Reviews & Analysis

Drawing is a versatile tool that people use to convey visual information across contexts. In this Review, Fan and colleagues discuss the cognitive mechanisms of drawing and key considerations for the use of drawings as a research tool.

Psychosis research has traditionally focused on vulnerability and the detrimental outcomes of risk exposure. In this Review, Thakkar et al. consider an alternative resilience-based approach focused on resources and strengths that might help protect against negative illness course among people at risk.

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is an empirically based, hierarchical model of the structure of psychopathology. In this Review, Rodriguez-Seijas et al. consider the applicability of the HiTOP model to diverse, underrepresented and epistemically excluded populations.

The somatosensory system processes tactile sensations to represent the human body. In this Review, Tamè and Longo discuss updates to the classical principles of somatosensation that reflect emerging patterns and complexities in how touch is represented.

People hold subjective beliefs that, independent of the actual distribution of resources, one party’s gains are inevitably accrued at other parties’ expense. In this Review, Davidai and Tepper synthesize research on when and why such zero-sum beliefs emerge and their consequences for individuals, groups and society.

Sexual objectification refers to a cultural prioritization of sexual appearance and appeal over other attributes. In this Review, Ward et al. synthesize empirical evidence about the sources and consequences of seeing women as sexual objects, and of women’s objectification of themselves (self-objectification).

Gesture contributes to human communication and encodes information differently from language. In this Review, Kita and Emmorey discuss how gesture interacts with and supports spoken and signed languages.

Individuals frequently lack the ability and confidence to make sense of quantitative information in their decision making. In this Review, Reyna and Brainerd describe how numeracy training emphasizing the qualitative meaning of numbers in context — the gist — can create substantial and long-lasting improvements to numeracy abilities that transfer across contexts.

Psychology research typically focuses on biases at the individual level rather than across broader societal systems. In this Review, Skinner-Dorkenoo and colleagues consider how systemic factors contribute to individual-level racial biases in the USA and vice versa.

Whether music-related psychological responses evolved as specialized cognitive adaptations is unknown. In this Review, Singh and Mehr find evidence for universality and early expression of emotional and behavioural responses but not domain-specificity, suggesting that music-related responses draw on more general psychological mechanisms.

People can reason about the relationships between people and about other people’s emotions. In this Perspective, Smith-Flores and Powell review research in both domains and propose a framework of how people jointly reason about social affiliation and emotion.

People address societal problems by engaging in collective action to attempt to change underlying structural systems (cause-focused solutions) or prosocial behaviours to help those affected (consequence-focused solutions). In this Perspective, Brown and Craig draw on construal level theory and regulatory scope theory to understand why people engage in different forms of social action.

Debate exists regarding whether using multiple languages confers cognitive advantages beyond the language domain. In this Review, Lehtonen and colleagues contrast domain-generality and skill-learning accounts of bilingualism, considering how bilingual language use interacts with executive functions across levels of language proficiency.

Acculturation is the process of individual identity change owing to intercultural contact. In this Review, Ward and Szabó discuss approaches to the study of acculturation, the influence of context on cultural identities, and the relationship between cultural identities and well-being.

Despite decades of research, suicide rates remain largely unchanged. In this Review, Kleiman et al. consider the promise and limitations of technology, such as smartphones, and statistical methods, such as machine learning, to predict and prevent suicide and thereby provide a realistic view of what might be possible.

Most faces that people encounter move, yet most research on emotion recognition uses photographs of posed expressions. In this Review, Krumhuber et al. describe how dynamic information contributes to emotion recognition, beyond the information conveyed in static images.

Behavioural economic accounts of addiction suggest that drug consumption arises from overvaluation of small, immediate rewards and drug-specific reinforcement. In this Perspective, Acuff et al. propose an extension to this reinforcer pathology model that highlights the critical role of alternative reinforcers in addiction motivation.

People belong to multiple social categories (such as those based on race, ethnicity, or gender) simultaneously. In this Perspective, Lei et al. propose a sociohistorical model of intersectional social prototypes that reconciles existing theories and generates testable hypotheses about the development and structure of social prototypes.

Authoritarianism weakens democratic institutions and fosters societal divisions. In this Review, Osborne et al. describe the psychological processes and situational factors that give rise to authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population.

From infancy, humans learn the regularities of their world using statistical learning. In this Review, Forest et al. consider how statistical learning changes quantitatively and qualitatively across development, considering influences on the input to learning and the resulting memory representations.