Cognitive theory posits that how one interprets an event determines how one feels about it and what one will try to do to cope with it. It further suggests that inaccurate beliefs and maladaptive information processing lie at the core of most disorders. Cognitive therapy seeks to reduce distress and relieve dysfunction by teaching patients to examine the accuracy of their beliefs and to use their own behaviors to test their validity.
The history of cognitive therapy is in essence a tale of two cities and one institute. Aaron Beck, the progenitor of the approach, did his original work in Philadelphia focused largely on depression before he expanded to other disorders. He spent time subsequently at Oxford University at the invitation of department chair Michael Gelder, whose young protégés David Clark and Paul Salkovskis refined the cognitive model for the anxiety disorders and supercharged their treatment. Anke Ehlers, who extended the model to posttraumatic stress, joined them in the 1990s before all three decamped for the Institute of Psychiatry in London, only to return a decade later. Jack Rachman at the Institute was an early mentor who commissioned conceptual treatises from all three. Chris Fairburn, who stayed at Oxford, developed a cognitive behavioral treatment for the eating disorders that focuses on changing beliefs, and Daniel Freeman from the Institute joined in 2011 with an emphasis on schizophrenia. Cognitive therapy has had a major impact on treatment in the United States but even more so in the United Kingdom, where it reigns supreme.
Cognitive therapy encourages patients to use their own behaviors to test their beliefs but keeps its focus squarely on those beliefs as the key mechanism to be changed. It is one of the most efficacious and enduring treatments for the various psychiatric disorders.
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Article
Aaron Beck and the History of Cognitive Therapy
Steven D. Hollon
Article
Acquired Brain Injury (Stroke and TBI) in Later Life
Megan S. Barker, Emily C. Gibson, and Gail A. Robinson
The term “acquired brain injury” refers to any type of brain damage that occurs after birth. Two main types of acquired brain injury are stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). A stroke occurs when there is a blockage or bleed in the vascular system of the brain, while a TBI results from an external force to the head. Older adults are at a higher risk of both stroke and TBI; thus, overall incidence is increasing as the proportion of older adults in the population is growing. Stroke and TBI result in immediate and long-term cognitive changes. Impairments in the domains of language, attention, memory, executive functions, perception, and social cognition have been documented following stroke and TBI. However, strokes tend to cause focal or selective cognitive disorders, while cognitive deficits following TBI are widespread and can be generalized. Individuals who have suffered a stroke or TBI may also experience psychosocial changes; for example, symptoms of depression and anxiety are common. Functional outcomes, including independence in activities, are varied and are associated with a range of factors including age, injury severity, cognitive disorders, and psychosocial factors. To achieve optimal outcomes for individuals following stroke and TBI, and to reduce the impact of the injury on everyday functioning, a multidisciplinary rehabilitation process is recommended.
Article
Action Regulation Theory
Hannes Zacher
Action regulation theory is a meta-theory on the regulation of goal-directed behavior. The theory explains how workers regulate their behavior through cognitive processes, including goal development and selection, internal and external orientation, planning, monitoring of execution, and feedback processing. Moreover, action regulation theory focuses on the links between these cognitive processes, behavior, the objective environment, and objective outcomes. The action regulation process occurs on multiple levels of action regulation, including the sensorimotor or skill level, the level of flexible action patterns, the intellectual or conscious level, and the meta-cognitive heuristic level. These levels range from unconscious and automatized control of actions to conscious thought, and from muscular action to thought processes. Action regulation at lower levels in this hierarchy is more situation specific and requires less cognitive effort than action regulation at higher levels.
Workers further develop action-oriented mental models that include long-term cognitive representations of input conditions, goals, plans, and expected and prescribed results of action, as well as knowledge about the boundary conditions of action and the transformation procedures that turn goals into expected results. The accuracy and level of detail of such action-oriented mental models is closely associated with the efficiency and effectiveness of action regulation. One of three foci can be in the foreground of action regulation: task, social context, or self. A task focus is most strongly associated with high efficiency and effectiveness of action regulation, because it links task-related goals with relevant plans, behavior, and feedback. Action regulation theory has been applied to understand several phenomena in the field of industrial, work, and organizational psychology, including proactive work behavior, work-related learning and error management, entrepreneurship, occupational strain and well-being, reciprocal influences between personality and work, innovation, teamwork, career development, and successful aging at work.
