The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is so widely used and fundamental to psychiatry and clinical psychology that it is commonly called the “bible” of the mental health profession. Not only does it define disorders and describe their core symptoms and typical course, but it describes why they are included as diagnoses at all, lists indications that a person does not have a disorder, and emphasizes variations in symptoms by age, gender, and culture. And since its initial publication in 1951, the manual has been continually revised to accommodate new scientific insights. 

However, despite its increasing status and ongoing refinements, the DSM has never been free of criticism. By the time the fifth and latest edition, known as the DSM-5, was published in 2013, that criticism had reached a fever pitch. 

Related content from this issue: National Academies Release Consensus Report on Ontologies in Behavioral Science

One chief complaint about the DSM is that many of its diagnostic categories lack empirical support. “Most of them were formulated decades ago,” Christopher Conway (Fordham University) and colleagues explained in a 2021 Current Directions in Psychological Science article, “when standards of evidence were very different.” Despite continual revisions, for example, the reliability of DSM diagnoses (i.e., consistent agreement between clinicians) has remained low—in fact, as tests for the diagnoses’ reliability improved, their performance worsened (Cooper, 2014).  

Other criticisms concern high rates of comorbidity, or overlap, among diagnoses. “Many people… get five [DSM] diagnoses,” said former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director Steven Hyman (Belluck & Carey, 2013). “But they don’t have five diseases—they have one underlying condition.” It’s actually rare, Conway and colleagues noted, for people to fit only one DSM category.  

A further complaint concerns heterogeneity within DSM diagnoses. To qualify for a diagnosis, all patients must have a certain number of symptoms—but those symptoms may differ dramatically. For example, according to Isaac Galatzer-Levy (New York University School of Medicine) and Richard Bryant (University of New South Wales, Kensington), there are 636,120 symptom combinations that meet the DSM-5’s criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even if certain symptoms are more or less common, this variability raises questions about how likely researchers are to identify a treatment that applies to all, or even most, cases. 

These problems are relevant not only for treatment but for research. Valuable information about the variety and severity of symptoms may be lost when researchers collapse them into unitary DSM diagnoses or exclude participants without a requisite number of symptoms (Forbes et al., 2021). To illustrate that point, Conway and colleagues described an imaginary study based on the DSM’s definition of antisocial personality disorder, which would exclude participants whose “only” symptoms were deceitfulness and a lack of empathy. Surely, the authors argued, those two symptoms alone have a major impact on behavior. 

Amid these criticisms, what are the alternatives to the DSM? What new avenues and insights do they open up, and what are their chances of supplanting the “bible” of psychiatry? 

Enter RDoC 

Mere weeks before its publication, one of the most high-profile blows to the DSM-5 came from Thomas Insel, then director of NIMH. In a blog post, Insel proclaimed that the institute would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” The DSM’s definitions, he noted, were based on experts’ interpretations of presenting symptoms, not objective data. “Symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment,” Insel wrote. “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.” 

As an alternative, Insel and others at NIMH proposed a new initiative: the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. Its proponents hoped that by giving grant-seeking researchers a new way to classify and structure their research, RDoC would lay the foundation for a new diagnostic system and, ultimately, better mental health treatment. 

Learn more: RDOC at 10: Sharpening the Science of Mental Health

RDoC distinguishes six “transdiagnostic” domains, which play a role in the onset or maintenance of multiple disorders: negative valence systems (which respond to aversive contexts), positive valence systems (which respond to rewarding contexts), cognitive systems, social processes, arousal and regulatory systems, and sensorimotor systems. Each domain can be investigated across eight units of analysis. Three of those—behavior, self-report, and “paradigms,” or assessment instruments—are relatively traditional measures. The others, however, reflect more recent approaches to psychopathology: genes, molecules, cells, (neural) circuits, and physiology.  

Elements of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) matrix. The domain of negative valence systems includes dimensions underlying the ability to respond to aversive or threatening stimuli. The neural circuits governing that domain represent one unit of analysis. Adapted from National Institute of Mental Health, “RDoC Matrix,” https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rdoc/constructs/rdoc-matrix.

RDoC is thus well positioned to advance understanding of neurobiological processes in psychopathology. For example, as Randy Auerbach (Columbia University) noted in a 2022 article in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, although typically developing youth and those diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) achieve similar cortical maturation over time, that maturation is delayed among ADHD patients. A focus on neurodevelopmental trajectories could help to reveal whether and how this delay relates to behavioral and attentional symptoms. It might even be possible, he proposed, to triangulate across measures—examining how changes in physical development or in hormone levels relate to cortical development and function—to explore how these processes unfold over the course of puberty.

However, because RDoC represents such a sweeping departure from the DSM, it may take a long time for any insights it generates to transform diagnostic models. Insel himself admitted that RDoC might seem to be “divorced from clinical practice”; traditional measures of mental illness may hold their own benefits. “Clinical signs can be poorly specific and/or sensitive markers of diseases,” wrote philosophers of medicine Kathryn Tabb (Bard College) and Maël Lemoine (University of Bordeaux) in 2021. “But at the same time, clinical outcomes are the only variable patients and health practitioners are ultimately interested in.”

Network analysis

Network analysis hews more closely to the DSM’s diagnostic categories, retaining the manual’s focus on symptoms but emphasizing their interrelationships, rather than their biological underpinnings. It envisions psychopathology as a network of symptoms and the associations between them. An episode of disorder is thought to occur whenever a sufficient number of associated symptoms arise and persist for long enough to disrupt well-being or functioning. Recovery occurs when symptoms ease or their connections are severed.

In a 2016 article in Behaviour Research and Therapy, APS Fellow Richard McNally (Harvard University) explained that whereas categorical frameworks like the DSM assume that co-occurring symptoms reflect discrete underlying disorders, network analysis assumes that symptoms themselves give rise to disorders and may not share a common cause.

Network analysis also avoids favoring symptoms that are characteristic of or specific to particular disorders. Instead, it emphasizes “central” nodes—the symptoms of greatest importance in a particular network, as evidenced by the number and strength of their associations with other symptoms.

