Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a multidimensional psychological phenomenon with significant implications for mental, physical, and social wellbeing. Although research across psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and public health has grown rapidly, current theoretical approaches remain fragmented, often emphasizing only one level of analysis—biological, cognitive, sociocultural, developmental, or existential. This article aims to synthesize these disparate literatures to propose a unified Translational Framework of Loneliness (TFL), integrating evolutionary, affective, neurobiological, cultural, and relational processes. Evidence is reviewed demonstrating that loneliness is associated with heightened threat sensitivity, altered neuroendocrine and immune functioning, cognitive biases, disrupted socioemotional memory, and increased allostatic load. Cultures with different norms surrounding embeddedness, autonomy, and relational obligation shape both the experience and meaning of loneliness. Loneliness also varies across the lifespan, with notable spikes in adolescence and emerging adulthood, and unique existential expressions in later life. The TFL model provides a translational structure linking mechanisms to interventions, including psychological, social, cultural, and community-level strategies shown to reduce loneliness. Implications for interdisciplinary research, public mental health, social policy, and future intervention science are discussed.
Coaching psychology occupies a distinctively interdisciplinary position in contemporary applied psychology, drawing theoretical and methodological resources from cognitive-behavioural psychology, positive psychology, organisational science, sport science, health promotion, and adult education. Despite rapid growth, sustained questions persist about the domain’s intellectual coherence, theoretical foundations, and cumulative evidence base. The present study integrates a systematic literature review with three bibliometric techniques (citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-word analysis) and a qualitative content analysis to map the intellectual landscape of coaching psychology research. Searches conducted in Web of Science and Scopus yielded a final corpus of 109 peer-reviewed articles (2005–2024), analysed using VOSviewer software. Results reveal a maturing but fragmented domain characterised by strong growth in scholarly output, theoretical plurality spanning cognitive-behavioural, positive psychology, self-determination, sport psychology traditions, and methodological pluralism. Four research clusters were identified: evidence-based coaching outcomes, positive psychology applications, executive coaching and leadership development, and sport and performance coaching psychology. Persistent gaps include limited cross-cultural generalisability, insufficient mechanistic research, and underdeveloped interdisciplinary integration. These findings provide an empirically grounded mapping of coaching psychology’s scholarly landscape, advance understanding of its interdisciplinary character, and offer a targeted research agenda for strengthening theoretical coherence and cumulative knowledge within and across the discipline’s constituent sub-domains.
This paper advances a novel framework for understanding feelings of reality (FR), the elusive yet fundamental dimension through which the self and the world are felt as real. Drawing on descriptive phenomenology, clinical psychopathology, and altered-state research, we characterize FR as non-conceptual phenomenal qualities through which the self and world are experienced as immediate and substantial. We propose that FR are structured by six interacting candidate facets: subjective awakeness, vividness, experiential coherence, experiential embeddedness, bodily awareness, and presence. These facets define a continuum extending from the diminished realness of depersonalization and derealization, through ordinary wakefulness, to the intensified or hyper-real quality of some psychedelic, contemplative, near-death, and peak-like states. The proposed facets should be understood as provisional phenomenological characterizations of felt realness rather than as definitive empirical factors or as necessary and sufficient components present in every instance of feeling real. For each facet, we distinguish phenomenological evidence drawn from first-person, clinical, contemplative, and altered-state descriptions from measurement-related evidence drawn from self-report scales, clinical instruments, experimental findings, or adjacent operational constructs. By clarifying the structure of experiential realness, this framework offers a basis for future psychometric validation, clinical assessment and treatment of diminished realness, and epistemic analysis of heightened realness without conflating the felt reality of an experience with the ontological truth of its contents.
Psychology has long aspired to Nexus, a coherent body of knowledge that would integrate its many subfields into a cumulative science of the human mind and behavior. However, in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), moving closer to Nexus may paradoxically become the field’s greatest vulnerability. It could make psychological knowledge more susceptible to exploitation by AI systems, enabling them to surpass human researchers and gain extraordinary power to manipulate individuals. In this article, I argue that a state I call Babel, the opposite of Nexus and characterized by fragmentation, disunity, plurality of perspectives, and diverse forms of knowledge, can function as a safeguard against AI by preserving the subjectivity and richness that machines cannot easily replicate. Building on this foundation, I develop the idea of a “truly human psychology” that emphasizes unique personal experience, introspection, and creative expression. I propose both a radical version of this psychology, which resists universal frameworks entirely, and a pluralistic version that integrates uniquely human ways of knowing alongside psychology’s dominant natural science traditions. I conclude that embracing Babel need not mean abandoning the question of universality; paradoxically, it may provide a more fruitful path for exploring that possibility.
