Neuroimaging as a New Tool in the Toolbox of Psychological Science

Eye Movements When Looking at Potential Friends and Romantic Partners

Eye movements of 105 heterosexual undergraduate students (36 males) were monitored while viewing photographs of men and women identified as a potential mate or a potential friend. Results showed that people looked at the head and chest more when assessing potential mates and looked at the legs and feet more when assessing potential friends. Single people looked at the photographs longer and more frequently than coupled people, especially when evaluating potential mates. In addition, eye gaze was a valid indicator of relationship interest. For women, looking at the head corresponded to greater interest in friendship, whereas for men looking at the head corresponded to less interest in friendship. These findings show that relational goals and gender may affect the way people scan their environment and search for relevant information in line with their goals.

Technology and Assessment in Selection

As technology evolves and is incorporated into testing and assessment applications, psychologists have opportunities to improve testing processes making scores on measurement tools more accurate, the administration process more efficient, and often the assessment process more realistic. At the same time, they also must contend with fundamental changes in the assumptions made about good testing practices and confront new problems that are created by technological enhancements. Issues such as distractions and their implications for test performance, changes to the applicant pool and their effect on adverse impact, and cheating and its impact on test scores must be explored. This article provides examples of how technology is being used in tests and assessments, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of relying on technology, and offers an agenda for future research.

The Promise and Peril of Organizational Neuroscience

In this short response, we extend Lindebaum’s ethical analysis of organizational neuroscience. We do so in three ways. First, we examine the contemporary technical state of modern neuroscientific tools. Second, we consider the ethical implications of future investigations, including the possibility that neuroscience could enrich and otherwise improve peoples’ lives. Finally, we argue for a more open ethical dialogue—not only one that includes those who might be harmed by neuroscientific interventions but also one that does not neglect those who can be legitimately benefited.

The brain basis of emotion: a meta-analytic review

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain-emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories.

Mistreating Psychology in the Decades of the Brain

We systematically mistreat psychological phenomena, both logically and clinically. This article explores three contentions: that the dominant discourse in modern cognitive, affective, and clinical neuroscience assumes that we know how psychology/biology causation works when we do not; that there are serious intellectual, clinical, and policy costs to pretending we do know; and that crucial scientific and clinical progress will be stymied as long as we frame psychology, biology, and their relationship in currently dominant ways. The arguments are developed with emphasis on misguided attempts to localize psychological function via neuroimaging, misunderstandings about the role of genetics in psychopathology, and untoward constraints on health-care policy and clinical service delivery. A particular challenge, articulated but not resolved in this article, is determining what constitutes adequate explanation in the relationship between psychology and biology.