experimental research articles in psychology

• - Google Chrome

Intended for healthcare professionals

• My email alerts
• BMA member login
• Username * Password * Forgot your log in details? Need to activate BMA Member Log In Log in via OpenAthens Log in via your institution

Search form

• Advanced search
• Search responses
• Search blogs
• Beauty sleep:...

Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people

• Related content
• Peer review
• John Axelsson , researcher 1 2 ,
• Tina Sundelin , research assistant and MSc student 2 ,
• Michael Ingre , statistician and PhD student 3 ,
• Eus J W Van Someren , researcher 4 ,
• Andreas Olsson , researcher 2 ,
• Mats Lekander , researcher 1 3
• 1 Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden
• 2 Division for Psychology, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet
• 3 Stress Research Institute, Stockholm University, Stockholm
• 4 Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and VU Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Correspondence to: J Axelsson john.axelsson{at}ki.se
• Accepted 22 October 2010

Objective To investigate whether sleep deprived people are perceived as less healthy, less attractive, and more tired than after a normal night’s sleep.

Design Experimental study.

Setting Sleep laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden.

Participants 23 healthy, sleep deprived adults (age 18-31) who were photographed and 65 untrained observers (age 18-61) who rated the photographs.

Intervention Participants were photographed after a normal night’s sleep (eight hours) and after sleep deprivation (31 hours of wakefulness after a night of reduced sleep). The photographs were presented in a randomised order and rated by untrained observers.

Main outcome measure Difference in observer ratings of perceived health, attractiveness, and tiredness between sleep deprived and well rested participants using a visual analogue scale (100 mm).

Results Sleep deprived people were rated as less healthy (visual analogue scale scores, mean 63 (SE 2) v 68 (SE 2), P<0.001), more tired (53 (SE 3) v 44 (SE 3), P<0.001), and less attractive (38 (SE 2) v 40 (SE 2), P<0.001) than after a normal night’s sleep. The decrease in rated health was associated with ratings of increased tiredness and decreased attractiveness.

Conclusion Our findings show that sleep deprived people appear less healthy, less attractive, and more tired compared with when they are well rested. This suggests that humans are sensitive to sleep related facial cues, with potential implications for social and clinical judgments and behaviour. Studies are warranted for understanding how these effects may affect clinical decision making and can add knowledge with direct implications in a medical context.

Introduction

The recognition [of the case] depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state Joseph Bell (1837-1911)

Good clinical judgment is an important skill in medical practice. This is well illustrated in the quote by Joseph Bell, 1 who demonstrated impressive observational and deductive skills. Bell was one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s teachers and served as a model for the fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes. 2 Generally, human judgment involves complex processes, whereby ingrained, often less consciously deliberated responses from perceptual cues are mixed with semantic calculations to affect decision making. 3 Thus all social interactions, including diagnosis in clinical practice, are influenced by reflexive as well as reflective processes in human cognition and communication.

Sleep is an essential homeostatic process with well established effects on an individual’s physiological, cognitive, and behavioural functionality 4 5 6 7 and long term health, 8 but with only anecdotal support of a role in social perception, such as that underlying judgments of attractiveness and health. As illustrated by the common expression “beauty sleep,” an individual’s sleep history may play an integral part in the perception and judgments of his or her attractiveness and health. To date, the concept of beauty sleep has lacked scientific support, but the biological importance of sleep may have favoured a sensitivity to perceive sleep related cues in others. It seems warranted to explore such sensitivity, as sleep disorders and disturbed sleep are increasingly common in today’s 24 hour society and often coexist with some of the most common health problems, such as hypertension 9 10 and inflammatory conditions. 11

To describe the relation between sleep deprivation and perceived health and attractiveness we asked untrained observers to rate the faces of people who had been photographed after a normal night’s sleep and after a night of sleep deprivation. We chose facial photographs as the human face is the primary source of information in social communication. 12 A perceiver’s response to facial cues, signalling the bearer’s emotional state, intentions, and potential mate value, serves to guide actions in social contexts and may ultimately promote survival. 13 14 15 We hypothesised that untrained observers would perceive sleep deprived people as more tired, less healthy, and less attractive compared with after a normal night’s sleep.

Using an experimental design we photographed the faces of 23 adults (mean age 23, range 18-31 years, 11 women) between 14.00 and 15.00 under two conditions in a balanced design: after a normal night’s sleep (at least eight hours of sleep between 23.00-07.00 and seven hours of wakefulness) and after sleep deprivation (sleep 02.00-07.00 and 31 hours of wakefulness). We advertised for participants at four universities in the Stockholm area. Twenty of 44 potentially eligible people were excluded. Reasons for exclusion were reported sleep disturbances, abnormal sleep requirements (for example, sleep need out of the 7-9 hour range), health problems, or availability on study days (the main reason). We also excluded smokers and those who had consumed alcohol within two days of the protocol. One woman failed to participate in both conditions. Overall, we enrolled 12 women and 12 men.

