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Written in a lively and entertaining style, Facts and Fictions in Mental Health examines common conceptions and misconceptions surrounding mental health and its treatment. Each chapter focuses on a misconception and is followed by a discussion of related findings from scientific research. -A compilation of the authors' 'Facts and Fictions' columns written for Scientific American Mind, with the addition of six new columns exclusive to this book -Written in a lively and often entertaining style, accessible to both the undergraduate and the interested general reader -Each chapter covers a different \"fiction\" and allows readers to gain a more balanced and accurate view of important topics in mental health -The six new columns examine myths and misconceptions of considerable interest and relevance to undergraduates in abnormal psychology courses -Introductory material and references are included throughout the book.-- Source other than Library of Congress.

The microaggression concept has recently galvanized public discussion and spread to numerous college campuses and businesses. I argue that the microaggression research program (MRP) rests on five core premises, namely, that microaggressions (1) are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation; (2) are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members; (3) reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives; (4) can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports; and (5) exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health. A review of the literature reveals negligible support for all five suppositions. More broadly, the MRP has been marked by an absence of connectivity to key domains of psychological science, including psychometrics, social cognition, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior genetics, and personality, health, and industrial-organizational psychology. Although the MRP has been fruitful in drawing the field’s attention to subtle forms of prejudice, it is far too underdeveloped on the conceptual and methodological fronts to warrant real-world application. I conclude with 18 suggestions for advancing the scientific status of the MRP, recommend abandonment of the term “microaggression,” and call for a moratorium on microaggression training programs and publicly distributed microaggression lists pending research to address the MRP’s scientific limitations.

The past several years have been a time for soul searching in psychology, as we have gradually come to grips with the reality that some of our cherished findings are less robust than we had assumed. Nevertheless, the replication crisis highlights the operation of psychological science at its best, as it reflects our growing humility. At the same time, institutional variables, especially the growing emphasis on external funding as an expectation or de facto requirement for faculty tenure and promotion, pose largely unappreciated hazards for psychological science, including (a) incentives for engaging in questionable research practices, (b) a single-minded focus on programmatic research, (c) intellectual hyperspecialization, (d) disincentives for conducting direct replications, (e) stifling of creativity and intellectual risk taking, (f) researchers promising more than they can deliver, and (g) diminished time for thinking deeply. Preregistration should assist with (a), but will do little about (b) through (g). Psychology is beginning to right the ship, but it will need to confront the increasingly deleterious impact of the grant culture on scientific inquiry.

The seven articles in this Special Section of the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment underscore the point that, at least in the psychopathy domain, parsimony is frequently an inaccurate scientific heuristic. These articles highlight the multidimensionality of youth psychopathy, suggesting that (a) the full constellation of psychopathy tends to outperform callous-unemotional traits alone in statistically predicting external criteria, (b) psychopathy subdimensions often interact statistically in predicting such criteria, and (c) psychopathy subdimensions often bear markedly different external correlates, including criminal offending, trait anxiety, and emotion processing. I offer five recommendations for future research on psychopathy and argue that that a full comprehension of this condition will require a better understanding of its subdimensions, and their interrelations, placement within the general personality domain, physiological correlates, and genetic and environmental underpinnings.

In this issue, Williams (pp. 3–26) responds to my 2017 critique in this journal of the scientific status of the microaggression research program (MRP). In some cases, she presents helpful data that partially address several of my recommendations for enhancing the MRP’s rigor. Nevertheless, because she appears to misconstrue many of my arguments regarding the MRP, many of her rebuttals are not relevant to my criticisms. Furthermore, her assertions notwithstanding, Williams does not effectively address my concerns regarding the (a) excessively fuzzy boundaries of the microaggression construct, (b) psychometric hazards of relying exclusively on subjective reports when detecting microaggressions, and (c) hypothesized causal impact of microaggressions on mental health. In other cases, Williams appears to draw causal inferences from correlational data and conflate within-group with between-group differences. Although several of Williams’s recommendations for MRP research are worth considering, I contend that some others are unlikely to be conducive to a scientific approach to microaggressions. The MRP remains a promising but provisional research program that would benefit from greater openness to outside criticism. I conclude with a discussion of areas of potential common ground in microaggression research and application.

The phrase primum non nocere (\"first, do no harm\") is a well-accepted credo of the edical and mental health professions. Although emerging data indicate that several psychological treatments may produce harm in significant numbers of individuals, psychologists have until recently paid little attention to the problem of hazardous treatments. I critically evaluate and update earlier conclusions regarding deterioration effects in psychotherapy, outline methodological obstacles standing in the way of identifying potentially harmful therapies (PHTs), provide a provisional list of PHTs, discuss the implications of PHTs for clinical science and practice, and delineate fruitful areas for further research on PHTs. A heightened emphasis on PHTs should narrow the scientist-practitioner gap and safeguard mental health consumers against harm. Moreover, the literature on PHTs may provide insight into underlying mechanisms of change that cut across many domains of psychotherapy. The field of psychology should prioritize its efforts toward identifying PHTs and place greater emphasis on potentially dangerous than on empirically supported therapies.

