Psychological measures aren't toothbrushes.

Most psychological measures are used only once or twice. This proliferation and variability threaten the credibility of research. The Standardisation Of BEhavior Research (SOBER) guidelines aim to ensure that psychological measures are standardised and, unlike toothbrushes, reused by others.

Beware 'persuasive communication devices' when writing and reading scientific articles.

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results.

Effects on the Affect Misattribution Procedure are strongly moderated by influence awareness.

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is used in many areas of psychological science based on the assumption that it not only taps into attitudes and biases but does so without a person's awareness. Across eight preregistered studies (N = 1603) plus meta-analyses, we reexamined the 'implicitness' of AMP effects, and in particular, the idea that people are unaware of the prime's influence on their evaluations. Results indicated that AMP effects and their predictive validity are primarily moderated by a subset of influence-aware trials (within individuals), and high rates of influence awareness (between individuals).

Best research practices for using the Implicit Association Test.

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last published treatment of recommended best practices for research using IAT measures.

Exposure to and experience of self-harm and self-harm related content: An exploratory network analysis.

Exposure to the self-harm behaviour of others plays a role in individuals' own self-harm thoughts and behaviours, but there has been little consideration of the broader range of mediums through which exposure to self-harm related content may occur. N = 477 participants completed an online study, including questions regarding lifetime history of self-harm thoughts and behaviours and the frequency with which they had been exposed to self-harm via various mediums. Gaussian Markov random field network models were estimated using graphical LASSO and extended Bayesian information criterion.

Incidental Attitude Formation via the Surveillance Task: A Preregistered Replication of the Olson and Fazio (2001) Study.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments.

The influence of extinction and counterconditioning procedures on operant evaluative conditioning and intersecting regularity effects.

One of the most effective methods of influencing what people like and dislike is to expose them to systematic patterns (or 'regularities') in the environment, such as the repeated presentation of a single stimulus (mere exposure), two or more stimuli (evaluative conditioning (EC)) or to relationships between stimuli and behaviour (approach/avoidance). Hughes . (2016) , 731-754.

Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes.

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, 'Do you think free will exists?'), but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes (FWA, 'Do you like/value will?').

The shared features principle: If two objects share a feature, people assume those objects also share other features.

In this article we introduce the , which refers to the idea that when 2 stimuli share 1 feature, people often assume that they share other features as well. This principle can be recognized in several known psychological phenomena, most of which were until now never considered to be related in this way. To illustrate the generative power of the principle, we report 8 preregistered studies ( = 1,614) in which participants completed an acquisition phase containing 3 stimuli: a neutral target, a positive source, and a negative source.

Implicit Association Test as an Analogical Learning Task.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a popular tool for measuring attitudes. We suggest that performing an IAT could, however, also change attitudes via analogical learning. For instance, when performing an IAT in which participants categorize (previously unknown) Chinese characters, flowers, positive words, and negative words, participants could infer that Chinese characters relate to flowers as negative words relate to positive words.

The functional-cognitive meta-theoretical framework: Reflections, possible clarifications and how to move forward.

The functional-cognitive meta-theoretical framework has been offered as a conceptual basis for facilitating greater communication and cooperation between the functional/behavioural and cognitive traditions within psychology, thus leading to benefits for both scientific communities. The current article is written from the perspective of two functional researchers, who are also proponents of the functional-cognitive framework, and attended the "Building Bridges between the Functional and Cognitive Traditions" meeting at Ghent University in the summer of 2014. The article commences with a brief summary of the functional approach to theory, followed by our reflections upon the functional-cognitive framework in light of that meeting.