The participants slept in their own homes. Sleep times were confirmed with sleep diaries and text messages. The sleep diaries (Karolinska sleep diary) included information on sleep latency, quality, duration, and sleepiness. Participants sent a text message to the research assistant by mobile phone (SMS) at bedtime and when they got up on the night before sleep deprivation. They had been instructed not to nap. During the normal sleep condition the participants’ mean duration of sleep, estimated from sleep diaries, was 8.45 (SE 0.20) hours. The sleep deprivation condition started with a restriction of sleep to five hours in bed; the participants sent text messages (SMS) when they went to sleep and when they woke up. The mean duration of sleep during this night, estimated from sleep diaries and text messages, was 5.06 (SE 0.04) hours. For the following night of total sleep deprivation, the participants were monitored in the sleep laboratory at all times. Thus, for the sleep deprivation condition, participants came to the laboratory at 22.00 (after 15 hours of wakefulness) to be monitored, and stayed awake for a further 16 hours. We therefore did not observe the participants during the first 15 hours of wakefulness, when they had had a slightly restricted sleep, but had good control over the last 16 hours of wakefulness when sleepiness increased in magnitude. For the sleep condition, participants came to the laboratory at 12.00 (after five hours of wakefulness). They were kept indoors two hours before being photographed to avoid the effects of exposure to sunlight and the weather. We had a series of five or six photographs (resolution 3872×2592 pixels) taken in a well lit room, with a constant white balance (×900l; colour temperature 4200 K, Nikon D80; Nikon, Tokyo). The white balance was differently set during the two days of the study and affected seven photographs (four taken during sleep deprivation and three during a normal night’s sleep). Removing these participants from the analyses did not affect the results. The distance from camera to head was fixed, as was the focal length, within 14 mm (between 44 and 58 mm). To ensure a fixed surface area of each face on the photograph, the focal length was adapted to the head size of each participant.

For the photo shoot, participants wore no makeup, had their hair loose (combed backwards if long), underwent similar cleaning or shaving procedures for both conditions, and were instructed to “sit with a straight back and look straight into the camera with a neutral, relaxed facial expression.” Although the photographer was not blinded to the sleep conditions, she followed a highly standardised procedure during each photo shoot, including minimal interaction with the participants. A blinded rater chose the most typical photograph from each series of photographs. This process resulted in 46 photographs; two (one from each sleep condition) of each of the 23 participants. This part of the study took place between June and September 2007.

In October 2007 the photographs were presented at a fixed interval of six seconds in a randomised order to 65 observers (mainly students at the Karolinska Institute, mean age 30 (range 18-61) years, 40 women), who were unaware of the conditions of the study. They rated the faces for attractiveness (very unattractive to very attractive), health (very sick to very healthy), and tiredness (not at all tired to very tired) on a 100 mm visual analogue scale. After every 23 photographs a brief intermission was allowed, including a working memory task lasting 23 seconds to prevent the faces being memorised. To ensure that the observers were not primed to tiredness when rating health and attractiveness they rated the photographs for attractiveness and health in the first two sessions and tiredness in the last. To avoid the influence of possible order effects we presented the photographs in a balanced order between conditions for each session.

Statistical analyses

Data were analysed using multilevel mixed effects linear regression, with two crossed independent random effects accounting for random variation between observers and participants using the xtmixed procedure in Stata 9.2. We present the effect of condition as a percentage of change from the baseline condition as the reference using the absolute value in millimetres (rated on the visual analogue scale). No data were missing in the analyses.

Sixty five observers rated each of the 46 photographs for attractiveness, health, and tiredness: 138 ratings by each observer and 2990 ratings for each of the three factors rated. When sleep deprived, people were rated as less healthy (visual analogue scale scores, mean 63 (SE 2) v 68 (SE 2)), more tired (53 (SE 3) v 44 (SE 3)), and less attractive (38 (SE 2) v 40 (SE 2); P<0.001 for all) than after a normal night’s sleep (table 1 ⇓ ). Compared with the normal sleep condition, perceptions of health and attractiveness in the sleep deprived condition decreased on average by 6% and 4% and tiredness increased by 19%.

 Multilevel mixed effects regression on effect of how sleep deprived people are perceived with respect to attractiveness, health, and tiredness

• View inline

A 10 mm increase in tiredness was associated with a −3.0 mm change in health, a 10 mm increase in health increased attractiveness by 2.4 mm, and a 10 mm increase in tiredness reduced attractiveness by 1.2 mm (table 2 ⇓ ). These findings were also presented as correlation, suggesting that faces with perceived attractiveness are positively associated with perceived health (r=0.42, fig 1 ⇓ ) and negatively with perceived tiredness (r=−0.28, fig 1). In addition, the average decrease (for each face) in attractiveness as a result of deprived sleep was associated with changes in tiredness (−0.53, n=23, P=0.03) and in health (0.50, n=23, P=0.01). Moreover, a strong negative association was found between the respective perceptions of tiredness and health (r=−0.54, fig 1). Figure 2 ⇓ shows an example of observer rated faces.

 Associations between health, tiredness, and attractiveness

Fig 1  Relations between health, tiredness, and attractiveness of 46 photographs (two each of 23 participants) rated by 65 observers on 100 mm visual analogue scales, with variation between observers removed using empirical Bayes’ estimates

• Download figure
• Open in new tab
• Download powerpoint

Fig 2  Participant after a normal night’s sleep (left) and after sleep deprivation (right). Faces were presented in a counterbalanced order

To evaluate the mediation effects of sleep loss on attractiveness and health, tiredness was added to the models presented in table 1 following recommendations. 16 The effect of sleep loss was significantly mediated by tiredness on both health (P<0.001) and attractiveness (P<0.001). When tiredness was added to the model (table 1) with an estimated coefficient of −2.9 (SE 0.1; P<0.001) the independent effect of sleep loss on health decreased from −4.2 to −1.8 (SE 0.5; P<0.001). The effect of sleep loss on attractiveness decreased from −1.6 (table 1) to −0.62 (SE 0.4; P=0.133), with tiredness estimated at −1.1 (SE 0.1; P<0.001). The same approach applied to the model of attractiveness and health (table 2), with a decrease in the association from 2.4 to 2.1 (SE 0.1; P<0.001) with tiredness estimated at −0.56 (SE 0.1; P<0.001).

