How Can Psychological Science Contribute to a Healthier, Happier, and More Sustainable World?

Reinventing the public square and early educational settings through culturally informed, community co-design: Playful Learning Landscapes

What if the environment could be transformed in culturally-responsive and inclusive ways to foster high-quality interactions and spark conversations that drive learning? In this article, we describe a new initiative accomplishing this, called Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL). PLL is an evidence-based initiative that blends findings from the science of learning with community-based participatory research to transform physical public spaces and educational settings into playful learning hubs. Here, we describe our model for conducting this research, which is mindful of three key components: community input, how children learn best, and what children need to learn to be successful in the 21st century economy. We describe how this model was implemented in two PLL case studies: one in a predominantly Latine community and the second in early childhood education classrooms. Furthermore, we describe how research employing our model can be rigorously and reliably evaluated using observational and methodological tools that respond to diverse cultural settings and learning outcomes. For example, our work evaluates how PLL impacts adult-child interaction quality and language use, attitudes about play and learning, and community civic engagement. Taken together, this article highlights new ways to involve community voices in developmental and educational research and provides a model of how science can be translated into practice and evaluated in culturally responsive ways. This synthesis of our process and evaluation can be used by researchers, policymakers, and educators to reimagine early educational experiences with an eye toward the built environment that children inhabit in everyday life, creating opportunities that foster lifelong learning.

Racial/Ethnic Minority Vocational Research Trends in Counseling Psychology and Multicultural Psychology Journals: A Trend Analysis Across 51 Years

This study extends Flores et al.’s (2006) 36-year analysis of racial/ethnic minority (REM) vocational research published in career journals to REM vocational research in eight counseling psychology and multicultural psychology journals across a span of 51 years. We identified 483 REM vocational studies published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (JCP), The Counseling Psychologist (TCP), Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development (JMCD), Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology (CDEMP), Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (JCCP), Journal of Black Psychology (JBP), Journal of Latina/o Psychology (JLP), and Asian American Journal of Psychology (AAJP) between 1969 and 2020. Results showed that less than 5% of all articles published in these journals during the past 49 years focused on vocational issues with REMs. Publication trends, article topics and type, samples, and leading individual and institutional contributors to REM vocational research are reported. JMCD published the largest percentage of these articles (33.9%, n = 132) as well as the largest percentage (18%) of REM vocational articles relative to other articles in its journal during this time frame. Implications of the findings are provided for expanding REM vocational scholarship in counseling psychology in the future.

Personality-informed intervention design: Examining how trait regulation can inform efforts to change behavior

Research that helps people change their behavior has the potential to improve the quality of lives, but it is too often approached in a way that divorces behavior from the people who need to enact it. In this paper, we propose a personality-informed approach to classifying behavior-change problems and designing interventions to address them. In particular, we argue that interventions will be most effective when they target the appropriate psychological process given the disposition of the participant and the desired duration of change. Considering these dimensions can help to reveal the differences among common types of behavior-change problems, and it can guide decisions about what kinds of intervention solutions will most effectively solve them. We review key concepts and findings from the personality literature that can help us understand the dynamic nature of dispositions and to identify the psychological processes that best explain both short-term variance in behavior and long-term development of personality. Drawing on this literature, we argue that different types of behavior-change problems require different forms of “trait regulation,” and we offer a series of propositions to be evaluated as potential guides for the design of intervention strategies to address them.

Do We Report the Information That Is Necessary to Give Psychology Away? A Scoping Review of the Psychological Intervention Literature 2000-2018

Psychologists are spending a considerable amount of time researching and developing interventions in hopes that their efforts can help to tackle some of society's pressing problems. Unfortunately, those hopes are often not realized-many interventions are developed and reported in journals but do not make their way into the broader world they were designed to change. One potential reason for this is that there may be a gap between the information reported in articles and the information others, such as practitioners, need to implement the findings. We explored this possibility in the current article. We conducted a scoping review to assess the extent to which the information needed for implementation is reported in psychological intervention articles. Results suggest psychological intervention articles report, at most, 64% of the information needed to implement interventions. We discuss the implications of this for both psychological theories and applying them in the world.

Open Science Promotes Diverse, Just, and Sustainable Research and Educational Outcomes

Open science initiatives, which are often collaborative efforts focused on making research more transparent, have experienced increasing popularity in the past decade. Open science principles of openness and transparency provide opportunities to advance diversity, justice, and sustainability by promoting diverse, just, and sustainable outcomes among both undergraduate and senior researchers. We review models that demonstrate the importance of greater diversity, justice, and sustainability in psychological science before describing how open science initiatives promote these values. Open science initiatives also promote diversity, justice, and sustainability through increased levels of inclusion and access, equitable distribution of opportunities and dissemination of knowledge, and increased sustainability stemming from increased generalizability. In order to provide an application of the concepts discussed, we offer a set of diversity, justice, and sustainability lens questions for individuals to use while assessing research projects and other organizational systems and consider concrete classroom applications for these initiatives.