studies & articles
The Blog
One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.
I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.
-Dr. Karen Nelson
Growth mindset interventions, shared positivity, and well-being
The two articles I present here relate to well-being. First, Burnette et al. (2022) published “A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Growth Mindset Interventions: For whom, how, and why might such interventions work?” in Psychological Bulletin. Here’s the edited impact statement and abstract with some information in bold:
Communal expectations conflict with autonomy motives
Proudfoot & Kay (2022) published “Communal Expectations Conflict with Autonomy Motives: The western drive for autonomy shapes women’s negative responses to positive gender stereotypes” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.