Article
ADHD in Children and Adolescents
Kelsey E. Woods, Christina M. Danko, and Andrea Chronis-Tuscano
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by developmentally inappropriate levels of hyperactivity, impulsivity, and/or inattention. ADHD is chronic, may persist into adulthood, and is associated with impairment in social and academic/work domains across the lifespan. Children and adolescents with ADHD often present with executive function deficits and emotion dysregulation, and these deficits may increase impairment and risk for co-occurring disorders. The etiology of ADHD is not yet understood, though research suggests that biological and environmental factors (e.g., family, community) contribute to its development and course. It should be noted that ADHD commonly co-occurs with additional psychiatric disorders, such as oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), and major depressive disorder.
Evidence-based assessment of ADHD requires information from multiple informants using multiple assessment methods to determine the presence of ADHD symptoms across settings and any co-occurring disorders. The evidence-based treatment options for ADHD are manifold. Pharmacotherapy for ADHD is common, although numerous behavioral interventions are also effective. Stimulant medications are commonly prescribed and are typically effective in ameliorating core ADHD symptoms. There is also evidence that the nonstimulant medication atomoxetine substantially decreases the symptoms of ADHD. Importantly, medication therapy works to reduce symptoms but typically does not alleviate the impairments associated with the disorder. Combined medication and behavioral interventions are more likely to reduce impairments and normalize behavior.
Article
Affect and Emotions in Social Cognition: How Feelings Influence Thinking
Joseph P. Forgas
Affective states have a profound influence on how people view the world, yet the cognitive consequences of feelings for thinking have received relatively little attention until recently. There is growing evidence that people’s affective reactions have been shaped by evolutionary processes and have an adaptive influence on the way information is processed. There is now extensive evidence for the adaptive benefits of positive and negative affect for the way people think and process social information. Based on recent experimental research, there are two kinds of affective influences: affect congruence, in which an affective state influences the content and valence of thinking, and processing effects, where an affective state has a regulatory influence on the kind of processing strategy adopted. The evidence shows a broad spectrum of affective influences on memory, attention, inferences, associations, and judgments, as well as the way more complex social behaviors are planned and executed. All affective states, including the negative ones, confer significant adaptive benefits, serving as useful inputs to information processing strategies. These experimental findings, and recent theories linking affect and cognition have important practical implications for understanding how affective states influence everyday thinking and behavior.
Article
Ageism in the Workplace
David M. Cadiz, Amy C. Pytlovany, and Donald M. Truxillo
The population is aging in most industrialized nations around the world, and this trend is anticipated to continue well into the future. This demographic shift impacts the workforce in that the average age of workers is increasing, and the workplace is becoming more age diverse, meaning different generations of employees are working side by side now more than ever before. Increasing age diversity can be problematic if misguided age-related attitudes, biases, and behaviors lead to ageism—the stigmatization of, and discrimination against, people based on age. Evidence of the impact of ageism in the workplace is being observed in increasing age-related discrimination claims as well as increased time for older people to find employment.
Workplace ageism manifests from cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. Age stereotypes are associated with the cognitive component, age-related prejudice is related to the affective component, and age discrimination is aligned with the behavioral component. There is an abundance of research identifying age-related stereotypes and it is thought that these stereotypes influence how workplace decisions are made. Age-related prejudice research indicates that older workers are generally viewed more negatively than younger workers which can result in lower performance appraisals or older workers’ receiving harsher consequences for lower performance. Finally, age-discrimination research has identified that older workers struggle to find employment, to receive training and development opportunities, and to advance their careers. Although the majority of research on workplace ageism has focused on older individuals, younger workers also face challenges related to their age and this is a line of research that needs further exploration. Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence supports claims that workplace ageism has wide-ranging effects on individuals, groups/teams, organizations, and society.
Article
Aggression and Anger in Sport and Performance
Jerzy Kosiewicz
Aggressive behaviors and attitudes are investigated first of all from the viewpoint of psychology, sociology, and philosophy. These three disciplines could provide a coherent groundwork for the science on aggression in sport. The science on aggression in sport would be a discipline united by a bond between related issues and a unity of subject, and not by one uniform method.
There are two different viewpoints concerning aggression in sport: the cognitive and the ideological. The cognitive viewpoint approaches sports phenomena objectively in order to describe, explain, and compare them—that is, to present the real situation. The ideological viewpoint approaches the subject in an ideological way; that is, it strives for to presenting sport in the most favorable light, while attempting to hide its vices. This viewpoint makes it nearly impossible to diagnose the existing state of affairs, Attitudes towards aggression in sport, while taking into account other criteria, may be divided into the cognitive and the commonsense interpretations. Proponents of the commonsense viewpoint suggest that aggression is a solely negative entity and that it takes place only in the form of emotionally driven aggression meant to do harm. The cognitive interpretation suggests that there exist two forms of aggression in athletic rivalry: emotional aggression aimed at doing harm to an opponent and necessary aggression resulting from the regulations of a given sport.
