Piecing Together Ideas on Sociocultural Psychology and Methodological Approaches

In this commentary, I will piece together some transversal ideas throughout the articles that compose the thematic issue Self-identity on the move: methodological elaborations focusing on two main aspects: (i) the relation between the individual and the society and how self-identity is constructed in context; and (ii) data generalization in qualitative studies. I will base my commentary on the reflections brought forth by the articles on these two topics. My aim is to trace a line on which the authors, in their contributions to this issue, dialogue among each other with respect to the key elements of the individual, the social context, the (self)identity, and data generalization in qualitative research.     

Attention in Children: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

This commentary discusses conceptual and methodological issues in the assessment of attention in children. The five articles in this special issue are important advances in the study of attention in children with brain-related disorders. They provide important guidelines for future studies in this area: specification of the underlying model of attention, selection of tasks according to the model, and the use of multiple tasks in well-defined clinical populations.     

Personality and Daily Experience: The Promise and the Challenge

This special issue of the Journal of Personality is devoted to personality and daily experience. Through historical analysis of the daily event literature, empirical inquiry, and methodological and statistical commentary, the contributors to this issue convey both the possibilities and the problems of studying everyday life. These articles demonstrate how people's dispositions, goals, and commitments can influence daily emotional well-being and health, their inner experience, their reactions to events, and perhaps even which events they encounter. The introduction of personality to the study of daily experience holds the promise of enriching our studies of both.     

Applications of Psychological Safety to Developmental Science: Reflections and Recommendations for Next Steps

This commentary reviews and synthesizes the work of this special issue on psychological safety. At its core, psychological safety stems from a combination of individual attributes and contextual conditions that combine to produce moments in which individuals perceive their own agency and show willingness to take risks, grow, and change. This commentary reflects upon the contributions of the articles in this special issue, describes why bringing a developmental perspective to the study of psychological safety may be particularly valuable, and suggests challenges and opportunities for future work on psychological safety.     

Stereotype Threat in Applied Selection Settings: A Commentary

This commentary attempts to put the studies in this special issue in context. First, prior work by industrial-organizational psychologists on stereotype threat (ST) is briefly described. Second, the features differentiating the studies in this special issue from prior work on ST are outlined, and possible explanations for differences between the findings in these studies and prior work are discussed. Third, several methodological features of the studies in this issue are emphasized with the goal of influencing subsequent work on this topic. Finally, difficulties in using the ST experimental paradigm in applied settings are outlined, and possible strategies for examining threat in applied settings are examined.     

From single case to database: A new method for enhancing psychotherapy, forensic, and other psychological practice

This article proposes a new model for knowledge generation in applied and professional psychology—the pragmatic case study (PCS) method. Drawing from both psychology's traditional, quantitative and alternative, qualitative approaches, the PCS method involves the creation of systematic, peer-reviewed case studies (in all areas of applied psychology) that follow D. Peterson's “disciplined inquiry” epistemological model. The studies would be organized into “journal-databases” that combine (a) individual studies; (b) articles that address epistemological, theoretical, methodological, logistical, economic, political, and ethical issues in the PCS method; and (c) substantive cross-case analyses of groups of individual cases already published in the database. To lay out the proposal's arguments, the article begins by setting forth relevant historical and philosophical context, and then examines a possible set of initial methodological guidelines for ensuring rigorous quality in each case study. Next the PCS method's value in creating new and useful applied knowledge is demonstrated for two areas: psychotherapy efficacy research and forensic psychology. Finally, the implications of the present proposal are explored. Throughout, the emphasis is on creating an integrative, pragmatic alternative for gaining new useful knowledge in our discipline.     

