Contemporary research on collective memory recognises the past's dynamic role in present conflicts and future possibilities. Yet, in our polycrisis era marked by resurgent authoritarianism and rising individualism, resulting in democratic backsliding and withdrawal from political participation correspondingly around the world, most current work on collective memory remains descriptive, treating groups as homogeneous units while leaving developmental mechanisms of memory transformation untheorized. This article advances Genetic Social Psychology (GSP) as an interdisciplinary framework that addresses these gaps by examining how collective memory as social representations gets transformed through three types of social relationships: domination, submission, and co-operation. These relationship qualities shape not only what groups remember but also how memories transform (change) or not (continuity) across three timescales: microgenesis (through short social interaction or dialogue incidents), ontogenesis (lifespan), and sociogenesis (historical time). Drawing on foundational texts (Piaget, Bartlett, and Moscovici), and more recent work by Gerard Duveen, we propose that revealing heterogeneity within each of the antagonistic groups in their representations of history and transformation of various positions in the representational field through intergroup contact and history teaching is key. Applied to divided Cyprus, this framework offers policy proposals towards conflict transformation and deepening democratic culture, resisting rising authoritarianism and domination/submission memory politics.
The care of children and youth presenting with gender dysphoria has recently changed from watchful waiting and psychotherapeutic exploration to primarily an affirmative medical pathway involving social transition, puberty suppression, cross-sex hormones and surgery. This shift has occurred alongside a rapid increase in referrals and has been reinforced by political and legal frameworks that strongly favor gender-affirming care (GAC) while restricting alternative therapeutic approaches. This article critically examines the influence of legislation on clinical practice for gender-distressed youth. We argue that current policies have normalized a single explanatory model for any associated issues-the minority stress framework-while discouraging or prohibiting psychotherapeutic exploration of developmental, psychological, familial, and social factors that may contribute to gender dysphoria. In many jurisdictions, such exploration is conflated with "conversion therapy," resulting in legal risks for clinicians and a narrowing of treatment options for patients and families. Drawing on established principles of evidence-based psychotherapy, we highlight the limitations of a one-pathway model that assumes gender identity to be innate and non-explorable. We argue that ethical and effective care requires comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment and access to a plurality of therapeutic models, including cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, family-based, and dialectical approaches. The politicization of clinical guidelines and the expansion of conversion therapy bans risk undermining informed consent, clinical judgment, and patient autonomy. An evidence-based approach to pediatric gender dysphoria should prioritize psychotherapy as a first-line intervention and preserve space for individualized, developmentally sensitive care that allows for multiple outcomes.
The cross-cultural use of psychological assessment instruments-especially those developed in one cultural context and applied in another-raises critical concerns about content validity and the potential for misleading interpretations drawn from measures derived from those instruments. This article argues that without rigorous cultural adaptation and content validation, psychometric indices and interpretations derived from imported instruments used in cross-cultural assessment may be biased and thus misleading. We first clarify the multidimensional and continuous nature of culture and review psychometric principles, emphasizing the conditionality of evidence across cultural contexts. A central focus is on content validity-the extent to which an instrument accurately reflects the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions it purports to measure within a new cultural setting-and its influence on validity. We outline best-practice steps for evaluating and enhancing content validity in culturally adapted instruments, including translation, expert review, qualitative interviews, psychometric evaluation, and final modification of the instrument based on the reviews and qualitative and psychometric data from the new population. To assess current adherence to these practices, we reviewed 401 published articles from six high-impact psychology journals during the first six months of 2025. Results revealed that nearly all studies failed to implement comprehensive content validation procedures. Out of the 54 articles that reported using assessment instruments imported from a different country or culture, only three fully adhered to recommended strategies. These findings underscore the ethical and scientific importance of rigorous cultural adaptation in cross-cultural assessment. Limitations of the review and directions for future research are discussed.