In 2016, APS Fellow Eiko Fried (now at Leiden University) and colleagues reanalyzed data from 3,463 depressed patients who had completed the 28-item Inventory for Depressive Symptomatology (IDS). The IDS assesses many symptoms not found in the DSM, including irritability, anxiety, and somatic complaints (e.g., pain, heavy limbs). The researchers investigated how likely people with one depression symptom were to have other symptoms as well. In a group of people with any condition—such as the measles, Fried suggested in an exchange with the Observer—intercorrelations among disease-specific symptoms (fever, rash) should be higher than intercorrelations among nonspecific symptoms (brittle toenails, dental pain). The researchers’ findings, however, indicated that non-DSM symptoms were just as intercorrelated—that is, as central—as those in the DSM. In other words, a definition of depression could very reasonably include symptoms that the DSM leaves out.

Even if central symptoms apply to a small proportion of sufferers or span many diagnoses, they may hold the key to the emergence—and treatment—of a disorder, according to some proponents of network analysis, because simply unseating a central symptom could help to deactivate other symptoms in the network.

For example, McNally and colleagues found that difficulty sleeping, which isn’t thought to be a core PTSD symptom, was nevertheless a central symptom among survivors of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Their results suggested that poor sleep sapped the survivors’ executive resources, hobbling their ability to regulate emotions and attention. If that interpretation is correct, the authors argued, then stabilizing sleep in PTSD patients might be a simple way to bolster the effects of therapy.

Personality traits

But what if symptoms are more than nodes in a network—what if they really dorepresent a latent, underlying factor? When it comes to personality disorders, what we think of as symptoms may simply be “extreme variants of general personality traits,” Thomas Widiger (University of Kentucky) and coauthors wrote in Clinical Psychological Science in 2019. These traits are usually conceptualized as extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—the dimensions of the five-factor model of personality.

A broad body of research has linked those traits to a variety of meaningful outcomes, including mortality, criminality, school and work performance, life satisfaction, and, of course, psychopathology. For example, Widiger and colleagues noted, evidence from several studies suggests that low conscientiousness and low agreeableness are associated with externalizing psychopathology, which manifests as poorly controlled, impulsive, or aggressive behavior—as seen in substance-use disorders, ADHD, and antisocial personality disorder.

In a 2021 study published in Clinical Psychological Science, Monika Waszczuk (Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science) and coauthors analyzed longitudinal data from three samples—of adolescents, trauma-exposed primary care patients, and psychiatric patients, respectively—to determine whether personality traits predicted the onset of psychiatric disorders, the persistence of symptoms, or functional impairment. Their results indicated that on all three counts, personality traits, especially agreeableness and extraversion, provided more insight than past psychiatric diagnoses.

Both sets of authors concluded that by incorporating personality traits into assessments of patients, clinicians could improve their prognoses and better tailor their treatments. Going one step further, they suggested, mental health interventions might be more successful if they targeted personality traits rather than psychopathy per se.

Personality is often thought to be stable, Widiger and colleagues explained, but in fact it regularly changes, both over the life course and in response to events, including clinical interventions. A mindfulness-based intervention known as the Unified Protocol, for example, was originally developed for mood and anxiety disorders but has since been shown to effectively reduce neuroticism (Barlow et al., 2014).

The authors suggested that it may also be possible to develop interventions to heighten agreeableness and to reduce extreme levels of introversion and openness. In each case, targeting traits, rather than symptoms, might prevent associated manifestations of psychopathology.

But that hope raises questions about causality: Do personality traits cause symptoms or syndromes, Waszczuk and coauthors asked, or do they merely reflect a general underlying vulnerability? Other research is needed, the authors acknowledged, to tease apart those pathways.

HiTOP

One other alternative framework brings together several of these approaches: the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, or HiTOP for short. Drawing on a broad body of empirical work, HiTOP’s proponents argue that all mental illness shares a “general factor” of psychopathology, known as the p factor. That shared general factor, they say, helps to explain the common co-occurrence of symptoms and syndromes.

HiTOP seats the p factor at the top of a hierarchical structure of psychopathology. Directly beneath it are five broad “spectrum constructs”: internalizing, antagonistic externalizing, disinhibited externalizing, detachment, thought disorder, and somatoform. Those constructs are made up of subfactors and, in turn, clusters of symptoms. For example, the internalizing spectrum contains the subfactor of distress, which encompasses key symptoms associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD. Finally, at the base of the hierarchy are maladaptive personality traits and symptom components.

Proponents of HiTOP argue that by collapsing these dimensions, the DSM obscures how symptoms relate to one another and which symptoms are uniquely associated with particular traits and behaviors (Forbes et al., 2021). For example, research into pathological exercise, a common symptom in eating disorders, has found that different motivations underlie this habit among different populations—suggesting that treatments may need to be tailored for overexercisers driven by body-image concerns and by needs for competence and autonomy (Dreier et al., 2020). 

Other research influenced by HiTOP has highlighted the dangers of artificially assigning superordinate dimensions of pathology to individual disorders. In a 2020 article in Clinical Psychological Science, Kasey Stanton (University of Wyoming) described recent pushes to recognize negative affective dysfunction (NAD)—characterized by negative moods and maladaptive responses—as a core feature of ADHD. Studies have shown evidence for a substantial association between ADHD and NAD, he acknowledged, so targeting NAD in treatment would obviously be beneficial for some ADHD patients.  

However, he wrote, additional evidence suggests that NAD generalizes across internalizing and externalizing disorders and that its association with ADHD is comparatively small. By extension, if the DSM needs to include NAD in ADHD’s diagnostic criteria, then it should also add NAD to the criteria for many other diagnoses.  

But doing so would likely increase symptom overlap between ADHD and other disorders, Stanton stressed, with troubling implications for diagnosis and treatment. For example, both MDD and ADHD, as defined by the DSM-5, involve restlessness and difficulty concentrating. If the two disorders also shared NAD as a core symptom, that would make it even harder for clinicians to determine the correct diagnosis for patients—raising the risk of mistaken diagnosis and inappropriate stimulant prescriptions. 