Brief Experimental Analysis: A Decision Tool for Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice

This special issue illustrates how brief experimental analysis (BEA) is gaining recognition as a valuable tool for making treatment decisions about children who are unresponsive to regular classroom instruction. This commentary article provides evidence for why BEA has grown in popularity, briefly summarizes each of the studies included in the series, and discusses issues that are critical to conducting and interpreting data from a BEA. The articles in the issue exemplify how BEA is flexible enough to evaluate diverse intervention options, is time and cost efficient, and is uniquely suited for use in a problem-solving approach to school-based service delivery.     

Example-based learning: New theoretical perspectives and use-inspired advances to a contemporary instructional approach

Decades of research has shown that example-based learning is an effective instructional strategy for learning new skills. The field of learning from examples is seeing a shift in focus towards more innovative and use-inspired research, in part because the use of examples for informal and formal learning purposes has mushroomed. This special issue comprises a set of eight papers in which students learned a procedural skill from worked examples or modeling examples. Each study characterizes a recent development towards more innovative example-based learning research. These developments are: (a) the integration of social-cognitive and cognitive example research, (b) the integration of example-based learning and analogical reasoning research, (c) the extension of traditional Cognitive Load Theory effects, (d) a greater focus on learning from (productive) errors, and (e) more research on individual differences. This special issue concludes with insightful commentary articles written by Prof. Dr. Katharina Scheiter and Prof. Dr. Richard Mayer.     

Commentary: Critical Reflections on the Ethical and Professional Considerations in Writing About Clients

From the standpoint of a journal editor and researcher, this commentary critically reflects on some of the primary notions addressed in the 4 featured articles of the special section, discussing areas of agreement and divergence. As a way of further exploring these ethical and professional concerns, the contentious issue of using school children as case studies in publications and in graduate counseling courses is briefly examined.     

Defensiveness and Defense Mechanisms

This introduction to the Journal of Personality's special issue on the topic of defense mechanisms raises the question of why defenses have been largely overlooked in personality research. Although defenses were originally discussed in the context of psychopathology, for the past 60 years psychodynamically oriented psychologists have understood that defenses play an important part in normal psychological development. Recently, psychologists outside the field of personality have incorporated the ideas of unconscious mental processes and of defenses into their research programs. In this issue, personality researchers discuss their ideas about defense mechanisms, organized around three topical areas: current conceptualizations of defense, the measurement of defense mechanisms, and the integration of defense mechanisms into personality research. The issue concludes with a commentary on these articles and provides suggestions for future work.     

Advances in designing instruction based on examples

This commentary reviews the evidence for nine principles for how to design effective example-based instruction, drawing from the articles in this special issue.     

Perceptual Consistency as Measured by the Rorschach

This article discusses the 5 previous articles (Fowler, this issue; Handler, this issue; King &; Pope, this issue; Potash, this issue; Strassle, McKee, &; Plant, this issue) in reference to creativity assessment, emphasizing the need to study children's play. There is a need for validity studies in the optimism paradigm described for the Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1938). I also question the wisdom of omitting hostile responses in the paradigm used to assess playfulness in the Rorschach.     

Personality and Coping: Three Generations of Research

ABSTRACT This article introduces the Journal of Personality 's special issue on coping and personality. It first presents a historical overview of the psychological study of how people cope with stress and identifies three generations of theory and research: (a) the psychoanalysts and the ego development school, which tended to equate personality and coping strategies; (b) the transactional approach, which appeared in the 1960s and emphasized situational and cognitive influences on coping while downplaying the role of individual differences; and (c) the most recent, "third generation," whose work is represented in this special issue and focuses on the role of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions among coping, personality, appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. This introduction concludes with a discussion of unresolved conceptual and methodological issues and a brief orientation to the third-generation articles that follow in this special issue.     

Are Callous Unemotional (CU) Traits Enough?

