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Perspectives on Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.
Editor
Barbara A. Spellman
University of Virginia
School of Law
Associate Editors
David A. Sbarra
University of Arizona
Bethany A. Teachman
University of Virginia
Special Associate Editors
Alex O. Holcombe
University of Sydney
Alison Ledgerwood
University of California, Davis
Kristina R. Olson
University of Washington
Daniel J. Simons
University of Illinois
Advisory Editors
John T. Cacioppo
University of Chicago
Robert W. Levenson
University of California, Berkeley
Elizabeth F. Loftus
University of California, Irvine
Walter Mischel
Columbia University
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Perspectives on Psychological Science
Volume 10, Number 5
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The links below take you to the journal via the APS website. If not already logged in, you will be redirected to log-in using your last name (Garcia) and Member ID (81665).
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Simon Nørby
Failing to recall a piece of desired information can be frustrating and embarrassing. Despite the negative associations people have with forgetting information, in many ways, forgetting does benefit us. One way in which people can engage in emotion regulation is to selectively forget negative memories. Selectively forgetting negative memories can lead people to have a generally happier view of their lives; studies show that healthier people tend to have more positive than negative memories. Forgetting allows people keep only relative information and discard information that is no longer important, helping people efficiently structure their knowledge and process information efficiently. Despite our distress when we feel we cannot remember a piece of information, forgetting has positive effect on our emotional well-being, knowledge acquisition, and contextual attunement.
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Garriy Shteynberg
When a person attends to an event, another person -- a spouse, a child, or a stadium of people -- is often attending to the same thing. As a social species, shared attention is particularly important, allowing for the development of group knowledge and the coordination of group actions. In support of this view, researchers have found that people use more cognitive resources when attending to the same events as others. These greater cognitive resources lead to better memory for shared information, stronger motivation to complete shared goals, and more extreme judgments of shared valenced objects. Shared attention has also been found to intensify emotional reactions and to lead to greater behavioral learning.
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Gustaf Gredebäck and Terje Falck-Ytter
Research has shown that when one person watches another reach for an object, they do not track the hand movement but rather predictively fixate on the target of the hand movement. This type of predictive gaze allows people to effectively guide actions and to interact with the fast-paced world. According to the embodied view -- proposed by Flanagan and Johansson (2003) -- when we see someone act, we access our own internal motor plans for that action, using it to implement predictive eye movements. Studies following from their original work have shown that behavioral or transcranial manipulation of the motor cortex can lead to interference in action prediction and that action prediction occurs early in life. Although these findings support the embodied view of action prediction, future research is still needed in other areas, such as the manner in which prior knowledge, statistical regularity, and goal salience influence this process.
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Amit Bernstein, Yuval Hadash, Yael Lichtash, Galia Tanay, Kathrine Shepherd, and David M. Fresco
People have the ability to view experiences in their lives from more than one perspective. For example, people can be completely engrossed in an unfolding event and the way the mind experiences it, or they can step outside that experience, shifting perspective from within to an outside, third-person view. The capacity to make this shift -- termed decentering -- is thought to have links to mental health and well-being. A new model describes how the interrelated processes of meta-awareness (i.e., awareness of present-moment experiences as a process), disidentification from internal experience (i.e., the experience of separating internal states from one's self), and reduced reactivity to cognitive thought (i.e., a reduced impact of thought content on other mental processes such as attention or motor planning) relates to decentering-related constructs, such as mindfulness and cognitive distancing, and to mental health.
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Hiroki P. Kotabe and Wilhelm Hofmann
Many different components contribute to whether someone experiences successes or failures of self-control. These many components, such as effort, desire, goal pursuit, and self-control motivation, have often been studied in isolation, making it difficult for researchers to fully grasp their interconnected nature. A new model based on integrative self-control theory draws together the various components of self-control into a framework that can be used to classify and predict self-control failures and successes. In this model, activation of a lower-order desire that conflicts with a higher order goal leads to desire-goal conflict. This conflict triggers control motivation. The strength of the control effort and of the desire will determine whether self-control will be successful or will fail.
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Meredith Van Vleet and Brooke C. Feeney
Children aren't the only ones who like to play; adults like to engage in play as well. However, problems defining play and a lack of a guiding framework for this area of research has hampered research on the function and implications of play in adulthood. A new definition of play seeks to further research in this area, describing adult play as a behavior or activity that has a goal of amusement and fun, is carried out with an enthusiastic approach, and is interactive -- either with partners or with the activity itself. Although more research is needed, some hypothesized outcomes of adult play are a reduction in stress, an increased state of positive affect, better physical and psychological health, increased intimacy and trust between partners, reduced conflict, and more relationship excitement and satisfaction. Measures of adult play will need to be constructed to examine these hypothesized outcomes; these measures should fully capture the behavioral, social, and biological aspects of this behavior.
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 Special Section on Video Games and Children's Mental Health
There is a long standing debate over the impact of video games -- especially violent games -- on children's development and later aggressive tendencies. In a new meta-analysis, Christopher J. Ferguson examined 101 published and unpublished studies that focused on the impact of violent and nonviolent video games on behavioral health (i.e., aggression, prosocial behavior, depressive symptoms, attention problems, or academic performance) in children. He found that overall, violent and nonviolent video games had a minimal impact on aggressive behavior, suggesting the need for a new theory and for better, more standardized research measures.
In a series of commentaries on Ferguson's article, leading authors in the field provide their views and opinions on his study and its findings.
Patrick M. Markey notes that people on different sides of the video game debate often interpret the same set of data quite differently, and that although Ferguson's study will most likely not bring unity to this field, it does demonstrate the need for researchers to be more accepting of results that are inconsistent with their own viewpoints and to be wary of forcing data to conform with their own beliefs.
Douglas A. Gentile suggests that one should be wary of any extreme position. Sometimes these extremes are easy to spot and sometimes -- as in the case of Ferguson's article, he says -- they are not. Gentile says that Ferguson has tried to gloss over many of the inconsistencies in his own arguments by sowing doubt in the scientific processes of video game research, and by focusing readers' attention only on things deemed important to him.
In two separate commentaries, Paul Boxer, Christopher L. Groves, and Meagan Docherty and Hannah R. Rothstein and Brad J. Bushman criticize the methodology used in Ferguson's meta-analysis, asserting that his meta-analysis strays from current standards for meta-analytic procedures. They specifically take issue with, among other things, his use of partial correlations, the way he partialled different variables from different studies, and his use of a single coder system for assessing the appropriateness of studies for inclusion in the analysis.
Patti M. Valkenburg concludes that Ferguson's meta-analyses consistently seem to report lower effect sizes than others done in the field. The differences in the ways people interpret different meta-analytic results contributes to increased conflict within the field -- a conflict she says is far from constructive. Valkenburg suggests that the divergent findings in the field may be best explained by a differential susceptibility model -- a type of approach that recognizes that all children are not equally or similarly affected by media exposure. Ferguson responds to the commentaries, saying that selective reporting problems and citation and publication bias remain a problem for this field. He defends the use of partial effect sizes in his meta-analysis, indicating that standard procedures for use of this type of data have been in place for some time. He recognizes the contentiousness of views, both in these commentaries and in the field at large, and suggests the need for greater theoretical inclusivity and open-mindedness going forward.
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Perspectives on Psychological Science is a publication of the Association for Psychological Science. Please contact APS by email or by telephone at +1 202.293.9300 with questions or comments. Visit APS on the Web
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