ICD 

 The DSM is sometimes overshadowed by the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD. Since its sixth edition was published in 1949, World Health Organization member states have used the ICD’s categories to report statistics on both mental and physical health. And today, many countries, including the United States, legally require health care professionals to use ICD categories (or national modifications) when collecting or reporting diagnostic information.  

It’s no accident that the DSM’s categories are much like the ICD’s: Throughout its history, the DSM has been heavily influenced by the ICD, and that influence has only grown over time. As APS Fellow Lee Anna Clark (University of Notre Dame) and colleagues described in a 2017 article in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, the American Psychiatric Association’s development of the DSM-5 involved collaborations with WHO in “an effort to maximize the [two systems’] structural similarity.” Most criticisms of the DSM also apply to the ICD (Clark et al., 2017), but the ICD’s categorical structure has been less hotly contested than the DSM’s—perhaps because of its underlying goals.  

One of those goals is clinical utility—in particular, ease of implementation by relevant health professionals. Moreover, because the ICD is meant to be globally applicable, it has spawned a proliferation of guidelines catering to different needs and populations.  

For example, in 1992, WHO developed the ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines (CDDG) to help clinicians make more reliable diagnoses of mental health disorders. Rather than requiring precise symptom durations and counts like the DSM, the CDDG offers more flexible guidance. That flexibility allows not only for cultural variation in presentations of illness but for geographic variation in infrastructure and available resources (Clark et al., 2017).  

Another WHO publication, the mhGAP Intervention Guide for Mental, Neurological, and Substance Use Disorders in Non-Specialized Health Settings, details treatment guidelines for primary-care settings in low- and middle-income countries. Limited to “priority” mental disorders—those with the highest prevalence, disease burden, and amenability to treatment—it provides guidance on a range of conditions (including depression, psychoses, dementia, and substance-use disorders), as well as psychosocial interventions (Clark et al., 2017).  

Even beyond its clinical use, the ICD has some unique advantages for research. By including mental disorders alongside other medical diagnoses, Clark and colleagues noted, the ICD “facilitates coordination with classification of other disorders, including… conditions that are frequently comorbid with mental and behavioral disorders.” That can also make it easier to identify associations between mental illness and risk factors for other conditions—whether those are due to shared etiology, to patients’ behaviors (e.g., smoking), or to treatment itself (e.g., institutionalization or medication).  

Conclusion 

Although the DSM’s present-versus-absent symptom and syndrome determinations have been maligned by the proponents of most alternative models, a broad cross-section of users may favor them, as Gerald Haeffel (University of Notre Dame) and colleagues noted in a 2021 Clinical Psychological Science article. In health care and administrative contexts, they explained, binary decisions are often necessary: Does a child qualify for special education? Does an applicant qualify for disability benefits? Can a code be provided to secure insurance coverage for a patient’s treatment? In other words, the same clinical utility that bolsters the status of the ICD makes the DSM valuable, imperfections aside. 

The DSM’s monopoly on diagnostic practice might also be weaker than it seems. A recent global survey revealed that mental health professionals found the classifications in the DSM and the ICD most useful for “meeting administrative requirements, assigning a diagnosis, communicating with other health care professionals, and teaching trainees or students, and lowest for selecting a treatment and assessing probable prognosis” (First et al., 2018). In other words, even if clinicians apply DSM categories for administrative purposes, they may incorporate other information into their assessments and treatment decisions.  

All of these taxonomic systems have proved useful for certain purposes; improving our understanding and treatment of psychopathology may hinge not on identifying a single system to rule them all but on avoiding what Fried (2021) has called “diagnostic literalism,” or conflating complex mental health problems with cut-and-dry diagnostic categories. In the complex landscape of psychopathology, he cautions, taxonomic systems are useful frameworks for describing the world, reflecting our methods and our needs as much as they reflect reality itself. 

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References 

Auerbach, R. P. (2022). RDoC and the developmental origins of psychiatric disorders: How did we get here and where are we going? The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 63(4), 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13582 

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Barlow, D. H., Sauer-Zavala, S., Carl, J. R., Bullis, J. R., & Ellard, K. K. (2014). The nature, diagnosis, and treatment of neuroticism: Back to the future. Clinical Psychological Science, 2(3), 344–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613505532 

Belluck, P., & Carey, B. (2013, May 6). Psychiatry’s guide is out of touch with science, experts say. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/health/psychiatrys-new-guide-falls-short-experts-say.html 

Clark, L. A., Cuthbert, B., Lewis-Fernández, R., Narrow, W. E., & Reed, G. M. (2017). Three approaches to understanding and classifying mental disorder: ICD-11, DSM-5, and the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 18(2) 72–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100617727266 

Conway, C. C., Krueger, R. F., & HiTOP Consortium Executive Board. (2021). Rethinking the diagnosis of mental disorders: Data-driven psychological dimensions, not categories, as a framework for mental-health research, treatment, and training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(2), 151–158. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721421990353 

Cooper, R. (2014, September 2). How reliable is the DSM-5? Mad in America. https://www.madinamerica.com/2014/09/how-reliable-is-the-dsm-5/ 

Dreier, M. J., Coniglio, K., & Selby, E. A. (2021). Mapping features of pathological exercise using hierarchical-dimensional modeling. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 54(3), 422–432. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23406 

First, M. B., Rebello, T. J., Keeley, J. W., Bhargava, R., Dai, Y., Kulygina, M., Matsumoto, C., Robles, R., Stona, A.-C., & Reed, G. M. (2018). Do mental health professionals use diagnostic classifications the way we think they do? A global survey. World Psychiatry, 17(2), 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20525 

Forbes, M. K., Sunderland, M., Rapee, R. M., Batterham, P. J., Calear, A. L., Carragher, N., Ruggero, C., Zimmerman, M., Baillie, A. J., Lynch, S. J., Mewton, L., Slade, T., & Krueger, R. F. (2021). A detailed hierarchical model of psychopathology: From individual symptoms up to the general factor of psychopathology. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620954799 

Fried, E. I. (2021). Studying mental health problems as systems, not syndromes. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/k4mhv 