Sleep deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy, and more tired compared with when they are well rested. Apparent tiredness was strongly related to looking less healthy and less attractive, which was also supported by the mediating analyses, indicating that a large part of the found effects and relations on appearing healthy and attractive were mediated by looking tired. The fact that untrained observers detected the effects of sleep loss in others not only provides evidence for a perceptual ability not previously subjected to experimental control, but also supports the notion that sleep history gives rise to socially relevant signals that provide information about the bearer. The adaptiveness of an ability to detect sleep related facial cues resonates well with other research, showing that small deviations from the average sleep duration in the long term are associated with an increased risk of health problems and with a decreased longevity. 8 17 Indeed, even a few hours of sleep deprivation inflict an array of physiological changes, including neural, endocrinological, immunological, and cellular functioning, that if sustained are relevant for long term health. 7 18 19 20 Here, we show that such physiological changes are paralleled by detectable facial changes.

These results are related to photographs taken in an artificial setting and presented to the observers for only six seconds. It is likely that the effects reported here would be larger in real life person to person situations, when overt behaviour and interactions add further information. Blink interval and blink duration are known to be indicators of sleepiness, 21 and trained observers are able to evaluate reliably the drowsiness of drivers by watching their videotaped faces. 22 In addition, a few of the people were perceived as healthier, less tired, and more attractive during the sleep deprived condition. It remains to be evaluated in follow-up research whether this is due to random error noise in judgments, or associated with specific characteristics of observers or the sleep deprived people they judge. Nevertheless, we believe that the present findings can be generalised to a wide variety of settings, but further studies will have to investigate the impact on clinical studies and other social situations.

Importantly, our findings suggest a prominent role of sleep history in several domains of interpersonal perception and judgment, in which sleep history has previously not been considered of importance, such as in clinical judgment. In addition, because attractiveness motivates sexual behaviour, collaboration, and superior treatment, 13 sleep loss may have consequences in other social contexts. For example, it has been proposed that facial cues perceived as attractive are signals of good health and that this recognition has been selected evolutionarily to guide choice of mate and successful transmission of genes. 13 The fact that good sleep supports a healthy look and poor sleep the reverse may be of particular relevance in the medical setting, where health estimates are an essential part. It is possible that people with sleep disturbances, clinical or otherwise, would be judged as more unhealthy, whereas those who have had an unusually good night’s sleep may be perceived as rather healthy. Compared with the sleep deprivation used in the present investigation, further studies are needed to investigate the effects of less drastic acute reductions of sleep as well as long term clinical effects.

Conclusions

People are capable of detecting sleep loss related facial cues, and these cues modify judgments of another’s health and attractiveness. These conclusions agree well with existing models describing a link between sleep and good health, 18 23 as well as a link between attractiveness and health. 13 Future studies should focus on the relevance of these facial cues in clinical settings. These could investigate whether clinicians are better than the average population at detecting sleep or health related facial cues, and whether patients with a clinical diagnosis exhibit more tiredness and are less healthy looking than healthy people. Perhaps the more successful doctors are those who pick up on these details and act accordingly.

Taken together, our results provide important insights into judgments about health and attractiveness that are reminiscent of the anecdotal wisdom harboured in Bell’s words, and in the colloquial notion of “beauty sleep.”

What is already known on this topic

Short or disturbed sleep and fatigue constitute major risk factors for health and safety

Complaints of short or disturbed sleep are common among patients seeking healthcare

The human face is the main source of information for social signalling

What this study adds

The facial cues of sleep deprived people are sufficient for others to judge them as more tired, less healthy, and less attractive, lending the first scientific support to the concept of “beauty sleep”

By affecting doctors’ general perception of health, the sleep history of a patient may affect clinical decisions and diagnostic precision

Cite this as: BMJ 2010;341:c6614

We thank B Karshikoff for support with data acquisition and M Ingvar for comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript, both without compensation and working at the Department for Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

Contributors: JA designed the data collection, supervised and monitored data collection, wrote the statistical analysis plan, carried out the statistical analyses, obtained funding, drafted and revised the manuscript, and is guarantor. TS designed and carried out the data collection, cleaned the data, drafted, revised the manuscript, and had final approval of the manuscript. JA and TS contributed equally to the work. MI wrote the statistical analysis plan, carried out the statistical analyses, drafted the manuscript, and critically revised the manuscript. EJWVS provided statistical advice, advised on data handling, and critically revised the manuscript. AO provided advice on the methods and critically revised the manuscript. ML provided administrative support, drafted the manuscript, and critically revised the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Funding: This study was funded by the Swedish Society for Medical Research, Rut and Arvid Wolff’s Memory Fund, and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any company for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any companies that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

Ethical approval: This study was approved by the Karolinska Institutet’s ethical committee. Participants were compensated for their participation.