This study analyses, through a systematic literature review, research conducted on the colonial past and/in history textbooks, drawing on 44 studies published since 2015. Prompted by renewed global attention to colonial legacies, the review focuses on secondary school history textbooks addressing overseas European modern imperialism. Using a systematic search complemented by snowball sampling, three main research foci were identified: analyses of textbook representations of modern imperialism, investigations into how such representations are used and received in classrooms, and meta-analyses of textbook representations of modern imperialism. Half of the studies examined textbook accounts from former colonizing countries, while the other half focused on textbooks from former colonies or other countries. Two thirds of the studies were situated within the disciplines of history and history education, followed by social psychology and postcolonial studies. All studies employed qualitative methods (some also quantitative) involving textual analysis, often informed by postcolonial perspectives, while explicit methodological transparency was lacking in one third of them. The findings from the 44 studies reveal a persistent resistance to postcolonial transformation in textbooks from former colonizing countries, despite some textbooks showing incremental shifts. By contrast, textbooks from former colonies more frequently offer explicitly critical, anti-imperial narratives that connect past injustices to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and present-day inequalities, though these accounts also reproduce simplifications and binary oppositions. Across contexts, textbooks continue to mirror national memory cultures more than academic historiography. Nevertheless, emerging innovative materials, committed teachers and experimental pedagogies illustrate the potential for more decolonial, inclusive approaches to teaching the colonial past.
Political ideology has increasingly entered clinical psychology training through the incorporation of decolonial and activist-oriented frameworks. While attention to social inequities is essential to culturally competent care, integrating politicized models into applied clinical training raises concerns about scientific neutrality, professional pluralism, and the emergence of identity-based bias. This article examines how decolonial psychology and related activist frameworks have contributed to the development of antisemitic dynamics within professional clinical psychology training. We argue that these dynamics emerge not only from specific political narratives but from a broader shift toward ideologically driven models of care that prioritize moral frameworks over empirical reasoning. This shift has contributed to fractures within the profession and introduces potential public health risks by influencing clinical judgment, professional relationships, and standards of care. These challenges are described, and a programmatic approach to addressing them is provided.
In recent years, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has come under significant criticism. Whereas critics across the political spectrum worry that CBT centers particular ideological perspectives that undermine its efficacy and harm patients, the details of these criticisms vary. Critics on the political right emphasize psychology's left-leaning ideological homogeneity, the risk of pathologizing ordinary experiences stemming from expanding definitions of harm, and the broader entrenchment of progressive narratives in clinical contexts. Critics on the political left focus on CBT's Western, individualistic orientation, its neglect of clients' cultural traditions, and its insufficient engagement with multicultural perspectives. Although such criticisms are important and worthy of reflection, they also risk portraying CBT as ideologically compromised and undermining confidence among clients, practitioners, and the public. We propose three complementary strategies for navigating this tension. First, recent research suggests that cultivating collective intellectual humility (individual and group-level acknowledgment of limits, openness to diverse perspectives, and willingness to revise assumptions) can help practitioners remain self-critical while promoting trust among the public. Second, expanding multicultural frameworks to explicitly include political identity alongside traditional domains of diversity may improve therapeutic alliances and reduce perceptions of ideological bias. And, finally, providing practitioners with training in political diversity can prevent prematurely signaling one's ideological commitments in a therapeutic context and potentially help the therapeutic alliance. These strategies may allow CBT to engage constructively with legitimate criticisms without eroding its reputation as a scientifically valid and trustworthy practice.
Recent developments within the mental health professions suggest a growing ideological capture by left-wing identitarian frameworks, with significant implications for clinical ethics, scientific integrity, and public health. This article argues that the increasing fusion of psychotherapy with political activism, particularly through the spread of decolonial therapy and related approaches, has contributed to discriminatory practices. This has led to identity-based discrimination toward Jewish clinicians and clients, specifically those who identify as Zionist. We argue that these frameworks impose ideological litmus tests, lack empirical support, and conflict with core professional obligations to avoid harm, maintain fidelity to evidence-based practice, and ensure equitable access to care. These ideological frameworks could easily coalesce around discrimination toward other groups, and thus this analysis is intended to raise awareness of a political purity movement that may isolate specific groups for political means and couch it within a treatment model. Drawing on clinical ethics, emerging scholarship on traumatic invalidation and microaggression, and recent patterns within professional institutions, we examine how antisemitism has become normalized in certain psychological spaces and why this poses risks extending beyond Jewish communities. We conclude by offering concrete recommendations to re-center mental health care on rigorous science and patient well-being.