Fried, E. I., Epskamp, S., Nesse, R. M., Tuerlinckx, F., & Borsboom, D. (2016). What are ‘good’ depression symptoms? Comparing the centrality of DSM and non-DSM symptoms of depression in a network analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 189, 314–320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2015.09.005 

Haeffel, G. J., Jeronimus, B. F., Kaiser, B. N., Weaver, L. J., Soyster, P. D., Fisher, A. J., Vargas, I., Goodson, J. T., & Lu, W. (2022). Folk classification and factor rotations: Whales, sharks, and the problems with the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP). Clinical Psychological Science, 10(2), 259–278. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1177/21677026211002500

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McNally, R. J., Robinaugh, D. J., Wu, G. W. Y., Wang, L., Deserno, M. K., & Borsboom, D. (2015). Mental disorders as causal systems: A network approach to posttraumatic stress disorder. Clinical Psychological Science, 3(6), 836–849. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1177/2167702614553230 

Stanton, K. (2020). Increasing diagnostic emphasis on negative affective dysfunction: Potentially negative consequences for psychiatric classification and diagnosis. Clinical Psychological Science, 8(3), 584–589. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620906147 

Leveraging the Strengths of Psychologists With Lived Experience of Psychopathology
Sarah E. Victor et al.

Recent research has suggested that a significant proportion of clinical, counseling, and school psychology faculty and graduate students experienced and/or experiences psychopathology. This commentary complements these findings by leveraging the perspectives of the authors, who have personal lived experience of psychopathology, to improve professional inclusivity in these fields. By “coming out proud,” the authors aim to foster discussion, research, and inclusion efforts. To that end, they describe considerations related to disclosure of lived experience, identify barriers to inclusion, and provide concrete recommendations for personal and systemic changes to improve recognition and acceptance of psychopathology lived experience among psychologists.

Advancing the Study of Resilience to Daily Stressors
Anthony D. Ong and Kate A. Leger

Ong and Leger suggest that, besides trauma and extreme adversity, stressors experienced in daily life may also forecast individual health and well-being. They argue that daily process approaches that incorporate intensive sampling of individuals in natural settings can provide insights into adaptational processes to daily stressors. The authors review studies that link intraindividual dynamics with diverse health-related phenomena and support a multiple-levels-analysis perspective that embraces greater unity in resilience constructs across the life span. Ong and Leger propose that more research in this area will deepen understanding of the mechanisms by which individuals’ inherent capacity for change might promote health.

Why Warmth Matters More Than Competence: A New Evolutionary Approach
Adar B. Eisenbruch and Max M. Krasnow

Past research has suggested that there are two major dimensions of social perception, often called warmth and competence, and that warmth is usually prioritized over competence in social decision-making. Eisenbruch and Krasnow suggest that humans’ evolutionary history of cooperative partner choice might explain the prioritization of warmth. They argue that ancestral humans faced greater variance in the warmth of potential cooperative partners than in their competence but greater variance in competence over time within cooperative relationships. These differences in the distributions of these traits made warmth more predictive than competence of the future benefits of a relationship.

Bias, Fairness, and Validity in Graduate-School Admissions: A Psychometric Perspective
Sang Eun Woo, James M. LeBreton, Melissa G. Keith, and Louis Tay

Seeking to enhance equity and diversity in higher education, many schools are considering the removal of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE; a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada and that has been linked to disparities between groups) from their admission processes. Controversies have followed. Using a psychometric perspective, Woo and colleagues argue for a critical need to clarify the measurement of “bias” and “fairness.” They review evidence on the validity, bias, and fairness issues associated with six measurements used to inform graduate-school admissions decisions, including GRE, grade point average, personal statements, resumes/curriculum vitae, letters of recommendation, and interviews.

Epistemic Oppression, Construct Validity, and Scientific Rigor: Commentary on Woo et al. (2022)
Jennifer M. Gómez

Gómez highlights what she considers flaws in the article by Woo and colleagues that undermine its credibility and utility as rigorous science contributing to the field. She discusses epistemic oppression (systemic exclusion of certain types of scholarship) and the importance of including construct validity within a psychometric article. She also highlights that the article contains interpretations that are contrary to relevant scholarship and reinstates arguments that have been made previously. Gómez concludes with a plea to the authors to respectfully consider the matter of anti-Black violence, which they reference.

Improving Graduate-School Admissions by Expanding Rather Than Eliminating Predictors
Christopher D. Nye and Ann Marie Ryan

Nye and Ryan expand on Woo et al.’s review and suggest ways of supplementing the GRE to both increase the predictive validity of admissions decisions and improve the diversity of graduate programs. To inform admissions decisions, they suggest assessing both conscientiousness and vocational interests and combining the scores from these predictors with the GRE. To improve the diversity of the applicant pool, they propose several ways of expanding recruitment efforts to attract qualified underrepresented minority applicants.

Constructs, Tape Measures, and Mercury
C. Malik Boykin

Boykin challenges and offers alternatives to how we define the underlying construct measured by the GRE. As an analogy, Boykin discusses how genomic models predicting height are trained on data from European ancestral populations and systematically underpredict the height of West Africans. The author examines the implications for the GRE’s validity and usability and scrutinizes an analogy Woo and colleagues used to assert that blaming the GRE for disparities in scores across groups is akin to blaming the thermometer for global warming. Boykin describes racism as context for thinking about the limitations of this misguided analogy.

What Was Not Said and What to Do About It
Nathan R. Kuncel and Frank C. Worrell

Kuncel and Worrell go beyond Woo and colleagues’ article and suggest that the inability to provide opportunities and develop talent across all groups is a fundamental problem in education. They would like to dismiss test and grade differences but believe the greatest change will come by investing in expanded gifted-and-talented programs, increasing the flow of underrepresented students into these programs, improving the assessment of psychosocial skills and talents at all levels, and offering career counseling and mentoring early and continuing them through higher education.

HUMANS HAVE A complicated relationship with happiness. Consider this study on the subject: Scientists found that valuing happiness can lead to less happiness when you feel happy. It’s an emotional rollercoaster fueled by unhelpful expectations.

Yet the relationship gets more complex still. According to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science our current state of well-being can interfere with our perception of the past. Overall, researchers observed an asymmetrical pattern: Happy people tend to overreport an improvement in their well-being, while unhappy people tend to exaggerate a worsening sense of well-being.