Participant consent: Participant’s consent obtained.

Data sharing: Statistical code and dataset of ratings are available from the corresponding author at john.axelsson{at}ki.se .

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode .

• ↵ Deten A, Volz HC, Clamors S, Leiblein S, Briest W, Marx G, et al. Hematopoietic stem cells do not repair the infarcted mouse heart. Cardiovasc Res 2005 ; 65 : 52 -63. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Doyle AC. The case-book of Sherlock Holmes: selected stories. Wordsworth, 1993.
• ↵ Lieberman MD, Gaunt R, Gilbert DT, Trope Y. Reflection and reflexion: a social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference. Adv Exp Soc Psychol 2002 ; 34 : 199 -249. OpenUrl CrossRef
• ↵ Drummond SPA, Brown GG, Gillin JC, Stricker JL, Wong EC, Buxton RB. Altered brain response to verbal learning following sleep deprivation. Nature 2000 ; 403 : 655 -7. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed
• ↵ Harrison Y, Horne JA. The impact of sleep deprivation on decision making: a review. J Exp Psychol Appl 2000 ; 6 : 236 -49. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Huber R, Ghilardi MF, Massimini M, Tononi G. Local sleep and learning. Nature 2004 ; 430 : 78 -81. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Spiegel K, Leproult R, Van Cauter E. Impact of sleep debt on metabolic and endocrine function. Lancet 1999 ; 354 : 1435 -9. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Kripke DF, Garfinkel L, Wingard DL, Klauber MR, Marler MR. Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2002 ; 59 : 131 -6. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Olson LG, Ambrogetti A. Waking up to sleep disorders. Br J Hosp Med (Lond) 2006 ; 67 : 118 , 20. OpenUrl PubMed
• ↵ Rajaratnam SM, Arendt J. Health in a 24-h society. Lancet 2001 ; 358 : 999 -1005. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Ranjbaran Z, Keefer L, Stepanski E, Farhadi A, Keshavarzian A. The relevance of sleep abnormalities to chronic inflammatory conditions. Inflamm Res 2007 ; 56 : 51 -7. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Haxby JV, Hoffman EA, Gobbini MI. The distributed human neural system for face perception. Trends Cogn Sci 2000 ; 4 : 223 -33. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Rhodes G. The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annu Rev Psychol 2006 ; 57 : 199 -226. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Todorov A, Mandisodza AN, Goren A, Hall CC. Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science 2005 ; 308 : 1623 -6. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Willis J, Todorov A. First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychol Sci 2006 ; 17 : 592 -8. OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
• ↵ Krull JL, MacKinnon DP. Multilevel modeling of individual and group level mediated effects. Multivariate Behav Res 2001 ; 36 : 249 -77. OpenUrl CrossRef Web of Science
• ↵ Ayas NT, White DP, Manson JE, Stampfer MJ, Speizer FE, Malhotra A, et al. A prospective study of sleep duration and coronary heart disease in women. Arch Intern Med 2003 ; 163 : 205 -9. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Bryant PA, Trinder J, Curtis N. Sick and tired: does sleep have a vital role in the immune system. Nat Rev Immunol 2004 ; 4 : 457 -67. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Cirelli C. Cellular consequences of sleep deprivation in the brain. Sleep Med Rev 2006 ; 10 : 307 -21. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Irwin MR, Wang M, Campomayor CO, Collado-Hidalgo A, Cole S. Sleep deprivation and activation of morning levels of cellular and genomic markers of inflammation. Arch Intern Med 2006 ; 166 : 1756 -62. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Schleicher R, Galley N, Briest S, Galley L. Blinks and saccades as indicators of fatigue in sleepiness warnings: looking tired? Ergonomics 2008 ; 51 : 982 -1010. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Wierwille WW, Ellsworth LA. Evaluation of driver drowsiness by trained raters. Accid Anal Prev 1994 ; 26 : 571 -81. OpenUrl CrossRef PubMed Web of Science
• ↵ Horne J. Why we sleep—the functions of sleep in humans and other mammals. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Experimental Psychology - Science topic

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Experimental Psychology Journals

• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition Publishes experimental and theoretical studies concerning all aspects of animal behavior processes.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied Publishes original empirical investigations in experimental psychology that bridge practical problems and psychological theory.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition Publishes original experimental studies on basic processes of cognition, learning, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, decision making, thinking, reading, and language processing.
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance Publishes studies on perception, control of action, perceptual aspects of language processing, and related cognitive processes.

Contact Division 3

• Customers outside USA/CAN
• Forgot password
• Cart article/s To Cart

Testzentrale

Experimental psychology, the journal for experimental research in psychology.

• ISSN L: 1618-3169
• ISSN Print: 1618-3169
• ISSN Online: 2190-5142

About the journal

For authors.

• More information

Editors & editorial board

Order information, read online.

• Advance articles
• Current issue
• Open access
• Free online sample issue

As its name implies, Experimental Psychology publishes innovative, original, high-quality experimental research in psychology.

Why is Experimental Psychology a quality journal?

• Professional outlet for cutting-edge experimental research in psychology since 50 years
• Rigorous peer review and a dedicated editorial team
• Electronic manuscript submission and peer review via Editorial Manager
• Transparency through TOP guidelines and Open Science Practices
• Author friendly and non-bureaucratic handling of submission

To get more detailed information, read the Editorial by Andreas B. Eder and Christian Frings.