Identitarian progressivism has become the public face of institutional psychological science. Masking the diverse perspectives within our field, these single-minded expressions have two trust-related implications: reinforcing 'ingroup' trust among a progressive activist cohort within our science, while evoking mistrust from an 'outgroup' public that -to an overwhelming extent- does not share their views. Given the predominant role of taxpayers in funding our research, we should be concerned that the voting public may justifiably perceive our science as emphasizing activist visions of what should be over the empirical complexities of what is. Ensuring public trust will depend on re-embracing persuasive intellectual humility and eschewing the identitarian vernacular and deficit model pedagogy that currently characterizes our public-facing messaging.
Despite decades of research, the study of sexual violence perpetration remains theoretically fragmented. Foundational models of general aggression, alongside etiological frameworks specific to sexual violence, have identified a robust set of correlates-including rape-supportive attitudes, antagonistic personality traits, alcohol use, and coercive peer norms; however, these approaches rarely provide a unified mechanistic account specifying when, how, and under what conditions these risk factors converge to produce coercive and abusive behavior. The overarching purpose of this review is to advance a process-based reconceptualization of sexual violence perpetration by integrating existing theories using the I3 Model (Instigation-Impellance-Inhibition) and Perfect Storm Theory. Throughout, we argue that these frameworks offer a generative structure for organizing dispositional, situational, affective, and relational risk factors, while specifying the temporal and interactional conditions under which risk is most likely to behaviorally produce sexual violence. Drawing on advances from intimate partner violence research, we also highlight the importance of modeling momentary affect, dyadic processes, and within-person variability to capture how perpetration risk unfolds in real time. Given that most prevention efforts target impelling risk factors such as attitudes and normative misperceptions, we further emphasize the need to conceptualize impellance as a multilevel system shaped by individual attitudes and beliefs, personality traits, and peer contexts. We conclude by outlining an integrative vision for a dynamic, multilevel science of sexual violence perpetration that moves the field beyond static correlates and toward developing mechanistic models capable of informing timing-sensitive, process-focused prevention interventions.
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is a well-established, empirically validated psychological treatment for depression, anxiety, and other disorders, but its assumptions, principles, and methods have recently been described as harmful and oppressive to clients in racial, ethnic, sexual, and other marginalized populations. The claim is that CBT's emphasis on altering these clients' thinking in more rational and helpful directions imposes the values of Western white culture while failing to address the discriminatory social, cultural and structural realities that serve to create and perpetuate the problems they experience. If students taking introductory, clinical, and abnormal psychology, not to mention those in graduate psychotherapy practica, are aware of and sensitive to these criticisms, they may not react well when their professors present CBT in uniformly positive terms, including by highlighting empirical research demonstrating its superiority over other therapeutic approaches for treating a wide range of clients and disorders. This article offers suggestions for teaching this content in ways that minimize unpleasant classroom consequences by establishing contracts with students that invite them to express their concerns about the alleged harmfulness of CBT while legitimizing the instructor's right to challenge them to think critically about the claims underlying it.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is often presented as a technically neutral, evidence-based psychotherapy. This article questions that assumption by examining the political, institutional, and cultural contexts that have shaped psychiatry and psychotherapies in Japan, integrating historical review, administrative data, cross-national comparison, and personal reflection. First, the postwar development of Japanese psychiatry is reviewed, focusing on gradual mental health reform following the WHO "Clark Recommendation" and the politicized professional climate of the late 1960s and 1970s. Second, the introduction and dissemination of CBT in Japan are examined using the National Database of Health Insurance Claims and Specific Health Checkups (NDB) Open Data, which reveal a decline in reimbursed CBT claims despite formal insurance coverage. This paradox is discussed in relation to Japan's regulated pay-for-service system, in contrast to the United States, where DRG/PPS and pay-for-performance models have structurally favored brief, standardized psychotherapies. Third, political and legal differences among Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are considered to illustrate how similar cultural regions diverge markedly in governance, social change, and mental health-relevant policies. Finally, drawing on personal clinical experience, the article argues that CBT's apparent "non-political" stance is itself a political position, reflecting a broader shift toward empirically grounded but ideologically understated forms of professional practice. Psychotherapies, including CBT, are best understood as practices embedded in specific political and institutional regimes rather than as politically neutral technologies.
