Amy Lim

The term “languishing” gained widespread recognition and appeal during the COVID-19 pandemic as it succinctly captured the pervasive sense of stagnation, disconnection, and emotional depletion experienced by many individuals amidst prolonged uncertainty and isolation. While existing research on the topic of languishing during COVID-19 has largely focused on people’s mental health states in different populations and across different time periods, this paper elucidates if mental health literacy protects against languishing in higher education students—where languishing is reportedly most prevalent. In this study, we employed a correlational design and recruited participants from a university in Australia (N = 149). Our results indicated that mental health literacy did not predict languishing. With the COVID-19 pandemic underscoring the significance of mental health, our work contributes to the increasing emphasis on safeguarding and potentially enhancing mental well-being within both public and policy discourse.

In recent years, the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology has garnered unprecedented attention, particularly following the advent of generative AI tools in 2022. These tools, capable of producing human-like text, images, and even deepening our understanding of cognitive processes, have not only captured the public imagination but also sparked new concerns and debates within the psychological community. While AI has been a subject of research for decades, the emergence of its generative capabilities has truly thrust AI into the spotlight. This article explores how these advancements are reshaping our understanding of human cognition and behavior, as well as their potential implications for psychological practice and research. Through a critical examination of current AI technologies and their psychological impacts, we aimed to bridge the gap between technological innovation and the intricate workings of the human mind.

Stereotype threat refers to the concern of being judged based on stereotypes about one's social group. This preregistered meta-analysis examines the correlates of stereotype threat in the workplace (k = 61 independent samples, N = 40,134). Results showed that stereotype threat was positively related to exhaustion, identity separation, negative affect, turnover intentions, and behavioral coping, and negatively related to career aspirations, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job engagement, job performance, positive affect, self-efficacy, and work authenticity. In addition, moderator analyses for constructs represented in at least k = 10 samples in the focal analyses showed that relations did not differ for measures of stereotype threat and stigma consciousness. However, the negative relationships between stereotype threat and career aspirations, job satisfaction, and job engagement were stronger for older employees compared with female employees as the stereotyped group. Overall, the findings suggest that stereotype threat constitutes an important stressor in the workplace.

Gender roles and expectations for women have been shown to account for why women tend to negotiate ineffectively in business settings. Drawing from the psychological literature on multiple identities, this paper examines how individual differences in perceived compatibility between gender and professional identities–captured by the construct Gender-Professional Identity Integration (G-PII)–shape businesswomen’s negotiation behaviors. Two studies examined how G-PII interacts with identity cues and cue valence to influence negotiation outcomes. We found that those who perceived their gender and professional identities as compatible (high G-PII) exhibited an “assimilation” effect–they negotiate more effectively when their professional identity was primed by professional identity cues and when prototypical female traits were positively linked to negotiation success, and negotiated less effectively when their gender identity was primed by gender identity cues and when prototypical female traits were negatively linked to negotiation success. However, businesswomen who perceived their gender and professional identities as incompatible (low G-PII) exhibited the opposite “contrast” effect. These findings suggest that the way women negotiate is influenced in part by individual differences in perceptions of compatibility between multiple identities.

From the erosion of mental well-being through incessant comparison, unrealistic portrayals, and addiction, the negative effects of social media are well-documented. However, it is necessary to move beyond the simplistic characterizations of social media as inherently either beneficial or detrimental and, instead, underscore the nuanced mechanisms that underlie its adverse outcomes. To this end, this paper delineates a conceptual framework grounded in evolutionary psychology, designed to explain the prevalent negative repercussions often linked to the utilization of social media. Specifically, we argue that these “social media ills” are manifestations of evolutionary mismatches between social media features and our evolved mechanism designed for social living. We start by reviewing how our psychological mechanisms—sociometer, social monitoring system, and social comparison—facilitate living within complex social situations and fulfill our fundamental need to belong. We then identify features of social media that may hijack these processes to produce the consequences we observe today. We have also recommended several evolutionarily informed directions policymakers and social media companies can undertake to treat social media ills at their root cause. This article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications and interventions the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis provides.