What makes Experimental Psychology special?

• Now a founding participant journal in the Peer Community In Registered Reports
• Open to all disciplines of experimental research in psychology
• Various article types (Research Articles, Theoretical Articles, Registered Reports)
• Publication of Brief Articles reporting a single experiment
• Preregistration of Registered Reports using a two-tiered system
• Dedication to Open Science Practices (data archiving, open science badges, etc.)
• Low hurdle submission guidelines
• Rapid quality check of incoming submissions
• Optional publication models: subscription –based or open access for a fair price!
• Advance online publication in the paper’s final form within 12 weeks of acceptance.*

*Provided there are no delays in approving proofs for release.

Open Access for UK authors publishing in APA PsycArticles Hogrefe is participating in the open access publishing pilot for the APA PsycArticles database in 2023-26 – this includes eligible articles accepted in Experimental Psychology. Learn more

Announcing a New Submission Category: Replication Reports The Editors are proud to announce a new article category, which gives you as authors the opportunity to present results of studies conducted as either exact or conceptual replications of already published research. For more information, please click here .

Announcing the Peer Community in Registered Reports Experimental Psychology is proud to be a founding participant journal in the recently launched Peer Community in Registered Reports (PCI-RR). After a preprint is posted on a server and submitted for review at PCI, it follows the usual rounds of reviews and revisions. Once authors have their Registered Report recommended by PCI-RR, they have the option to publish their article in a growing list of “PCI-RR-friendly” journals that have committed to accepting PCI-RR recommendations without further peer review – one of them is Experimental Psychology. Click here for more information.

We are looking forward to receiving your manuscript for Experimental Psychology . Please read and take note of the instructions to authors before submitting your manuscript. All manuscripts should be submitted via Editorial Manager . Thank you!

Useful links:

• Guidelines on sharing and use of articles in Hogrefe journals
• APA style tutorials
• OpenMind – Hogrefe’s open access program
• Authors from UK – please see the information about open access publication under our read-and-publish agreement, in collaboration with APA and Jisc
• Authors from Germany – please read our FAQs about Plan S compliant open access publication in our journals under a publish-and-read agreement with 100+ institutions
• Instructions to authors (PDF, 235 KB)
• Title page template (DOCX, 53 KB)

Publication Ethics

It is important to the Hogrefe Publishing Group that our scientific journals and all the people involved adhere to the highest ethical standards. Please take a moment to review our guidelines on what this means for authors, editors, reviewers, and us as a publisher.

Follow them to get all updates about the journal like announcements of the latest online and print copy, important news and reminders regarding special issues.

Call for Registered Replication Studies

Experimental Psychology wants to encourage researchers to carry out replication research using its Registered Report format.

Article highlights

Recent Editorial

Message From Your New Editor Raymond M. Klein Experimental Psychology, Vol. 68, No. 4, pp. 173-174

Editor’s Picks

(A)symmetries in Memory and Directed Forgetting of Political Stimuli Andrew Franks, Hajime Otani, and Gavin T. Roupe Experimental Psychology, Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 68-80

Probing the Dual-Route Model of the SNARC Effect by Orthogonalizing Processing Speed and Depth Daniele Didino, Matthias Brandtner, Maria Glaser, and André Knops Experimental Psychology, Vol. 70, No. 1, pp. 1–13

Raymond Klein

Editor-in-chief

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

Faculty of Science

Dalhousie University

1355 Oxford St.

Editorial assistant

Swasti Arora Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Faculty of Science Dalhousie University 1355 Oxford St. Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2 Canada Send email

Associate editors

Ullrich Ecker School of Psychological Science University of Western Australia Perth 6009 Australia Send email Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia. His main interests lie in episodic memory, working memory, feature binding, memory updating, as well as the processing of misinformation and its effects on memory and reasoning. He uses mainly behavioural experimentation, augmented by neuroimaging methods (event-related potentials, fMRI) and computational modelling.

Gesa Hartwigsen Lise Meitner Research Group Cognition and Plasticity Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Stephanstraße 1a 04103 Leipzig Germany Send email Lise Meitner Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig (Germany). Her main interest is the potential for adaptive systems plasticity in neural networks for cognitive functions, with a focus on the healthy and lesioned language network. Her group combines neurostimulation and neuroimaging techniques to probe interactions between domain-specific and domain-general networks.

Manuel Perea University of València Av. Blasco Ibáñez, 21 46010 Valencia Spain Send email Professor of Psychology at the University of Valencia (Spain). His main fields of interest are psychology of language, lexical-semantic memory, and cognitive neuroscience.

James R. Schmidt Université de Bourgogne LEAD-CNRS UMR 5022 Pole AAFE 11 Esplanade Erasme 21000 Dijon France Send email Full Professor at the Université de Bourgogne, working in the Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement (LEAD; Laboratory for Research on Learning and Development). His main research interests are implicit learning, music learning, cognitive control, and neural networks.

Alexander Schütz University of Marburg Department of Psychology Gutenbergstr. 18 35032 Marburg Germany Send email Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Marburg (Germany). His main research interests are visual perception, eye movements and their interaction in active perception.