This article proposes a narrative approach to letters written by people interned as Jews at the Drancy camp between 1941 and 1944. Part of the interdisciplinary LettresCamps project, it combines history and psychology to analyse a corpus of around 300 letters - official, clandestine, or thrown from the deportation trains. These writings offer a rare insight into the subjective experience of internment, revealing emotions, daily concerns, and strategies designed to maintain ties with loved ones. The chosen methodology combines carrying out a thematic analysis across the corpus with an in-depth study of the dynamics of writing, examined through the analysis of individual letters. This dual approach makes it possible to identify the functions of writing and the forms of subjectivity mobilised, while highlighting, through the analysis of a letter, the most embodied dimension of these dynamics. Drawing on the combined contributions of history and psychology, the article highlights the emotional and relational dynamics perceptible in the correspondence. These letters form a "mosaic of moments" that together tell a story of internment and constitute, both individually and collectively, real acts of psychological resistance that helped to preserve connection, identity, and inner continuity in the face of the dehumanisation.
This article presents an introduction to a proposed transformational psychology. Our use of the term is to characterize a school of psychological thought, theory, and research that emphasizes those aspects of psychology directed toward the discernment and achievement of a common good-a good that will make the world a better place for all. A transformational psychologist has as a primary goal to make a positive, meaningful, and potentially enduring difference to the world, at some level. We contrast transformational psychology with transactional psychology, which is psychology directed toward achieving a kind of tit-for-tat exchange of rewards, such as the production of articles or the application of therapy, with primary goals such as the acquisition of resources, publications, grants, promotions, or other specifiable tangible rewards. We also contrast transformational psychology with pseudo-transformational psychology, which is the superficial appearance of transformation, but is actually directed toward the acquisition of resources at the expense of others and which too often results in doing harm to others. We review various schools of psychology and show how the distinction proposed here crosscuts other schools. We propose ways in which transformational psychology might become integrated into instruction, in psychology, and otherwise.
Well-being has been traditionally considered a multidimensional construct linked with different well-being capacities and the satisfaction of basic human needs. However, theories of well-being have in general rested on a dichotomous differentiation between 'positive' and 'negative' mental health, rather than seeing these as natural, dynamically occurring experiences part of a well-being process (i.e., growth). Therefore, this article suggests a growth theory of well-being, seeing well-being as a dynamic process of differentiation and integration, which were previously established as fundamental elements of various theories of change, personal growth, cognitive development and more. This article outlines the growth theory of well-being and its component processes of differentiation and integration, reviewing their roles in earlier growth theories. It then discusses the implications of adopting the growth theory of well-being.
Psychology has been a relatively disunified discipline since its inception, partly owing to the historical context in which it arose as a science. The interdisciplinary field of developmental science can potentially overcome this fragmentation. Specifically, the Developmental Systems (DS) approach recognizes that individuals, together with their contexts, constitute self-organizing, dynamic, complex systems best characterized by the processes that transpire when system components work together to build psychological attributes. This approach holds that these attributes emerge during development in ways that depend on spatial and temporal (i.e., historical) relations among system components. DNA works in collaboration with other factors in its local environment, so genetic determinism can be rejected; psychological traits cannot be predicted from genetic information alone. Research on the epigenetic control of gene expression has bolstered this insight, revealing how experiences influence genetic activity and, ultimately, behavior. Behavioral epigenetics likely bears on all psychological phenomena, putting it in a position to help unify the behavioral sciences. The DS perspective encourages skepticism of constructs that assign static traits to individuals and of tests that rely on genetic information alone to predict developmental outcomes. Because all characteristics develop-and because individuals are cohesive, highly integrated systems-psychology's unification is an attainable goal that will be advanced by adopting this perspective.