…

Traits tied to success • Entrepreneurial hotspots • Entrepreneurial training • Future directions

Bryan Stacy felt devastated by the 2019 failure of his first business venture—a virtual sexual health clinic launched with financial backing from friends and family. But it didn’t take him long to start another company. 

“After the first one, my identity was crushed,” the Brooklyn, NY, entrepreneur said. “I had put my entire life savings into it. I was $70,000 in debt when I closed up. My next move was to start the next business, which sounds insane. But it didn’t feel insane at the time.” 

Stacy found success with that follow-up company, Vaheala, which provides COVID-19 testing and tracking for employers. As planned when he launched the venture in 2020, he’s set to shutter the company as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. And he’s already contemplating his next business endeavor. 

Stacy’s resilience in the wake of that initial 2019 failure is a critical trait that researchers have tied to entrepreneurial success. While statisticians debate the true rate of business failures, collectively the data show that roughly half of start-up ventures shut down within 5 years of their launch. A burgeoning assortment of psychological scientists is studying the factors that distinguish successful entrepreneurs from those that falter.  

Their work is particularly salient today. The U.S. Census Bureau saw business applications begin to spike in 2020 as side hustlers and laid-off workers—flush with time and savings built up over the pandemic lockdown—took advantage of low interest rates to launch new companies and solo ventures. Startup activity varied from country to country throughout the pandemic, but funding for new businesses soared on a global scale. Venture capitalists poured $683 billion into business ventures in 2021, doubling the amount invested in the previous year.  

But the favorable economic winds have slowed over the last year amid rising borrowing costs, throttled supply chains, and inflation. Worldwide, venture capitalists curtailed their investments in new companies by 30% in 2022, reports the National Venture Capital Association. The trends portend a Darwinian environment in the start-up space and could trigger layoffs, debts, and wasted capital. Psychological research is revealing what will help the fittest ventures to survive.  

“Society at large benefits when the money invested in entrepreneurial ventures creates new jobs,” said APS Fellow Kelly G. Shaver, who was professor of entrepreneurial studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and now runs the consulting firm MindCette. “Society loses when the money invested in entrepreneurial ventures creates failures. So, if there is any way to reduce the percentage of failures, that’s of very broad scientific and societal interest. With up to $344 billion invested in startup companies in a year [in the United States], a 5% reduction in losses turns out to be a pretty sizeable chunk of money.”    

Traits tied to success 

Scientists in a variety of disciplines have explored key personality and cognitive traits of entrepreneurs. Researchers at Bocconi University in Italy, for example, introduced a cognitive mechanism called “user perspective-taking”—the ability to assume the viewpoint of a market’s potential customers. They found that entrepreneurs who adopted such a perspective showed an enhanced ability to identify market opportunities (Prandelli et al., 2016). 

APS Fellow Robert A. Baron of Oklahoma State University and collaborators in Rome and Abu Dhabi observed that business founders appear to possess a special type of entrepreneurial alertness fueled by two aspects of self-control: 

• locomotion—the ability to take swift action without distractions or delays; and 
• assessment—the capacity to evaluate relevant factors before moving ahead. 

The researchers recruited a sample of 120 entrepreneurs on the Italian island of Sardinia and had them respond to questions designed to capture individuals’ proactive tendencies, judgment, and alertness. They found that participants who scored high on locomotion and assessment showed a superior aptitude for scanning market conditions, evaluating opportunities, and making the most profitable choices (Amato et al., 2017). 

Related content: It’s Time for Psychological Science to Become More Entrepreneurial

Innovators also tend to excel in planning and adapting, studies suggest.  An international team of psychological scientists, including APS William James Fellow Carol Dweck, found that entrepreneurs and other business professionals, along with students and athletes, tend to think more strategically than others when facing challenges. Led by Patricia Chen at the National University of Singapore, the researchers surveyed participants using a six-item scale designed to measure self-efficacy and tactical thinking. They found that people who were best able to adjust their strategic thinking were most successful in achieving their goals (Chen et al., 2020). 

A team of psychologists led by Jeffrey M. Pollack of North Carolina State University (NC State) identified networking style as a factor in entrepreneurial performance. They recruited participants from a national business networking group that met weekly to share leads and referrals. They then asked the participants about networking style and the number of face-to-face meetings they had with other group members. They found that participants who focused on seeking out new contacts in the group—as opposed to people who interacted with members they already knew—reported more frequent and sundry interactions.  And greater networking correlated with increased business revenue. (Pollack et al, 2014).  

Research has also illuminated the role of “need for cognition”—an individual’s attraction to effortful cognitive activity—in driving entrepreneurial activity. Josef Scarantino, a Denver-based professional who has launched several business ventures and advises start-ups, fits that description. 

“Since I was very young, I was intrigued by the freedom to build and pursue and create,” Scarantino said. “It’s always been something that stimulated my brain.” 

Additionally, research points to a rebellious streak among entrepreneurs. Researchers from Germany and Sweden, using longitudinal data, found that business founders had a history of minor anti-social tendencies in their adolescence. In a data set of 1,000 residents of Sweden tracked over 40 years, social psychologist Martin Obschonka and his colleagues found that eventual entrepreneurs were more likely than others in the sample to have cheated at school, defied their parents, and used drugs regularly. The findings suggest that questioning boundaries in adolescence may be the basis for productive, enterprising risk-taking in adulthood, the researchers said (Obschonka et al., 2013). 

Listen to this Under the Cortex episode on Exploration and Risk-Taking: Hallmarks of Adolescence That Increase Well-Being

Nikki Blacksmith and Mo McClusker, industrial/organization psychologists who founded the Washington, DC-based firm Blackhawke Behavior Science, set out to uncover the relationship between entrepreneurship tasks, human behavior, and business outcomes. The company conducted a massive meta-analysis of studies on the behaviors tied to start-up success. 