Editorial board

The expertise of the international editorial board covers a broad range of subject areas. All papers submitted to the journal are subject to full peer-review by members of the board and external reviewers. Hartmut Blank, University of Portsmouth, UK (memory (misinformation and social influence), hindsight bias and meta-analysis) Arndt Bröder, University of Mannheim, Germany (memory and metamemory, judgment and decision making) Roberto Dell'Acqua, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy (visual attention, visual working memory, attentional blink) Edgar Erdfelder, Universität Mannheim, Germany (episodic memory, judgment/reasoning, cognitive modeling, design/power analysis) Christian Frings, University of Würzburg, Germany (action control, perception-action Integration, inhibition (negative priming), multisensory perception) Morris Goldsmith, University of Haifa, Israel (object-based attention, memory accuracy, and metamemory-metacognition) Dirk Kerzel, Université de Genève, Switzerland (visual search, visual working memory, and motion perception) Andrea Kiesel, University of Freiburg, Germany (cognitive control, multitasking, cognitive-motor interference) Iring Koch, RWTH Aachen, Germany (attention & cognitive control (task switching specifically), bilingualism, sequence learning) Joachim I. Krueger, Brown University, RI, USA (social cognition, JDM, free will)

Stephen Lindsay, University of Victoria, Canada (memory, eyewitness memory, response bias) Ben Newell, University of New South Wales, Australia (judgment, decision making, choice) Klaus Oberauer, Universität Zürich, Switzerland (working memory, executive functions, episodic memory) Michel Regenwetter, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA (order-constrained Inference, decision making, probabilistic choice) Rainer Reisenzein, Universität Greifswald, Germany (emotion, surprise, motivation, temporal order) Jeffrey N. Rouder, University of Missouri, MO, USA (methods (Bayesian in particular), individual differences, attention) David Shanks, University College London, UK (learning, memory, and unconscious processes)

Christoph Stahl, University of Cologne, Germany (evaluative conditioning, implicit/unconscious learning, false memory)

Sarah Teige-Mocigemba, University of Marburg, Germany (social cognition, implicit measures, priming)

Sebastien Tremblay, Université Laval, Canada (cognitive limitations, human performance, problem solving, decision making) Christian Unkelbach, Universität zu Köln, Germany (social cognition, person perception, evaluative learning & conditioning, sport psychology) Eva Walther, Universität Trier, Germany (evaluative learning, conditioning, contingency memory) Peter A. White, Cardiff University, UK (causal judgment, causal perception, temporal aspects of perception)

The Experimental Psychology is published bimonthly, online.

Subscriptions generally run from January to December.

Further information on our subscription conditions can be found in the Information for subscribers or in our current journals catalog .

Individuals 2024

Single issue 2024.

Single online issues may be purchased online at  Hogrefe eContent. Single print copies of back issues (up to 06/2023) may be ordered (subject to availability) using this order enquiry form. Please specify the desired volume number and issue number when ordering.

Institutions 2024

Prices for institutions depend on the size of the institution and can be found in the table below. Further information and prices for journal subscriptions can be found in our journals catalog – or contact us via email for a price quote.

Prices for institutions

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

The practice of experimental psychology: an inevitably postmodern endeavor.

• Department of Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: (re-)creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology.

Introduction

Postmodernism is, in essence, an attempt to achieve greater clarity in our perception, thinking, and behavior by scrutinizing their larger contexts and preconditions, based on the inextricably intertwined levels of both the individual and the society. Psychology also studies the human mind and behavior, which indicates that psychology should dovetail with postmodern approaches. In the 1990s and early 2000s, several attempts were made to introduce postmodern thought as potentially very fruitful ideas into general academic psychology ( Jager, 1991 ; Kvale, 1992 ; Holzman and Morss, 2000 ; Holzman, 2006 ). However, overall they were met with little response.

Postmodern thoughts have been taken up by several fringe areas of academic psychology, e.g., psychoanalysis ( Leffert, 2007 ; Jiménez, 2015 ; but see Holt, 2005 ), some forms of therapy and counseling ( Ramey and Grubb, 2009 ; Hansen, 2015 ), humanistic ( Krippner, 2001 ), feminist and gender ( Hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1988 ; Sinacore and Enns, 2005 ), or cultural psychology ( Gemignani and Peña, 2007 ).

However, there is resistance against suggestions to incorporate postmodern ideas into the methodology and the self-perception of psychology as academic—and scientific!—discipline. In fact, postmodern approaches are often rejected vehemently, sometimes even very vocally. For instance, Gergen (2001) argued that the “core tenets” of postmodernism are not at odds with those of scientific psychology but rather that they can enrich the discipline by opening up new possibilities. His suggestions were met with reservation and were even outright rejected on the following grounds: postmodernism, “like anthrax of the intellect, if allowed [our italics] into mainstream psychology, […] will poison the field” ( Locke, 2002 , 458), that it “wishes to return psychology to a prescientific subset of philosophy” ( Kruger, 2002 , 456), and that psychology “needs fewer theoretical and philosophical orientations, not more” ( Hofmann, 2002 , 462; see also Gergen ’s, 2001 , replies to the less biased and more informed commentaries on his article).