In this paper, I challenge the substance ontology underpinning contemporary theories of human motivation, which treat needs as stable, possessable entities. Dominant frameworks from Maslow's hierarchy to Self-Determination Theory fail to account for empirical evidence showing needs fluctuate across contexts, cycle nonlinearly over time, and influence one another recursively. I demonstrate that these failures stem from conceptualizing needs as things rather than processes. I adopted dynamic systems as a metatheoretical framework and integrated it with a process ontology (Whitehead's prehension and Bergson's dur & eacute;e) to present the Cyclical Interdependence Theory of Needs (CITN). CITN reconceptualizes needs as emergent, temporally embedded events organized through five principles: temporal embeddedness, recursive interdependence, contextual emergence, nonlinear dynamics, and adaptive learning. Theoretically, CITN shifts motivation research from measuring static traits to understanding dynamic processes, reorienting inquiry toward relational, embedded, and temporal phenomena. Methodologically, research grounded in CITN requires intensive longitudinal designs, person-specific modeling, and computational simulation that capture motivational dynamics invisible to cross-sectional approaches. Future research should prioritize crisis contexts where recursive feedback and temporal reorganization are most visible, apply CITN's methodological implications, and extend the theory to applied domains, including education, healthcare, organizational behavior, and community development.
Across cultures and generations, humans have continuously sought to understand their place in time: where they come from, who they are, and what role they play in shaping the future. Despite extensive research on psychological needs, dominant theories of motivation-Self-Determination Theory (SDT)-have focused primarily on present-oriented interpersonal and intrapersonal contexts. In this review, we introduce the Historical Psychological Need Satisfaction Model (HPNSM), a novel framework that embeds the three core psychological needs of SDT-relatedness, competence, and autonomy-into individuals' historical self-construal. We propose three corresponding constructs: historical belongingness (a sense of connection to a transgenerational historical community), historical self-efficacy (the belief that one can make a difference in history), and historical agency (the capacity to choose and author one's historical commitments). We review relevant theoretical and empirical literature on historical identity, collective memory, and sociotemporal motivation, and argue that historical experiences can serve as meaningful sources of psychological need satisfaction. We discuss how HPNSM can inform research on youth civic engagement, national identity, intergenerational transmission, and cross-cultural psychology. By bridging individual motivation with cultural-historical context, this model advances a temporally expanded understanding of psychological needs and opens new avenues for research in identity, meaning, and societal development.
The mainstream psychiatry literature contains the common and mostly unchallenged claim that schizophrenia is roughly 80% heritable. A 2003 twin study meta-analysis by genetic researchers Patrick Sullivan, Kenneth Kendler, and Michael Neale is often cited in support of this claim. The author argues that the 81% heritability estimate they produced is invalid because (1) schizophrenia twin studies are based on an unsupported key assumption; (2) especially in the older studies, schizophrenia was not reliably identified (diagnosed) for research purposes; and (3) among other problems, heritability estimates do not indicate the "magnitude" of supposed genetic influences. The author then discusses how Sullivan and colleagues performed their meta-analysis and their decisions on which twin studies to include. They decided to "relax" their "a priori" inclusion criteria because only four studies qualified. This decision led to their inclusion of mid-20th-century studies conducted by researchers with strong genetic confirmation biases, who did not define schizophrenia or make blindfolded diagnoses. The author concludes that Sullivan and colleagues' 81% schizophrenia heritability estimate should be disregarded in the context of a proposed re-evaluation of behavioral twin studies and their underlying assumptions. More than six decades of failed DNA-based attempts to identify genes that cause schizophrenia support this conclusion.
The replication crisis shook the discipline of psychology and has led to reforms such as open science and large-scale replication projects. Yet, it is not psychology's first crisis, and it is likely not the last. In this paper, we look at three major crisis discussions in the history of psychology: discussions in the early 20th century about the possibility of psychology as a natural-scientific discipline; discussions in the 1960s-70s about the methods, relevance and scientific status of the discipline; and discussions in the 2010s about replication. We compare these crises to determine what generates crisis discussions in psychology and how they tend to unfold and be resolved. We argue that, despite differences across these crisis discussions, some fundamental questions about the object of research and proper methods of psychology recur, as do considerations related to epistemology, ontology, ethics and politics. Our analysis indicates that the current responses to the replication crisis, although valuable, are not ultimate solutions because they deflect fundamental questions and postpone the reconsideration of the ideals of psychology as a science.
I argue that metatheories that inform social cognitive approaches to personality and relational developmental systems overlap in significant ways to provide an integrative framework for understanding moral formation across the lifecourse. Social cognitive theory describes how cognitive-affective units of early personality are solidified into autobiographical memory as a result of parental dialogic scaffolding. Goals, plans, and expectations of the moral self-as-agent are then folded into narrative form by young adulthood to create a moral identity that is action-guiding for the life-course. But moral identity will need to be fortified by features of moral wisdom to better confront the permanent adversities that invariably confound attempts to live a life that is good for one to live. Moral wisdom is held to be both personological (aligning with knowledge-and-appraisal aspects of personality architecture) and metacognitive (aligning with standard accounts of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation processes).