Aggression in sport—considered from the viewpoint of regulations of particular sports—may be either necessary (that is, instrumental) or non-instrumental (that is, potential in the sense that it enables expression of emotions which are not provided for by regulations). Aggressive behavior is necessary when called for by the regulations of a given sport, specifically, among others, combat sports such as boxing, judo, or wrestling. Competitors who avoid fighting and who do not manifest aggressive behaviors in such a field are induced to manifest them and—if this does not bring results—may be punished by referees and, as a last resort, sent off.
Article
Aggression: Risk Factors in the Person and the Situation
Barbara Krahé
Aggressive behavior is defined as social behavior carried out with the intention to harm. Violence denotes those forms of aggression that are intended to cause severe physical harm. Aggressive behavior has severe negative consequences for individuals, social groups, and societies as a whole. Therefore, understanding why some individuals are more prone to engaging in aggressive behavior than others and some situational circumstances and social contexts are more likely to elicit aggressive behavior is a critical task. Influential psychological theories of aggression conceptualize aggression as the result of the interplay between variables in the person and the situation. To explain individual differences in aggressive behavior, one line of research has looked at broad personality dimensions, such as self-esteem and narcissism, lack of self-control, and the “Big-Five” personality factors. Evidence shows that high narcissism, low self-control, low openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness, and high neuroticism are linked to a higher propensity to engage in aggressive behavior. Another line of research has focused on more circumscribed, aggression-related personality constructs, demonstrating that individuals who are habitually anger-prone, have a tendency ruminate about anger-eliciting experiences, and show a hostile attributional style in terms of seeing other persons’ behavior as an expression of hostile intent are more likely to show aggressive behavior. On the side of the situation and social environment, several conditions have been identified under which the likelihood of aggressive behavior is increased. Individuals are more likely to show aggressive behavior when they have consumed alcohol, after they have experienced social rejection by others, when aggressive cues, such as weapons, are present in the situation, and when they have access to a firearm. Aggression is also more likely to be shown under conditions of anonymity and high temperature and as a result of regular exposure to depictions of violence in the media. In addition to such “main effects,” there is evidence of an interactive effect of individual and situational characteristics. For example, the impact of exposure to violent media is greater on individuals with a higher disposition to show aggressive behavior, and the effect of alcohol consumption on aggression is greater among people who are habitually prone to engage in angry rumination. Approaches to preventing aggression may build on the evidence on personal and situational differences. For example, anger management trainings may promote better control of angry impulses, focusing on the personal risk factors for aggression, whereas providing role models who show nonaggressive responses in anger-eliciting situations reflects a focus on situational interventions. In conclusion, personality and situational variables need to be considered in combination and interaction to predict when aggressive behavior is likely to occur. Gaining a better understanding of the factors promoting aggressive behavior needs to remain high on the agenda for theory building and empirical research in psychology.
Article
Aging and Cognitive Skill Learning
Jack Kuhns and Dayna R. Touron
The study of aging and cognitive skill learning is concerned with age-related changes and differences in how we gather, store, and use information and abilities. As life expectancy continues to rise, resulting in greater numbers and proportions of older individuals in the population, understanding the development and retention of skills across the lifespan is increasingly important. Older adults’ task performance in cognitive skill learning is often equal to that of young adults, albeit not as efficient, where older adults often require more time to complete training. Investigations of age differences in fundamental cognitive processes of attention, memory, or executive functioning generally reveal declines in older adults. These are related to a slowing of cognitive processing. Slowing in cognitive processing results in longer time necessary to complete tasks which can interfere with the fidelity of older adults’ cognitive processes in time-limited scenarios. Despite this, older adults maintain comparable rates of learning with young adults, albeit with some reduced efficiency in more complex tasks. The effectiveness of older adults’ learning is also impacted by a lesser tendency to recognize and adopt efficient learning strategies, as well as less flexibility in strategy use relative to younger adults. In learning tasks that involve a transition from using a complex initial strategy to relying on memory retrieval, older adults show a volitional avoidance of memory that is related to lower memory confidence and an impoverished mental model of the task. Declines in learning are not entirely problematic from a functional perspective, however, as older adults can often rely upon their extensive knowledge to compensate for certain deficiencies, particularly in everyday tasks. Indeed, domains where older adults have maintained expertise are somewhat insulated from other age-related declines.