A guiding question for this special section, sparked by the increasing number of studies on callous –unemotional traits (CU traits) and the DSM-5 Limited Prosocial Emotion (LPE) specifier, is whether CU traits are enough to identify a clinically meaningful subgroup of youth with conduct problems or whether other psychopathic traits contribute. Seven empirical papers and two commentary papers address this question to varying degrees and in different ways with some papers “competing” various models against one another along with other papers investigating distinct correlates of the psychopathy factors. Findings across the papers suggest that there could be benefits to examining the broader construct of psychopathy in addition to examining its underpinning dimensions rather than CU traits alone. Two commentary papers also shed light on the importance of psychopathic traits in children with Conduct Disorder (CD) and provide insights for future work on this topic. It is hoped that the articles and commentary will generate new ideas for research and practice that could have implications for the treatment of those individuals with CD and psychopathic traits.     

Understanding the individual implicitly and explicitly

The possibility that behaviour is shaped by cognitions outside of conscious awareness or control is a long‐standing feature of psychological theory. Empirical support for this theoretical stance is accelerating with the advent of methodological innovations for assessing implicit cognition. The articles in this Special Section provide evidence for the construct and predictive validity of implicit measures, especially the Implicit Association Test, and illustrate the value of implicit constructs for personality theory. This commentary briefly discusses each article, and notes that discrepancies between implicit and explicit responses can take multiple forms, each with distinct implications for understanding the individual.     

Default categorization of outgroup faces and the other race effect: Commentary on the special issue

This commentary addresses how studies examining the neurophysiological correlates of racial categorization can provide insight into the neurocognitive mechanisms of the other-race effect in recognition memory. Several articles in the special issue describe how event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to examine processing of faces that vary according to race, some of which have concluded that larger ERP amplitudes elicited by other-race (relative to own-race) faces indicates less efficient visual processing of other-race faces. I describe findings from ERP studies of race categorization that suggest an alternative interpretation–that other-race faces elicit stronger categorization, which impedes individuation of other-race faces. Suggestions for future research are offered.     

Methods and measures in developmental emotions research: some assembly required

The remarkable contributors to this special issue highlight the importance of developmental research on emotion and its regulation, as well as its conceptual and methodological challenges. This commentary offers some additional thoughts, especially concerning alternative views of the convergence of multiple measures of emotional responding, the conceptualization of emotion and emotion regulation, and future directions for work in this field. In the end, in light of the complex construction of emotion and its development, we may learn from studying the divergence among multiple components of emotional responding as we do from expectations of their convergence. In each case, some assembly is required.     

Sexual orientation and gender identity in schools: A call for more research in school psychology—No more excuses

Research focused on sexual orientation and gender identity among youth is scarce in school psychology journals. Graybill and Proctor (2016; this issue) found that across a sample of eight school support personnel journals only .3 to 3.0% of the articles since 2000 included lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT)-related research. It appears that special issues are a mechanism for publishing LGBT-related scholarship. This commentary includes a call for more research in school psychology and other related disciplines that intentionally addresses experiences of LGBT youth and their families. Two articles in this special section are summarized and critiqued with clear directions for future scholarship. Researchers and practitioners are ethically responsible for engaging in social justice oriented research and that includes assessing gender identity and sexual orientation in their studies and prevention program evaluations.     

Embracing complexity in research on learning from examples and from problem solving

This contribution is a commentary to a special issue titled “Example-based learning: New theoretical perspectives and advances to a contemporary instructional approach” published in Applied Cognitive Psychology (2020). In the commentary, the presented research is discussed with respect to three extensions compared with previous research, namely, theoretical frameworks, learning scenarios and domains. It concludes with some suggestions for methodological advancements.     

How Does Migration Affect Mothers’ and Fathers’ Roles Within their Families? Reflections on some Recent Research

Collectively, the articles in this special issue reveal that immigration has diverse effects on individual family members that vary depending on their gender and age. Such findings underscore the need for intensive analysis and comparison on a number of levels—fathers versus mothers, sons versus daughters, parents versus children. This commentary highlights some of the findings that emphasise the centrality of gender in colouring the experience of immigration for different family members. Limitations of the findings are noted and suggestions are made for future research examining the effects of migration on families and family members.