Psychological essentialism is the tendency to attribute a shared, underlying, and unobservable essence to social categories, which can lead to bias toward them. This meta-analysis synthesized correlational ( N = 27,731 participants, k = 298 effects) and experimental ( N = 3,728 participants, k = 22 effects) evidence (January 2000–May 2024) associating essentialism with ethnoracial (racial, ethnic, national groups) bias. Essentialism and bias were moderately positively correlated ( r = 0.25, p < .001), which was attenuated when accounting for study-level and sample characteristics. Study region, setting, and gender were important covariates. Type of essentialism was a significant moderator. However, essentialism did not predict bias ( g = 0.21, p = .181). This held across different types of essentialism, which may reflect low statistical power in some instances. We found no evidence that study quality moderated the essentialism–bias association but found evidence of publication bias only with the correlational studies. The correlational evidence, along with the absence of causal evidence, suggests that essentialism may predict bias only under certain conditions and/or that bias may lead to increases in essentialism. However, experimental limitations may obscure these effects. Future research should explore additional moderators, test motivational frameworks and associative mechanisms, and refine experimental manipulations.
Aggression is a complex behavior that is difficult to capture using traditional methods, such as questionnaires and lab-based aggression tasks. These methods present challenges due to social desirability bias and limitations in translating findings into real-world situations. In this review, we discuss how emerging technologies, including virtual reality, video games, hyperscanning, biosignal recording, ecological momentary assessment and social media analysis, offer improved construct and ecological validity and can contribute to the refinement of integrative theoretical models of aggression. We comprehensively address advantages (e.g., immersion, realistic simulation, real-time and context-sensitive data collection and interpersonal dynamics) and limitations of each technology compared to traditional methods and highlight remaining gaps in aggression research. Additionally, we examine aggressive behavior related to the emergence of new technologies in digital spaces, focusing particularly on cyberbullying and the metaverse. We also review machine learning approaches for detecting cyber-aggression on social media platforms. We propose shifting from static, individual-level assessments to dynamic, context-sensitive frameworks that capture aggression in real time, in more ecological settings and digital environments. This shift in operationalization holds the potential to advance theoretical understanding, guide future research and inform clinical and forensic interventions.
Willingly engaging in intrinsically unwanted sexual behavior (i.e., consensual unwanted sex; CUWS) is a common experience in romantic relationships that can benefit, yet sometimes instead harm, individual and relational well-being. However, psychological science lacks an organizing framework for understanding how people evaluate their experiences of CUWS and subsequently themselves and their partners. The current article fills this gap by providing a comprehensive model of this process. This model incorporates evaluations of CUWS (e.g., acceptability, motives) that shape self- and partner-attitudes, identifies factors that determine those evaluations (e.g., gender roles, communication), and makes novel predictions about the individual differences and qualities of the relationship that should determine the implications of CUWS. By integrating diverse theoretical perspectives and lines of research on topics such as sexuality, moral judgments, behavioral evaluations, and romantic relationships, the current model provides a useful framework for understanding how people evaluate their experiences of CUWS and offers novel questions regarding the implications of CUWS that future research should address.
This paper examines how William James (1842-1910) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) developed fundamentally different philosophical frameworks for understanding consciousness, nature, and religious experience. Through close textual analysis of primary sources and engagement with recent historiographical debates, this study demonstrates that James's evolution from "supernaturalist" phenomenology to religious naturalism grounded in radical empiricism differs fundamentally from Jung's psycho-epistemological framework emphasizing archetypal structures. The analysis reveals how their divergent ontological commitments-James's neutral monism versus Jung's careful distinction between psychological and metaphysical reality-led to distinct methodological approaches to religious phenomena. James evaluated religious experiences pragmatically for their transformative "fruits," while Jung interpreted them as symbolic expressions of individuation processes. These findings contribute to understanding how early psychology navigated between scientific materialism and religious phenomena, offering insights relevant to contemporary consciousness studies. Rather than imposing anachronistic categories, this historically grounded analysis clarifies both thinkers' actual positions while exploring their enduring significance for psychology and philosophy of mind.