Although there are surely multiple contributors to the replication crisis in psychology, one largely unappreciated source is a neglect of basic principles of measurement. We consider 4 sacred cows-widely shared and rarely questioned assumptions-in psychological measurement that may fuel the replicability crisis by contributing to questionable measurement practices. These 4 sacred cows are: (a) we can safely rely on the name of a measure to infer its content; (b) reliability is not a major concern for laboratory measures; (c) using measures that are difficult to collect obviates the need for large sample sizes; and (d) convergent validity data afford sufficient evidence for construct validity. For items a and d, we provide provisional data from recent psychological journals that support our assertion that such beliefs are prevalent among authors. To enhance the replicability of psychological science, researchers will need to become vigilant against erroneous assumptions regarding both the psychometric properties of their measures and the implications of these psychometric properties for their studies. Bien qu'il soit certain que de nombreux facteurs contribuent à la crise de la reproductibilité en psychologie, l'un d'entre eux, largement méconnu, est la négligence des principes de base de la mesure. Nous examinons quatre principes « intouchables » de la mesure en psychologie - des hypothèses largement diffusées et rarement remises en question - qui, en rendant les pratiques de mesure discutables, peuvent alimenter la crise de la reproductibilité. Ces quatre intouchables sont les suivants : (A) nous pouvons nous fier en toute confiance au nom d'une mesure pour en déduire le contenu; (b) la fiabilité n'est pas une préoccupation majeure pour les mesures en laboratoire; (c) le recours à des mesures qui sont difficiles à recueillir écarte le besoin d'échantillons de taille plus importante; (d) des données convergentes sur la validité constituent des éléments de preuve suffisants de la validité conceptuelle. Pour les éléments a et d, nous fournissons des données provisoires issues de revues de psychologie récentes qui soutiennent notre affirmation selon laquelle de telles croyances prévalent parmi les auteurs. Afin d'améliorer la reproductibilité de la science de la psychologie, les chercheurs devront être vigilants face aux suppositions erronées concernant les propriétés psychométriques de ces mesures et aux répercussions de ces propriétés psychométriques pour leurs études. Public Significance Statement This article outlines four widely held but erroneous measurement assumptions that may adversely affect the accuracy and replicability of psychological findings. The effects of questionable measurement practices stemming from these assumptions are discussed, and new data bearing on the prevalence of these assumptions in academic journals are presented. In addition, this article offers several potential remedies that researchers and journals can implement to improve the measurement of psychological constructs.

Long the stuff of clinical lore, successful psychopathy has recently become the focus of research. Although numerous authors have conjectured that psychopathic traits are sometimes associated with occupational or interpersonal success, rigorous evidence for this assertion has thus far been minimal. We provide a status report on successful-psychopathy research, address controversies surrounding successful psychopathy, examine evidence for competing models of this construct, and offer desiderata for future research.

Psychological Science Under Scrutiny explores a range of contemporary challenges to the assumptions and methodologies of psychology, in order to encourage debate and ground the discipline in solid science.  * Discusses the pointed challenges posed by critics to the field of psychological research, which have given pause to psychological researchers across a broad spectrum of sub-fields * Argues that those conducting psychological research need to fundamentally change the way they think about data and results, in order to ensure that psychology has a firm basis in empirical science * Places the recent challenges discussed into a broad historical and conceptual perspective, and considers their implications for the future of psychological methodology and research * Challenges discussed include confirmation bias, the effects of grant pressure, false-positive findings, overestimating the efficacy of medications, and high correlations in functional brain imaging * Chapters are authored by internationally recognized experts in their fields, and are written with a minimum of specialized terminology to ensure accessibility to students and lay readers

Cross-cultural investigation of psychopathy measures is important for clarifying the nomological network surrounding the psychopathy construct. The Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (PPI-R) is one of the most extensively researched self-report measures of psychopathic traits in adults. To date however, it has been examined primarily in North American criminal or student samples. To address this gap in the literature, we examined PPI-R's reliability, construct validity and factor structure in non-criminal individuals (N = 227) in Sweden, using a multimethod approach including psychophysiological correlates of empathy for pain. PPI-R construct validity was investigated in subgroups of participants by exploring its degree of overlap with (i) the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV), (ii) self-rated empathy and behavioral and physiological responses in an experiment on empathy for pain, and (iii) additional self-report measures of alexithymia and trait anxiety. The PPI-R total score was significantly associated with PCL:SV total and factor scores. The PPI-R Coldheartedness scale demonstrated significant negative associations with all empathy subscales and with rated unpleasantness and skin conductance responses in the empathy experiment. The PPI-R higher order Self-Centered Impulsivity and Fearless Dominance dimensions were associated with trait anxiety in opposite directions (positively and negatively, respectively). Overall, the results demonstrated solid reliability (test-retest and internal consistency) and promising but somewhat mixed construct validity for the Swedish translation of the PPI-R.