Article
Aging Couples: Benefits and Costs of Long Intimate Relations
Victoria I. Michalowski, Denis Gerstorf, and Christiane A. Hoppmann
Aging does not occur in isolation, but often involves significant others such as spouses. Whether such dyadic associations involve gains or losses depends on a myriad of factors, including the time frame under consideration. What is beneficial in the short term may not be so in the long term, and vice versa. Similarly, what is beneficial for one partner may be costly for the other, or the couple unit over time. Daily dynamics between partners involving emotion processes, health behaviors, and collaborative cognition may accumulate over years to affect the longer-term physical and mental health outcomes of either partner or both partners across adulthood and into old age. Future research should move beyond an individual-focused approach to aging and consider the importance of and interactions among multiple time scales to better understand how, when, and why older spouses shape each other’s aging trajectories, both for better and for worse.
Article
Aging Societies and the Ethical Challenges of Long Life
Allison R. Heid and Steven H. Zarit
Individuals are living longer than they ever have before with average life expectancy at birth estimated at 79 years of age in the United States. A greater proportion of individuals are living to advanced ages of 85 or more and the ratio of individuals 65 and over to individuals of younger age groups is shrinking. Disparities in life expectancy across genders and races are pronounced. Financial challenges of sustaining the older population are substantial in most developed and many developing countries. In the United States in particular, employer-based pension programs are diminishing. Furthermore, Social Security will begin taking in less money than it pays out as early as 2023, and the debate over its future in part entails discussions of equitable distribution of resources for the young in need and the old. Living longer is associated with a greater number of chronic health conditions—over two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries in the United States have two or more chronic health conditions that require complex self-management regimes partnered with informal and formal care services from family caregivers and institutional long-term services and supports. Caregiver burden and stress is high as are quality care deficiencies in residential long-term care settings. The balance of honoring individuals’ autonomous wishes and providing person-centered care that also addresses the practicalities of safety is an ever-present quandary. Furthermore, complex decisions regarding end-of-life care and treatments plague the medical and social realms, as more money is spent at the end of life than at any other point and individuals’ wishes for less invasive treatment are often not accommodated. Yet, despite these challenges of later life, a large percentage of older individuals are giving financial support, time, and energy to younger generations, who are increasingly strained by economic hardship, the pressures on dual earner parents, and the problems faced by single parenthood. Older individuals’ engagement in society and the help they provide others runs counter to stereotypes that render them helpless and lonely. Overall, the ethical challenges faced by society due to the aging of the population are considerable. Difficult decisions that must be addressed include the sustainability of programs, resources, and social justice in care, as well as how to marshal the resources, talents, and wisdom that older people provide.
Article
Aging Workforce Issues from a Multilevel Approach
Lale M. Yaldiz, Franco Fraccaroli, and Donald M. Truxillo
The proportion of older people in the industrialized workforce is increasing owing to the aging of the baby-boom generation, improved health in industrialized countries, changing retirement laws, need for additional income by older workers, and entry of fewer younger people into the workforce in some countries. This “graying” trend of the workforce raises a number of issues such as the needs, motivation, job attitudes, and behaviors of older workers; how to manage age diversity issues at work; late career issues; and preparing the worker and the organization for retirement. Specifically, older worker issues as a research topic includes work-relevant changes taking place within individuals as they age (e.g., physical, cognitive, and personality changes); how older workers are affected by their physical and social environments; the sources of age stereotyping and discrimination and how to combat them; and how these factors affect outcomes such as older workers’ well-being, health, attitudes, motivation, performance, and desire to continue working.
Article
A Historical View on Attitudes and Persuasion
Pablo Briñol, Richard E. Petty, and Joshua J Guyer
The history of attitudes research can be organized into three main sections covering attitude definition and measurement, attitude-behavior relationships, and attitude change. First, an evaluation of the history of attitude measurement reveals three relatively distinct phases: an early phase in which the classic direct self-report procedures were developed, a middle phase focused on “indirect” assessment devices, and a modern phase in which various measures designed to capture people’s automatic or “implicit” attitudes have flourished. Second, the history of attitude-behavior correspondence can be organized also around three broad themes: an early period in which the presumed close association between attitudes and behaviors was largely an article of faith; a middle period in which some researchers concluded that little, if any, relationship existed between measures of attitudes and overt behaviors; and a more recent period in which the resolution of prior issues stimulated an explosion of research focused on identifying the moderators and psychological mechanisms responsible for attitude-behavior correspondence. Finally, the history of research and ideas regarding attitude change and persuasion can be organized around several prominent theories focused on distinct single processes, dual processes, or multiple processes, each of which are still used by contemporary attitudes researchers.