In the following years, and continuing the so-called science wars of the 1990s ( Segerstråle, 2000 ), several other attacks were launched against a perceived rise or even dominance of postmodern thought in psychology. Held(2007 ; see also the rebuttal by Martin and Sugarman, 2009 ) argued that anything postmodern would undermine rationality and destroy academic psychology. Similarly, postmodernism was identified—together with “radical environmentalism” and “pseudoscience” among other things—as a “key threat to scientific psychology” ( Lilienfeld, 2010 , 282), or as “inimical to progress in the psychology of science” ( Capaldi and Proctor, 2013 , 331). The following advice was given to psychologists: “We [psychologists] should also push back against the pernicious creep of these untested concepts into our field” ( Tarescavage, 2020 , 4). Furthermore, the term “postmodern” is even employed as an all-purpose invective in a popular scientific book by psychologist Steven Pinker (2018) .

Therefore, it seems that science and experimental psychology on the one hand and postmodern thinking on the other are irreconcilable opposites. However, following Gergen (2001) and Holtz (2020) , we argue that this dichotomy is only superficial because postmodernism is often misunderstood. A closer look reveals that experimental psychology contains many postmodern elements. Even more, there is reason to assume that a postmodern perspective may be beneficial for academic psychology: First, the practice of experimental psychology would be improved by integrating postmodern thinking because it reveals a side of the human psyche for which experimental psychology is mostly blind. Second, the postmodern perspective can tell us much about the epistemological and social background of experimental psychology and how this affects our understanding of the human psyche.

A Postmodern Perspective on Experimental Psychology

Experimental psychology and the modern scientific worldview.

It lies within the nature of humans to try to find out more about themselves and their world, but the so-called Scientific Revolution of the early modern period marks the beginning of a new era in this search for knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, which has led to impressive achievements in the natural sciences and the explanation of the physical world (e.g., Olby et al., 1991 ; Henry, 1997 ; Cohen, 2015 ; Osterlind, 2019 ), is based on the following principle: to “measure what can be measured and make measurable what cannot be measured.” This famous appeal—falsely attributed to Galileo Galilei but actually from the 19th century ( Kleinert, 2009 )—illustrates the two fundamental principles of modern science: First, the concept of “measurement” encompasses the idea that phenomena can be quantified, i.e., expressed numerically. Second, the concept of “causal connections” pertains to the idea that consistent, non-random relationships can be established between measurable phenomena. Quantification allows that relationships between phenomena can be expressed, calculated, and predicted in precise mathematical and numerical terms.

However, there are two important issues to be aware of. First, while it is not difficult to measure “evident” aspects, such as mass and distance, more complex phenomena cannot be measured easily. In such cases, it is therefore necessary to find ways of making these “elusive” phenomena measurable. This can often only be achieved by reducing complex phenomena to their simpler—and measurable!—elements. For instance, in order to measure memory ability precisely, possible effects of individual preexisting knowledge which introduce random variance and thus impreciseness have to be eliminated. Indeed, due to this reason, in many memory experiments, meaningless syllables are used as study material.

Second, it is not difficult to scientifically prove a causal relationship between a factor and an outcome if the relationship is simple, that is, if there is only one single factor directly influencing the outcome. In such a case, showing that a manipulation of the factor causes a change in the outcome is clear evidence for a causal relationship because there are no other factors which may influence the outcome as well. However, in situations where many factors influence an outcome in a complex, interactive way, proving a causal relationship is much more difficult. To prove the causal effect of one factor in such a situation the effects of all other factors—called confounding factors from the perspective of the factor of interest—have to be eliminated so that a change in the outcome can be truly attributed to a causal effect of the factor of interest. However, this has an important implication: The investigator has to divide the factors present in a given situation into interesting versus non-interesting factors with respect to the current context of the experiment. Consequently, while experiments reveal something about local causal relationships, they do not necessarily provide hints about the net effect of all causal factors present in the given situation.

The adoption of the principles of modern science has also changed psychology. Although the beginnings of psychology—as the study of the psyche —date back to antiquity, psychology as an academic discipline was established in the mid to late 19th century. This enterprise was also inspired by the success of the natural sciences, and psychology was explicitly modeled after this example by Wilhelm Wundt—the “father of experimental psychology”—although he emphasized the close ties to the humanities as well. The experiment quickly became the method of choice. There were other, more hermeneutic approaches during this formative phase of modern psychology, such as psychoanalysis or introspection according to the Würzburg School, but their impact on academic psychology was limited. Behaviorism emerged as a direct reaction against these perceived unscientific approaches, and its proponents emphasized the scientific character of their “new philosophy of psychology.” It is crucial to note that in doing so they also emphasized the importance of the experiment and the necessity of quantifying directly observable behavior in psychological research. Behaviorism quickly became a very influential paradigm which shaped academic psychology. Gestalt psychologists, whose worldview is radically different from behaviorism, also relied on experiments in their research. Cognitive psychology, which followed, complemented, and partly superseded behaviorism, relies heavily on the experiment as a means to gain insight into mental processes, although other methods such as modeling are employed as well. Interestingly, there is a fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology, which do not rely on the experiment, and the other above-mentioned approaches as the former focus on the psychic functioning of individuals, whereas the latter focus more on global laws of psychic functioning across individuals. This is reflected in the fact that psychological laws in experimental psychology are established on the arithmetic means across examined participants—a difference we will elaborate on later in more detail. Today, psychology is the scientific —in the sense of empirical-quantitative—study of the human mind and behavior, and the experiment is often considered the gold standard in psychological research (e.g., Mandler, 2007 ; Goodwin, 2015 ; Leahey, 2017 ).