From this work, Blackhawke developed 12 Pillars of Entrepreneurial Performance that cut across cognitive, motivational, and relational aspects of performing: vision, strategy, resourcefulness, execution, innovation, decision making, collaboration, direction, influence, autonomy, intensity, and tenacity. Blackhawke’s work paints a profile of a successful entrepreneur as someone who recognizes opportunity, marshals the necessary capital and other resources, develops and implements a solid business plan, and continuously improves the product on the basis of market conditions. The innovator also is an influential leader, builds and manages strong relationships, overcomes obstacles, and effectively manages stress. 

A key success factor that Blacksmith has identified in her consulting work with startups is team-building ability. 

“It’s about not just the product, but also about building a company,” Blacksmith said in an interview on the APS podcast Under the Cortex, “which means you have to bring in the right people, you have to manage them, you have to motivate them, you have to know how to effectively collaborate across people.” 

See Nikki Blacksmith’s Back Page interview.

Stacy says he learned the importance of team cohesion while captaining Biem, the sexual health start-up he cofounded with a medical doctor in 2016. Inspired by his diagnosis and treatment for testicular cancer and chlamydia, Stacy designed Biem to provide customers with an app that facilitated access to healthcare providers, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, and contact tracing. But within 3 years after the company’s launch, the partners had nearly exhausted their cash and formed conflicting goals for the business. 

“My cofounder said something like, ‘The vision of this is to build up all these physical offices and locations for people across the states,’” Stacy said. “And I said, ‘No, we’re a digital front door to people, and we’re going to work with doctors’ offices that already exist.’ The visions for what the business actually was couldn’t have been more different.” 

Stacy’s experience is all too common in new companies, Blacksmith told the Observer. 

“The most common reasons start-ups fail come back to the people,” she said. “It comes down to issues like team conflict and poor leadership decisions.” 

Entrepreneurial hotspots 

Other researchers are examining entrepreneurship from a geographical perspective. Obschonka, who heads the Entrepreneurship and Innovation section at the University of Amsterdam Business School, has worked with economists, data scientists, personality researchers, and other psychological scientists to identify “hotspots” where business start-ups thrive and boost regional economies. 

Obschonka and his colleagues used an artificial-intelligence method to examine local indicators of the Big Five personality traits reflected in language patterns on Twitter. They found large hotspots of entrepreneurial personality, characterized as high levels of extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experiences and low levels of agreeableness and neuroticism. The hotspots included the East Coast from Massachusetts to Florida; Denver/Boulder; the San Francisco Bay area, Southern California, and the Gulf Coast regions of Louisiana and Mississippi. Importantly, they found a significant overlap between the Twitter-based measures of entrepreneurial personality and actual levels of business start-ups in those hotspots (Obschonka et al., 2018).

Related content: Deconstructing Entrepreneurial Discovery

Shaver and his collaborators have developed a test to help identify some universal and geographically specific dimensions of entrepreneurship. They have collected survey responses from nationally representative samples in South Africa and Bahrain. These data represent two large, culturally distinct groups—a population made up largely of Black and brown Christians and another comprised of White Muslims. 

“It’s actually hard to find two societies that would be more vastly different,” Shaver said in an interview. 

Across both countries, Shaver’s team identified confidence, diligence, entrepreneurial desire, innovation, leadership, motives, permanence, self-control, and resilience as the common dimensions among entrepreneurs. MindCette calibrated the scales separately for men and women—a method that Shaver says is all too rare in entrepreneurial research—and found the dimensions evident across both sexes in both countries (Al-Ubaydli et al., 2022). 

“The beauty is that in both countries, the nine dimensions significantly distinguish people who are entrepreneurs from people who are not,” Shaver said. 

Ostensibly, angel investors would be interested in these data to help identify the start-ups that are likely to succeed over those that face a high risk of failure. But in their consulting work, both Shaver and Blacksmith have encountered a couple of obstacles when sharing their findings. For one, venture capitalists tend to accept a high level of risk when making investment decisions. 

“Most venture capitalists take an approach of investing in 10 companies assuming only one is going to become big enough to cover the investments,” Blacksmith said. “That’s a 10% success rate, which seems insane to me. How is this a good process?” 

Additionally, funders tend to place undue trust in their instincts when selecting start-ups to back, the consultants reported. 

“Their lack of psychological knowledge does not prevent them from making psychological judgments,” Shaver said. “I haven’t been able to convince them that, with their backgrounds in finance, they ought to be examining the finances, not me. And with my background in psychology, I ought to be examining the entrepreneurs, not them.” 

Entrepreneurial training 

Psychological scientists are also examining entrepreneurship as a teachable practice, rather than just an individual trait. Among the pioneers in entrepreneurial education research are APS Fellow Michael Frese and Michael Gielnik at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. 

Frese and his colleagues developed a psychologically focused training program for entrepreneurs in developing countries—all with the aim of helping fight global poverty. In one study, Frese and his collaborators randomly assigned 109 owners of small-to-medium-size businesses in Uganda to receive psychologically focused business training. During the intervention, participants met with a trainer to practice effective strategies for dealing with business obstacles. They learned, for example, the benefits of construing negative feedback as a tool for improving business rather than an impediment. 

Over a year, the research team collected data on how well each business performed. They found that participants in the intervention group were making more money and hiring more people compared with those in a control group. Additionally, all five businesses that shuttered during the study were in the control group (Frese et al., 2016). 

Frese worked with World Bank economists to test the impact of training for business owners in Togo. The research team recruited 500 small-business operators to undergo personal initiative training designed to foster motivation, innovation, goal setting, resilience, and other mental processes. In four follow-up surveys conducted over 2 years, the researchers found that the business owners who received the personal initiative training had increased their profits by 30%, compared with 11% for a comparison group that received traditional business training (Campos et al., 2017). 

Social psychologist Jeni L. Burnette and colleagues at NC State worked with other psychological scientists to test a growth-mindset intervention designed to boost students’ confidence in their entrepreneurial capacity. In a preregistered study, they presented 120 students with video modules showing how time, effort and energy can improve entrepreneurial abilities. Those students subsequently reported greater confidence in their ability to identify business opportunities and create products than a control group of 118 students (Burnette et al., 2020). 