Article
A History of Pavlovian Science
Gabriel Ruiz and Natividad Sánchez
Transnational historiography, which emerged in the 1990s, covers historical phenomena that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state, analyzing the processes of circulation, transformation and hybridization of scientific ideas and practices across national frontiers. When scientific knowledge flows between different countries, the ideas that emerge in one particular national context adapt to the new local contexts of their hosts, with their particular cultural, social, political and scientific traditions. In psychology, the transnational approach provides a productive theoretical framework capable of going beyond the traditional US-centered perspective that has dominated the historiography of psychology since the mid-20th century. This US-based historiography has, for example, interpreted the historical influence of I. P. Pavlov in terms of two main factors: his methodological contribution—the conditioned reflex—and the existence of a behaviorist tradition in the receptor psychology community. However, a more global analysis questions the need for these two elements and, at the same time, offers insights into the conditions that facilitated or hindered the flow of Pavlovian science beyond the United States. Thus, for example, between 1903 and 1970 the dissemination and appropriation of the Pavlovian science of conditioned reflexes took two different routes: in America, scientific aspects and factors dominated; whereas elsewhere, politics prevailed over science. This happened in countries such as China, Cuba, and Spain, with dictatorial regimes at different ends of the political spectrum, where Pavlov’s work arrived under the auspices of government programs to modernize scientific and clinical institutions. Once Pavlov’s ideas had been introduced through reform programs in each country, they were accepted or rejected depending on whether the sign of the regime in question converged with the ideology prevailing in the Soviet Union, which it did in China and Cuba, but not in Spain. In these countries, where psychology did not have strong institutional roots and behaviorism was not a dominant approach, Pavlovian ideas found a receptive audience among health professionals-doctors, psychiatrists, and clinical psychologists - keen to embrace new ideas and treatments for mental disorders. Thus, from a transnational perspective, the global repercussion of Pavlov’s ideas went far beyond the strictly methodological sphere.
Article
A History of the Concepts of Harmony in Chinese Culture
Louise Sundararajan
This historical overview of the concepts of harmony in Chinese culture situates the topic in the ecological context of a strong-ties society that fosters a type of rationality that privileges symmetry over asymmetry. Analysis of the discourse of harmony focuses on the texts of two native schools of thought—Confucianism and Taoism—and briefly mentions Buddhism (a religion imported from India). The modern history of harmony has just begun but is already portentous. The turbulent course of China’s rapid modernization suggests the possibility that as China transitions from a strong-ties society to the weak-ties global market, harmony may be encountering, for the first time, contradictions that defy harmonization. Whatever the future holds for the Chinese legacy of harmony, its contribution to the happiness and well-being of the individuals in their intimate relationship with self and others is likely to remain unchallenged.
Article
Alcohol Abuse and Drug Use in Sport and Performance
Matthew P. Martens
Issues associated with athletics, alcohol abuse, and drug use continue to be salient aspects of popular culture. These issues include high-profile athletes experiencing public incidents as a direct or indirect result of alcohol and/or drug use, the role that performance-enhancing drugs play in impacting outcomes across a variety of professional and amateur contests, and the public-health effects alcohol abuse and drug use can have among athletes at all competitive levels. For some substances, like alcohol abuse, certain groups of athletes may be particularly at-risk relative to peers who are not athletes. For other substances, participating in athletics may serve as a protective factor. Unique considerations are associated with understanding alcohol abuse and drug use in sport. These include performance considerations (e.g., choosing to use or not use a certain substance due to concerns about its impact on athletic ability), the cultural context of different types of sporting environments that might facilitate or inhibit alcohol and/or drug use, and various internal personality characteristics and traits that may draw one toward both athletic activity and substance use. Fortunately, there are several effective strategies for preventing and reducing alcohol abuse and drug use, some of which have been tested specifically among athlete populations. If such strategies were widely disseminated, they would have the potential to make a significant impact on problems associated with alcohol abuse and drug use in sport and athletics.