How the brain computes the hedonic value of sensory objects remains a foundational question in neuroscience. In the visual domain, this question has often been approached through the search for stimulus properties that reliably predict liking, such as symmetry, curvature, order, complexity, and color. Such work has shown that perceptual features contribute to visual preference. Recent evidence, however, strongly suggests that hedonic value cannot be explained by feature encoding alone. Thus, behavioral studies have revealed substantial individual differences in feature sensitivity, effects of expertise and expectations, and strong modulation by semantic knowledge, perceptual context, and task conditions. Neuroimaging studies likewise show that activity tracking objective stimulus properties in early visual cortex does not reliably predict hedonic judgments, which depend more closely on subjective and higher-level representations of those properties. We argue that these findings mark an important shift in the study of visual liking: from asking which features people prefer to asking how the brain computes hedonic value from sensory input. We explain this shift from the perspective of sensory valuation, which conceptualizes visual liking as a flexible computational process that integrates perceptual representations with semantic knowledge, task models, internal state, and reward-related valuation mechanisms. On this view, visual liking is not a direct readout of stimulus features, but the computed value of an interpreted sensory object in a specific organismic and situational context.
Adolescent aggression arises within developmental, cognitive, and emotional mechanisms embedded in cultural contexts that define which behaviors are acceptable and how they are sanctioned. Cross-cultural psychology provides critical insights into how values such as honor, collectivism, and relational harmony shape the forms and meanings of aggression, influencing developmental pathways toward partner maltreatment and violence (PM/V). This review synthesizes recent findings (2020-2025) on parenting, peer norms, cognition, and digital contexts to identify culturally responsive intervention levers. Evidence shows that warmth and open communication protect against aggression across settings, but discipline, peer dynamics, and digital practices vary by culture. Effective prevention must integrate developmental and cultural frameworks, ensuring that early interventions address the family, peer, and digital ecologies that sustain aggression and its potential continuity into adult relationships.
Parent training interventions have consistently demonstrated strong efficacy and effectiveness in addressing child disruptive behaviors. However, concerns have long been expressed regarding the generalizability of these approaches across cultural minority groups, prompting calls for so-called "cultural adaptations"-systematic modifications to align interventions with clients' cultural contexts. This review examines whether parent training benefits from such adaptations by synthesizing historical and contemporary literature. Early critiques highlighted potential limitations for non-White, non-middle-class families. Yet, subsequent studies, including meta-analyses and comparative trials, consistently show equivalent treatment outcomes across ethnic groups, with no evidence of superiority for culturally adapted versions. Despite this, adaptations continue to emerge, often lacking theoretical frameworks, transparent reporting, or theoretical justification, which risks diluting the core components. While ethnic minorities underutilize parent training interventions, potentially exacerbating health disparities, outcomes are broadly equivalent upon consistent participation. We conclude that cultural adaptations are unnecessary for effectiveness and urge a shift toward addressing engagement barriers among minority families to enhance accessibility in pediatric behavioral health.
The multicultural and social justice counseling (MSJC) movement has become a defining paradigm in psychotherapy, shaping ethics, training, and practice. While this evolution reflects important strides toward equity and inclusion, it also introduces philosophical tensions, particularly concerning ideological conformity, epistemological overreach, and the marginalization of empirically supported treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This critical position paper examines how Freirean and decolonial frameworks have transformed multiculturalism from a supplemental lens into a dominant moral narrative, often challenging client autonomy and therapeutic neutrality. Through an ethical and philosophical analysis, the paper highlights the risks of conflating advocacy with clinical practice and calls for a recommitment to pluralism, client-centered care, and evidence-based modalities. Psychotherapists must strike a balance between cultural responsiveness and foundational counseling values, including empathy, respect, and autonomy, to maintain ethical integrity and professional credibility in an increasingly polarized landscape.