Future directions 

In their interviews with the Observer, Blacksmith and Shaver pointed to necessary directions for future research on entrepreneurship. Both noted that the money invested in men’s start-up ventures woefully dwarfs the capital going to women entrepreneurs and other minorities, yet scientists have yet to pinpoint ways to counter bias in start-up funding. Blacksmith also sees a need for deepening collaborations between business schools and psychology departments to help potential entrepreneurs better grasp the importance of critical psychosocial business skills such as team building and leadership.  

For now, researchers and business developers alike agree that entrepreneurship, far beyond the stereotypical development of apps and gadgets, has significant potential to tackle existential issues like climate change, pandemics, and war. Blacksmith said she’s noticed a rising interest, among both entrepreneurs and their backers, to deliver a valuable impact to society and individuals.   

Scarantino reflects that sense of mission. 

“My greatest feeling of success,” he said, “is when someone has come to me and said, ‘This program or product you built changed my life.’” 

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Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, Teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offers advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Hyde, L., & Dotterer, H. (2022). The nature and nurture of callous-unemotional traits. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(6), 546–555.

When cold-blooded violence strikes, people want answers. Such was the case with Bryan Kohberger, the former criminology graduate student who allegedly murdered four University of Idaho students in late 2022. As a youth, Kohberger wrote that he felt “no emotion” and “little remorse” (Baker & Bogel-Burroughs, 2023). Was Kohberger’s lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse as a youth due to his nature? Or did his environment also play a role in affecting his antisocial thoughts and feelings?  

In their article, Luke Hyde and Hailey Dotterer (2022) provide a framework for understanding how nature (genetic factors) and nurture (environmental factors) contribute to the development of callous-unemotional traits—defined as lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse. Twin studies demonstrate that callous-unemotional traits are modestly heritable, with genetic influences explaining between 36% and 67% of the differences in callous-unemotional traits between individuals (Moore et al., 2019). Adoption studies also suggest a genetic component in callous-unemotional traits. In one study, birth parents’ history of antisocial behavior predicted children’s callous-unemotional traits, even though the children were raised by adoptive parents (Hyde et al., 2016). Nature matters mightily. 

Nurture matters, too. Callous-unemotional traits ebb and flow over time, implying a role for environmental influences. For example, three in four youth who score “high” on callous-unemotional traits later report relatively low levels, and only about 5% of all youth consistently score high on callous-unemotional traits (Basking-Sommers et al., 2015; Fontaine et al., 2011).  

Twin and adoption studies suggest the power of parenting in increasing or decreasing children’s risk for callous-unemotional traits. Specifically, twin studies have shown that those who experience harsh, cold parenting are at greater risk of callous-unemotional traits (Dotterer et al., 2021; Waller et al., 2018). In adoption studies, children whose adoptive parents demonstrated warmth toward them report lower levels of callous-unemotional traits two years later (Hyde et al., 2016). Some studies suggest that parental warmth can even reduce children’s genetic risk for callous-unemotional traits, whereas harsh parenting can increase children’s genetic risk (Henry et al., 2018; Tomlinson et al., 2022). By using warmth rather than harshness, parents aid their children’s empathy—and lower their children’s risk for callous-unemotional traits.   

Teaching Activity

Ask students to read the following fictional scenarios about youth with callous-unemotional traits.  

1. Roberta is 7 years old and lacks empathy, guilt, and remorse. She has been in trouble for shoplifting, but her antisocial behavior has decreased over the last 12 months. Although Roberta’s birth parents have a history of violence, her adoptive parents do not. Roberta’s adoptive parents try to give her unconditional emotional support, teaching her how to empathize. Roberta attends psychotherapy regularly to learn different strategies to cope with difficult situations. She reports that she has benefited from therapy and plans to continue attending until she graduates high school.  

2. Saul is 9 years old and shows little remorse for his antisocial behavior. He has engaged in multiple acts of aggression toward his friends, family, and teachers. He has also acted aggressively toward animals. Saul’s father and mother are not involved in his life. His grandmother takes care of him and believes that physical punishment (spanking, slapping) is the only way to discipline him. Saul did not participate in online schooling during the pandemic because his grandmother had no internet connection. He is now two years behind his classmates.  

With a partner, ask students to discuss the following questions:  

1. How might nature (genetic influence or heritability) influence Roberta and Saul’s lack of empathy and guilt? 

2. How might nurture (environmental factors, such as social support) influence Roberta and Saul’s lack of empathy and guilt? 

3. Psychological scientists have shown that nature and nurture interact. Hyde and Dotterer (2022) report that warm or harsh parenting (a nurture factor) can reduce or increase the heritability of low empathy and guilt (a nature factor). How might nature and nurture interact to predict Roberta and Saul’s tendency to experience empathy and guilt? 

4. Design an intervention to increase empathy and the tendency to experience guilt and remorse. Would your intervention prevent low empathy, guilt, and remorse from emerging? Or would your intervention try to assist people who already lacked empathy, guilt, and remorse?  

Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterizing typical patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change.

But the assumption that you can routinely measure these traits using questionnaires that identify typical behavior has come into question in the past two decades. It is not only that behavioral changes happen often but that they occur from day to day and hour to hour. Someone could be open and agreeable at noon but negative and rigid at two o’clock. Such oscillations in daily feelings and behavior—designated with the bland title of intraindividual variability, or IIV—are, in fact, so great that they rival or even exceed the differences in personality traits such as extroversion or conscientiousness that can be measured between one person and another.

The name for this new field appeared in 2004 when Peter C. M. Molenaar, an emeritus professor of human development and psychology at Pennsylvania State University, championed IIV in a manifesto entitled “Bringing the Person Back into Scientific Psychology, This Time Forever.” In it, he used a series of math and physics calculations to illustrate the degree of dynamic flux in personality while deriding standard methods of psychological testing. 

…

In ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates is said to have theorized that the ratio of four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—dictated a person’s distinct temperament. The psychologist Carl Jung, in his 1921 book, Psychological Types, proposed two major attitudinal types (introversion and extroversion) and four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) that combine to yield eight different psychological profiles. And in 2022, a BuzzFeed contributor suggested that everyone is either an apple or a banana. (I’m an apple.)