Article
Alternative Therapies: Sociodrama, Nude Therapy, Primal Scream, Psychedelic
Erika Dyck and Emmanuel Delille
Alternative therapies are sometimes associated with non-biological approaches, or practices that do not undergo rigorous testing or produce consistently repeatable results. In the 1970s, some alternative therapies also openly embraced spiritual dimensions that directly conflicted with a Western bio-medical paradigm, placing them within a category of new age medicine, suggesting that such therapies were both eclectic and outside the boundaries of orthodox clinical care. The timing and location of these therapies reveals a particular context that gave rise to treatments seeking non-orthodox approaches, and arguably for a set of conditions that also emerged out of a Cold War context of affluence, dissatisfaction, and cultural anxiety. Some of these alternative therapies overlapped, with founders and consumers borrowing principles from different therapies to produce an approach that itself might be considered alternative to orthodox or mainstream western bio-medical practice. Situated predominantly on the American west coast, in California, these alternative therapies are illustrative of a regional culture of therapy. One, in particular, that embraced elements of radicalism alongside a collision of individualistic and collective approaches to care and responsibility. This article examines four such therapies: psychedelics, primal scream, nude therapy, and sociodrama. It is argued that beyond the inherent differences among them and their common flirtations with orthodox biomedicine, these four sets of practices are also historically significant for what they reveal about the place of psychology as a discipline after the Second World War. With each of these therapies, their history reveals a tension with psychoanalysis that attempts to redefine the relationship between the therapist and the patient. Although none of these therapies endured in their original form into the 21st century, revisiting this history offers insight into the changing state of psychotherapy in the latter half of the 20th century, and a focus on alternative therapies helps to elucidate some of the professional and cultural tensions that fuelled subsequent changes in the therapeutic landscape.
Article
Analysis of Dyadic Data in Lifespan Developmental Research
Gizem Hülür and Elisa Weber
Lifespan development is embedded in multiple social systems and social relationships. Lifespan developmental and relationship researchers study individual codevelopment in various dyadic social relationships, such as dyads of parents and children or romantic partners. Dyadic data refers to types of data for which observations from both members of a dyad are available. The analysis of dyadic data requires the use of appropriate data-analytic methods that account for such interdependencies. The standard actor-partner interdependence model, the dyadic growth curve model, and the dyadic dual change score model can be used to analyze data from dyads. These models allow examination of questions related to dyadic associations such as whether individual differences in an outcome can be predicted by one’s own (actor effects) and the other dyad member’s (partner effects) level in another variable, correlated change between dyad members, and cross-lagged dyadic associations, that is, whether one dyad member’s change can be predicted by the previous levels of the other dyad member. The choice of a specific model should be guided by theoretical and conceptual considerations as well as by features of the data, such as the type of dyad, the number and spacing of observations, or distributional properties of variables.
Article
Anglo-American Psychology in the Cold War
Marcia E. Holmes
From the end of World War II until roughly 1989, global leaders feared that cataclysmic war would break out between the world’s two superpower states, the Soviet Union and the United States. Though such a confrontation did not occur, the stalemate between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States—with its simmering fears, proxy battles, and psychological warfare—became known as the Cold War. Psychological expertise played an important role in the Cold War, especially within Western democracies like the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. In these countries, citizens tended to view the Cold War as a “battle for minds”: a fight against communist political ideology, totalitarianism, social conformity, and other threats to individual mental freedom. Anglo-American psychology flourished within this intellectual environment by finding new topics and applications for research, new sources of funding, and a new image as essential to the functioning of healthy democracy.
Historians continue to debate how the Cold War influenced the field of psychology. Overall, the strategic partnership between psychology and the “military-industrial complex” was limited to certain initiatives. In some cases, Anglo-American psychologists who used their expertise to fight the Cold War were led into questionable pursuits, resulting in greater public scrutiny and even scandals for themselves and their profession. Nonetheless, the Cold War had a significant impact on Anglo-American psychology by making the relationship between psychological knowledge and democratic values a continual subject of public concern.
Article
Anxiety Disorders in Children and Young People
Cathy Creswell, Sasha Walters, Brynjar Halldorsson, and Peter J. Lawrence
Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders among children and young people, affecting an estimated 6.5% of children and young people worldwide. Childhood anxiety disorders often persist into adulthood if left untreated and are associated with a significant emotional and financial cost to individuals, their families, and wider society. Models of the development and maintenance of childhood anxiety disorders have underpinned prevention and treatment approaches, and cognitive behavioral treatments have good evidence for their efficacy. Ongoing challenges for the field include the need to improve outcomes for those that do not benefit from current prevention and treatment, and to increase access to those who could benefit.