Recent work has shifted understanding of aggression from an individual deficit model toward a neurocognitive and systems-level framework. Transdiagnostic models conceptualise aggression as emerging when perceived threat load exceeds available regulatory capacity, involving interacting mechanisms of threat responsivity, emotion regulation, and inhibitory control. Evidence from developmental adversity and neurodiversity research further indicates that variations in threat sensitivity and regulatory thresholds may increase vulnerability to escalation under high-threat conditions, while interoceptive processing shapes how threat is embodied and regulated. Integrating these perspectives with social-ecological frameworks suggests a dynamic account in which environmental instigators interact with neurocognitive vulnerabilities to influence aggression risk over time. Here, we integrate transdiagnostic neurocognitive models with neurodiversity and developmental adversity research to argue that relational and environmental conditions actively regulate threat load rather than simply providing background context. Within this framework, neurodiversity-, trauma-, and shame-aware (NeST) approaches can be understood as environmental strategies that reduce perceived threat and support regulatory capacity through predictability, co-regulation, and relational repair. This framing therefore conceptualises aggression as a context-sensitive threat-regulation response and identifies environmental design as a pathway for prevention, with implications for research and intervention targeting threat regulation across settings.
This paper reviews findings of nine large representative surveys assessing people's evolutionary acceptance and whether it relates to people's (non-) religious identities. It summarises findings of two surveys conducted within the UK and Canada in 2017 and of seven surveys conducted within the UK, Canada, Australia, US, Argentina, Spain, and Germany in 2023. Findings show that evolution acceptance is high. Dissecting the findings shows that evolution rejection might be partially driven by social cognitive processes that facilitate group boundaries. Using a social identity lens and social cognitive theories such a social-projection and counter-projection when interpreting the findings, it provides novel insights into how the perception of a necessary conflict between science and religion drives public perceptions of evolution scepticism.
Social justice ideologies, with its emphasis on group or social identity, is permeating psychology. From its major role in the recently proposed code of ethics to its impact on therapy itself, the infusion of social justice ideologies into psychology threatens to change its very nature. This movement has a laudable goal: to combat the injustices that can impact individuals' mental health. But studies show that it also has negative impacts. This article lays out aspects of psychological research that are often ignored by psychologists, showing how the politicization of social identity and the external imposition of identity can cause harm. While there are controlling mechanisms that can help diffuse those harms, the ideological positions that dominate the social justice model undermine them. In other words, social justice ideologies promote social identity while simultaneously undermining the ideas that help contain the damage it causes. While it is important to research and consider the ways in which injustice can impact mental health and to incorporate that knowledge into treatment when warranted, it is equally important to research and consider how the ways in which this is done can bring harm to the very people psychologists profess to help.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is widely regarded as a neutral, evidence-based approach, yet its frameworks embed implicit assumptions about individual responsibility, rationality, and adaptation that carry professional and political implications. This paper examines how mainstream CBT often decontextualizes psychological suffering, emphasizing personal change while neglecting structural, economic, and political determinants of distress. Drawing on recent critiques, emerging research and contextualized interventions, I argue for politically sensitive CBT, integrating awareness of social determinants, collective trauma, and systemic inequities. Such an approach maintains empirical rigor while enhancing ethical responsibility, clinical effectiveness, and relevance in diverse populations and contexts of collective upheaval. Recognizing the inseparability of mind and society is essential for a potent, socially engaged, ethically grounded practice of CBT.
A growing body of critical scholarship in psychology contends that its standard research methods, including randomized controlled trials, correlational designs, and psychometric measurement, are intrinsically rooted in White, Western, or colonial epistemologies and therefore function as mechanisms of epistemic exclusion/oppression and structural racism. These claims extend beyond concerns about unequal participation to argue that scientific rationality itself is epistemically and morally compromised. This paper critically examines such arguments, evaluates their epistemic coherence, and defends the rational foundations of scientific psychology's methods. Drawing on meta-scientific and philosophical work, particularly Popper's evolutionary epistemology and Laudan's problem-solving account of rationality, the paper argues that the legitimacy of research methods does not depend on their social or cultural origins, but rather on their openness to criticism, their capacity for error correction, and their demonstrated effectiveness in solving problems. While decolonial critiques appropriately highlight historical injustices and institutional failures within psychology, they frequently conflate the social genealogy of scientific practices with their epistemic validity. The paper further argues that proposed methodological replacements have not yet demonstrated comparable epistemic grounding or problem-solving productivity.