•Attending closely to cues of one's status within a group, and engaging efforts to increase or maintain status when cues suggested that status was lacking or waning, ensured having sufficient status that was crucial for the access to resources and reproductive success.•Cues within modern, economically advanced societies, chronically induce people to prioritize attaining social status at the cost of marriage and reproduction.•We argue that modern desire for social status hijack psychological mechanisms governing life history strategy, leading to maladaptive delays in marriage and reproduction.•A heightened desire to acquire higher social status led to preferences for investing heavily in fewer children rather than spreading one's resources across multiple children (i.e., offspring quality over quantity), and for delayed marriage and reproduction.•A slower reproductive life history strategy mediated the effects of desire for social status on delayed marriage and reproduction.
Modern low fertility is an unresolved paradox. Despite the tremendous financial growth and stability in modern societies, birth rates are steadily dropping. Almost half of the world's population lives in countries with below-replacement fertility and is projected for a continued decline. Drawing on life history theory and an evolutionary mismatch perspective, we propose that desire for social status (which is increasingly experienced by individuals in industrialized, modern societies) is a key factor affecting critical reproductive preferences. Across two experimental studies (total N = 719), we show that activating a desire for status can lead people to prefer reproductive tradeoffs that favor having fewer children, thereby predicting preferences for delaying both marriage and having a first child. These data support an evolutionary life history mismatch perspective and suggest a complementary explanation for declining fertility rates in contemporary societies, especially developed and economically advanced ones.
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Low fertility is a growing concern in modern societies. While economic and structural explanations of reproductive hindrances have been informative to some extent, they do not address the fundamental motives that underlie reproductive decisions and are inadequate to explain why East Asian countries, in particular, have such low fertility rates. The current paper advances a novel account of low fertility in modern contexts by describing how modern environments produce a mismatch between our evolved mechanisms and the inputs they were designed to process, leading to preoccupations with social status that get in the way of mating and reproductive outcomes. We also utilize developed East Asian countries as a case study to further highlight how culture may interact with modern features to produce ultralow fertility, sometimes to the extent that people may give up on parenthood or even mating altogether. Through our analysis, we integrate several lines of separate research, elucidate the fundamental dynamics that drive trade-offs between social status and reproductive effort, add to the growing literature on evolutionary mismatch, and provide an improved account of low fertility in modern contexts.

Gender expectations for women have largely been blamed for the widely documented “gender gap” in negotiations between men and women. However, women in business have both gender and professional identities. Drawing from the psychological literature on multiple identities, this paper examines the role of businesswomen’s perceived compatibility between their gender and professional identities–captured by the construct Gender-Professional Identity Integration (G-PII)–in shaping their negotiation behaviors. Two studies were conducted to examine how G-PII interacts with the salience and valence of identity cues to influence negotiation outcomes. The results showed that those who perceived their gender and professional identities as compatible (high G-PII) exhibited an “assimilation” effect by negotiating more effectively when their professional identity is salient and when prototypical female traits were positively linked to negotiation success; they negotiate less effectively when their gender identity is salient and when prototypical female traits were negatively linked to negotiation success. However, those who perceived their gender and professional identities as incompatible (low G-PII) exhibited the opposite “contrast” effect. This work sheds new light on the boundary conditions of the gender gap in negotiations, as well as ways to reduce the gender gap in organizations.

With the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, global economies continue to face uncertainties, widespread workforce volatility and employment challenges. During a sustained crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, university students’ self-perceptions about their employability and future career choices in their chosen industry sectors may be affected. Therefore, this study investigates graduate employability concerns and the perceptions of undergraduate students regarding employment prospects and future job security confidence in their disciplines’ industry sectors in light of this global crisis. Through the employment of a mixed methods design, the study investigates the perceptions of graduating students from three disciplines in Singapore: Tourism, Communications and Information Technology. The findings indicate that COVID-19 had a positive impact on perceptions of jobs that could be performed from home and those in essential services. Concurrently, there were notable variances in the students’ perceptions regarding career prospects and job security confidence across the three disciplines with regard to the impact of the crisis on their industry sectors in general and themselves individually.

The definition and measurement of filial piety in existing research primarily focuses on the narrow conceptualizations of Asian filial piety, which would inflate cultural differences and undermine cultural universals in how people approach caring for their elderly parents. Employing the Dual Filial Piety Model (DFPM), this study aimed to examine the relationship between filial piety and attitude toward caring for elderly parents beyond the Asian context. In our study (N = 276), we found that reciprocal filial piety (RFP) does not differ across cultures while authoritarian filial piety (AFP) does. We also found that collectivism, rather than ethnicity, predicted RFP and AFP, which in turn predicted positive attitude toward caring for elderly parents. Our work demonstrates the cross-cultural applicability of the DFPM and highlights the universal and culture-specific aspects of filial piety.