COVID-19 and the workplace: Implications, issues, and insights for future research and action.

The impacts of COVID-19 on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. This broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, is intended to make sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. This review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on (a) emergent changes in work practices (e.

Word order denotes relevance differences: The case of conjoined phrases with lexical gender.

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs.

A Growing Disconnection From Nature Is Evident in Cultural Products.

Human connection with nature is widely believed to be in decline even though empirical evidence is scarce on the magnitude and historical pattern of the change. Studying works of popular culture in English throughout the 20th century and later, we have documented a cultural shift away from nature that begins in the 1950s. Since then, references to nature have been decreasing steadily in fiction books, song lyrics, and film storylines, whereas references to the human-made environment have not.

Gender differences in response to competition with same-gender coworkers: A relational perspective.

We take a relational perspective to explain how women and men may differently experience competition with their same-gender coworkers. According to gender socialization research, the female peer culture values harmony and the appearance of equality, whereas hierarchical ranking is integral to the male peer culture. As competition dispenses with equality and creates a ranking hierarchy, we propose that competition is at odds with the norms of female (but not male) peer relationships.

Agreement Attraction and Impasse Aversion: Reasons for Selecting a Poor Deal Over No Deal at All.

In the present studies, we examined the positive value of agreement and the negative value of impasse. Participants chose to give up real value and sacrifice economic efficiency in order to attain an agreement outcome and avoid an impasse outcome. A personally disadvantageous option was selected significantly more often when it was labeled "Agreement" rather than "Option A," and a personally advantageous option was avoided significantly more often when it was labeled "Impasse" rather than "Option B.

Income Inequality Explains Why Economic Growth Does Not Always Translate to an Increase in Happiness.

One of the most puzzling social science findings in the past half century is the Easterlin paradox: Economic growth within a country does not always translate into an increase in happiness. We provide evidence that this paradox can be partly explained by income inequality. In two different data sets covering 34 countries, economic growth was not associated with increases in happiness when it was accompanied by growing income inequality.

A hedonic story has a transmission advantage over a eudaimonic story.

We examined (a) whether a hedonic story (story full of hedonic activities) is better remembered and transmitted compared with a eudaimonic story (story full of eudaimonic activities), and (b) whether the hedonic story's memory and transmission advantage varies depending on contextual cues, as indexed by the day of the week. Study 1 showed that college students are surrounded with more party announcements on Wednesdays through Fridays than on Mondays and Tuesdays. Study 2 showed that the hedonic story and the eudaimonic story we created were equally interesting, rich in plot, surprising, and arousing, yet the hedonic story was rated as more disturbing, real, and newsworthy.

Reducing implicit racial preferences: I. A comparative investigation of 17 interventions.

Many methods for reducing implicit prejudice have been identified, but little is known about their relative effectiveness. We held a research contest to experimentally compare interventions for reducing the expression of implicit racial prejudice. Teams submitted 17 interventions that were tested an average of 3.

Overweight people have low levels of implicit weight bias, but overweight nations have high levels of implicit weight bias.

Although a greater degree of personal obesity is associated with weaker negativity toward overweight people on both explicit (i.e., self-report) and implicit (i.

Concepts of happiness across time and cultures.

We explored cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. First, we analyzed the definitions of happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations to understand cultural similarities and differences in happiness concepts. Second, we analyzed the definition of happiness in Webster's dictionaries from 1850 to the present day to understand historical changes in American English.

Optimal social-networking strategy is a function of socioeconomic conditions.

In the two studies reported here, we examined the relation among residential mobility, economic conditions, and optimal social-networking strategy. In study 1, a computer simulation showed that regardless of economic conditions, having a broad social network with weak friendship ties is advantageous when friends are likely to move away. By contrast, having a small social network with deep friendship ties is advantageous when the economy is unstable but friends are not likely to move away.

The superorganism account of human sociality: how and when human groups are like beehives.

Biologists call highly cooperative and socially integrated animal groups like beehives and ant colonies "superorganisms." In such species, the colony acts like an organism despite each animal's physical individuality. This article frames human sociality through the superorganisms metaphor by systematically reviewing the superorganismic features of human psychology.

Income inequality and happiness.

Using General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2008, we found that Americans were on average happier in the years with less national income inequality than in the years with more national income inequality. We further demonstrated that this inverse relation between income inequality and happiness was explained by perceived fairness and general trust. That is, Americans trusted other people less and perceived other people to be less fair in the years with more national income inequality than in the years with less national income inequality.

A spontaneous self-reference effect in memory: why some birthdays are harder to remember than others.

The self-reference effect in memory is defined as the memory advantage for materials that have been processed in relation to the self. Existing demonstrations of the self-reference effect rely on laboratory stimuli and use explicit cues to prompt self-relevant encoding. In three studies, we used participants' memories for birthdays to document a naturalistic case of the self-reference effect that did not depend on explicit self-cues.

Cumulative and career-stage citation impact of social-personality psychology programs and their members.

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists' seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD.

The socio-ecological approach turns variance among populations from a liability to an asset.

We emphasize the value of the socio-ecological approach in addressing the problem of population variances. The socio-ecological perspective studies how social and natural habitats shape human behaviors, and are in turn shaped by those behaviors. This focus on system-level factors is particularly well-suited to studying the origins of group differences in human behavior.

A Theory of Human Needs Should Be Human-Centered, Not Animal-Centered: Commentary on Kenrick et al. (2010).

Kenrick et al. (2010, this issue) make an important contribution by presenting a theory of human needs within an evolutionary framework. In our opinion, however, this framework bypasses the human uniqueness that Maslow intended to capture in his theory.

On Feeling Understood and Feeling Well: The Role of Interdependence.

The present research examined whether people feel happier and healthier when they feel more understood in daily social interactions. A two-week diary study showed that people reported greater life satisfaction and fewer physical symptoms on days in which they felt more understood by others. Moreover, we found that individuals who tend to see themselves in relations to others (i.

Sociology: a lost connection in social psychology.

For the first half of the 20th century, sociology was one of the closest allies of social psychology. Over the past four decades, however, the connection with sociology has weakened, whereas new connections with neighboring disciplines (e.g.

National differences in gender-science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement.

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-reported stereotypes did not provide additional predictive validity of the achievement gap.