trust helps explain group differences in strong-leader preference. In sum, our research illustrates the unique nature of left-wing Whites’ leadership preferences, and highlights the importance of testing social science theories using diverse participant samples.

To navigate the world, our minds must represent not only how things are now (perception) but also how they are about to be (prediction). However, perception and prediction blur together for objects in motion, a classic finding known as "representational momentum." If you glance at a photo of a person diving into a lake, you will tend to remember them closer to the water than they really were. In seven experiments (with adult participants from the United States) we show that this phenomenon transcends motion: Our minds make predictions that distort our memories about changes that involve no motion whatsoever, including changes in brightness, color saturation, and proportion. Additionally, we use representational momentum to map the limits of automatic prediction, showing that there are no analogous effects for changes in hue. Our automatic predictions distort our memories in many domains-not just motion-and the presence or absence of these distortions expose the inner workings of perception, cognition, and memory.

This study examined the sequence and timing of sexual identity development (SID) milestones among Generation Z LGBTQ+ Australians, focusing on variations across subgroups and their relationship with minority stressors. The study included 490 Australian LGBTQ+ individuals aged 16 to 26, predominantly White ( n = 389) and assigned female at birth ( n = 402), with a balanced distribution between cisgender and gender-diverse participants. Demographic differences in the timing and achievement of SID milestones were found for sexual and gender identity. Latent profile analysis identified four distinct profiles, highlighting identity-centered and sex-centered sequences. Differences in rejection sensitivity, emotion dysregulation, and self-acceptance of sexual identity were noted across these profiles, but not for internalized homonegativity. Our findings indicate that SID trajectories do not strictly conform to discrete sexual or gender identity categories. The cross-sectional design limits causality inference, and findings are not generalizable to all LGBTQ+ young people or Generation Z more broadly.

Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this study, we investigated the extent to which primary-school children pay attention to and read subtitles and whether this is related to their reading proficiency. We tracked the eye movements of 180 British children in Years 1 to 6 who watched videos with and without subtitles. Results showed that attention to subtitles was associated with reading proficiency: Superior readers were more likely to look at subtitles than less proficient readers and spent more time on them. When children looked at words in the subtitles, they showed evidence of reading them. We conclude that some degree of reading fluency may be necessary before children pay attention to subtitles. However, by the third or fourth year of reading instruction, most children read sufficiently quickly to follow same-language subtitles and potentially learn from them.

A powerful cue when reasoning is whether an apparent consensus has been reached. However, we do not yet know how the strength of this cue varies between different individuals and types of claims. In the current study ( N = 78 U.S. adults, recruited from Prolific), we evaluated this with a realistic mock social-media paradigm in which each participant evaluated 60 diverse, real-world claims based on posts from people who either disagreed with each other, formed a consensus independently, or formed a consensus using shared sources. Almost all participants revised their beliefs to align with the consensus; many also qualitatively changed their minds. A consensus was also more persuasive for claims more likely to have a ground truth (i.e., more knowable claims). Although most people were insensitive to consensus independence, some were more persuaded by a consensus formed independently, whereas some were equally convinced by a consensus formed using the same sources.

Scientific institutions should work to earn trust from the scientific community and from the public.With prominent threats to trust in science around the world, it is especially important to make clear why scientific institutions are worthy of trust.Our goal at Psychologi

Perceptual distraction distorts visual working memories. Recent research has shown divergent effects of distraction on memory performance, including attractive biases, impairment of memory precision, and an increase in the guess rate, indicating multiple mechanisms of distraction interference. Here we propose a novel signal-intrusion model based on the TCC (target-confusability-competition) framework to reconcile those discrepant results. We hypothesized that sensory interference is driven by the integration of a target signal and an intrusive distractor signal. Model comparisons showed that this TCC-intrusion model had a superior fit to memory error distributions across three delayed-estimation tasks with distraction ( N = 220 adults) compared with other candidate models. According to the model, distractor intrusions decreased along with target-distractor dissimilarity, in accordance with the sensory-recruitment hypothesis. Moreover, TCC-intrusion successfully replicated divergent effects of distraction on memory bias, precision, and guess rate using this one intrusion mechanism. Together, these results suggest that perceptual distractors affect working memories through a unified mechanism of signal intrusion.