The point is, people have historically made great efforts to categorize their inner workings, and they haven’t stopped trying. Billy is an extrovert; Sarah wants you to know that her love language is gifts. Your best friend is a Miranda, and you enjoy her company even though she’s a Gemini. Today, attempting to measure personality is a fun conversation topic, a still-growing area of scientific study, and a multibillion-dollar industry.

This plethora of personality measurements presents a new quandary, though: Which one do you believe in? Research has pointed to three major motives for self-evaluation—self-assessment (procuring accurate self-knowledge), self-enhancement (hearing vague compliments and thinking, Huh, that does sound like me), and self-verification (checking to see if others see you the way you see yourself). Yet modern behavior measurements—whether Jungian or fruit-based—can attract different types of people, who are drawn to their test of choice for different reasons. In other words, the selection of the metric itself might say something about the person.

…

Blood flow is often blamed when it comes to erectile dysfunction, but a new medical review suggests that treatment plans shouldn’t ignore what’s also happening psychologically.

According to a recent article published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, personality traits and mental health issues are among the risk factors associated with ED. However, the authors point out, researchers tend to bypass the psychological aspects of this condition in order to concentrate on the physical causes and their treatments.

…

What do Beowulf, Batman and Barbie all have in common? Ancient legends, comic book sagas and blockbuster movies alike share a storytelling blueprint called “the hero’s journey.” This timeless narrative structure, first described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, describes ancient epics, such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and modern favorites, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series. Many hero’s journey stories have become cultural touchstones that influence how people think about their world and themselves.

Our research reveals that the hero’s journey is not just for legends and superheroes. In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that people who frame their own life as a hero’s journey find more meaning in it. This insight led us to develop a “restorying” intervention to enrich individuals’ sense of meaning and well-being. When people start to see their own lives as heroic quests, we discovered, they also report less depression and can cope better with life’s challenges.

…

Psychological research often relies on participants to report or reflect on their own behavior, but these perceptions don’t always align with how they act in the real world or even during experiments in a laboratory. Lab experiments sometimes have participants engage in tasks that don’t capture the full range of behaviors people display in their day-to-day lives, but pairing realistic tasks with machine learning could help researchers more accurately assess individuals’ personality traits, wrote San Ho Lee and colleagues (Seoul National University) in a Psychological Science article. 

The study employed an inverse reinforcement learning (ILR) algorithm capable of inferring the reward function that underlies observed behaviors. 

“The combination of real-time tasks and deep IRL offers a promising novel approach to improving the assessment of psychological constructs underlying human behaviors and decision-making,” Lee and coauthors Myeong Seop Song, Min-hwan Oh, and Woo-Young Ahn wrote. 

The researchers put their IRL algorithm to the test through a study of 47 students at Seoul National University. In addition to completing the Barrat Impulsiveness Scale (BIS), which measures participants’ perceptions of their own motor, planning, and attentional abilities, the students completed a series of three tasks designed to assess impulsivity:  

• a simulated driving task in which the participants’ goal was to drive as fast as possible using arrows on a keyboard, without crashing into another car,  
• a delay-discounting task in which participants chose between different rewards offered at various points in the future, and  
• a go/no-go task in which participants needed to press or not press a key on a keyboard in response to text that appeared on screen.  

In line with previous research, Lee and colleagues found a gap between participants’ BIS scores and their performance on the delay-discounting and go/no-go tasks. However, participants’ BIS score significantly correlated with their overall performance on the driving task. 

“The results support our hypothesis that a real-time task in a realistic environment would better reflect impulsivity than traditional trial-based tasks,” Lee and colleagues explained. “Behavioral task measures can represent individual traits measured with a self-report questionnaire if the task offers a wide range of states in which participants can exhibit diverse behaviors as they do in real-world situations.” 

The researchers also found that a deep neural network (DNN) model—trained by the IRL algorithm with data about participants’ driving task performance—was able to identify new indicators of impulsivity that corresponded with the participants’ BIS scores. DNNs can identify complex relationships between actions and rewards that may not be apparent to human observers, the researchers explained. 

In this case, the algorithm compared participants’ actual actions (moving up, no action, moving down, acceleration, and deceleration) with the hypothetical actions generated by an artificial participant operating according to the DNN model. The closer the artificial participants’ actions matched those of the real participants, the more accurate the algorithms’ DNN model appeared to be. The model’s average accuracy was found to be 64%, much higher than the chance rate of 20%. 

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The researchers said they also found an important difference between human and artificial participants: humans chose to take no action more often than artificial participants, possibly because the algorithms do not fully account for the physical cost of actions. 

“Although the IRL agents learn from human demonstrations that reflect constraints on human behaviors, they might not replicate infrequent inaction because of fatigue or inattention in situations in which the participant typically took action,” Lee and colleagues wrote. 

Nonetheless, the DNN model trained by the IRL algorithm was able to identify that participants were motivated by at least two features during the driving task: the speed of their own car and their distance from the car ahead of them in the same lane. Although most participants were motivated to drive at low to moderate speed while maintaining a close to moderate distance from the car ahead of them, participants with higher BIS scores, and thus higher impulsivity, were found to drive faster and closer to the car ahead of them. 

More impulsive participants were also less likely to decelerate before crashing and more likely to change lane immediately before passing a car, rather than switching lanes at a greater distance. 

“We found stronger indicators of impulsivity from IRL rewards than from summary statistics (e.g., mean speed, number of crashes). This suggests that IRL offers more than just a descriptive analysis because the reward functions can provide insights into participants’ characteristics that may not be apparent in their behaviors,” Lee and colleagues wrote. 

In future work, the researchers plan to investigate how people with mental health conditions associated with heightened impulsivity perform on the highway task, as well as the neural correlates of IRL reward functions. Incorporating more realistic laboratory tasks into neuropsychological assessment could help improve their validity by measuring patients’ behaviors under more naturalistic conditions, Lee and colleagues wrote. 

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Reference 

Lee, S. H., Song, M. S., Oh, M., & Ahn, Y. (2024). Bridging the gap between self-report and behavioral laboratory measures: A real-time driving task with inverse reinforcement learning. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241228503