The experiment is closely associated with the so-called scientific method ( Haig, 2014 ; Nola and Sankey, 2014 ) and the epistemological tenets philosophy of positivism—in the sense as Martin (2003) ; Michell (2003) , and Teo (2018) explain—which sometimes exhibit characteristics of naïve empiricism. Roughly speaking, the former consists of observing, formulating hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses in experiments. The latter postulates that knowledge is based on sensory experience, that it is testable, independent of the investigator and therefore objective as it accurately depicts the world as it is. This means that in principle all of reality can not only be measured but eventually be entirely explained by science. This worldview is attacked by postmodern thinkers who contend that the world is far more complex and that the modern scientific approach cannot explain all of reality and its phenomena.

The Postmodern Worldview

Postmodern thinking (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ) has gained momentum since the 1980s, and although neither the term “postmodernism” nor associated approaches can be defined in a unanimous or precise way, they are characterized by several intertwined concepts, attitudes, and aims. The most basic trait is a general skepticism and the willingness to question literally everything from the ground up—even going so far as to question not only the foundation of any idea, but also the question itself. This includes the own context, the chosen premises, thinking, and the use of language. Postmodernism therefore has a lot in common with science’s curiosity to understand the world: the skeptical attitude paired with the desire to discover how things really are.

Postmodern investigations often start by looking at the language and the broader context of certain phenomena due to the fact that language is the medium in which many of our mental activities—which subsequently influence our behavior—take place. Thus, the way we talk reveals something about how and why we think and act. Additionally, we communicate about phenomena using language, which in turn means that this discourse influences the way we think about or see those phenomena. Moreover, this discourse is embedded in a larger social and historical context, which also reflects back on the use of language and therefore on our perception and interpretation of certain phenomena.

Generally speaking, postmodern investigations aim at detecting and explaining how the individual is affected by societal influences and their underlying, often hidden ideas, structures, or mechanisms. As these influences are often fuzzy, contradictory, and dependent on their context, the individual is subject to a multitude of different causalities, and this already complex interplay is further complicated by the personal history, motivations, aims, or ways of thinking of the individual. Postmodernism attempts to understand all of this complexity as it is in its entirety.

The postmodern approaches have revealed three major general tendencies which characterize the contemporary world: First, societies and the human experience since the 20th century have displayed less coherence and conversely a greater diversity than the centuries before in virtually all areas, e.g., worldviews, modes of thinking, societal structures, or individual behavior. Second, this observation leads postmodern thinkers to the conclusion that the grand narratives which dominated the preceding centuries and shaped whole societies by providing frames of references have lost—at least partially—their supremacy and validity. Examples are religious dogmas, nationalism, industrialization, the notion of linear progress—and modern science because it works according to certain fundamental principles. Third, the fact that different but equally valid perspectives, especially on social phenomena or even whole worldviews, are possible and can coexist obviously affects the concepts of “truth,” “reality,” and “reason” in such a way that these concepts lose their immutable, absolute, and universal or global character, simply because they are expressions and reflections of a certain era, society, or worldview.

At this point, however, it is necessary to clarify a common misconception: Interpreting truth, reality, or reason as relative, subjective, and context-dependent—as opposed to absolute, objective, and context-independent—does naturally neither mean that anything can be arbitrarily labeled as true, real, or reasonable, nor, vice versa, that something cannot be true, real, or reasonable. For example, the often-quoted assumption that postmodernism apparently even denies the existence of gravity or its effects as everything can be interpreted arbitrarily or states that we cannot elucidate these phenomena with adequate accuracy because everything is open to any interpretation ( Sokal, 1996 ), completely misses the point.

First, postmodernism is usually not concerned with the laws of physics and the inanimate world as such but rather focuses on the world of human experience. However, the phenomenon itself, e.g., gravity, is not the same as our scientific knowledge of phenomena—our chosen areas of research, methodological paradigms, data, theories, and explanations—or our perception of phenomena, which are both the results of human activities. Therefore, the social context influences our scientific knowledge, and in that sense scientific knowledge is a social construction ( Hodge, 1999 ).

Second, phenomena from human experience, although probably more dependent on the social context than physical phenomena, cannot be interpreted arbitrarily either. The individual context—such as the personal history, motivations, aims, or worldviews—determines whether a certain behavior makes sense for a certain individual in a certain situation. As there are almost unlimited possible backgrounds, this might seem completely random or arbitrary from an overall perspective. But from the perspective of an individual the phenomenon in question may be explained entirely by a theory for a specific—and not universal—context.

As described above, the postmodern meta-perspective directly deals with human experience and is therefore especially relevant for psychology. Moreover, any discipline—including the knowledge it generates—will certainly benefit from understanding its own (social) mechanisms and implications. We will show below that postmodern thinking not only elucidates the broader context of psychology as an academic discipline but rather that experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are not acknowledged as such.

The Postmodern Context of Experimental Psychology

Paradoxically, postmodern elements have been present since the very beginning of experimental psychology although postmodernism gained momentum only decades later. One of the characteristics of postmodernism is the transplantation of certain elements from their original context to new contexts, e.g., the popularity of “Eastern” philosophies and practices in contemporary “Western” societies. These different elements are often juxtaposed and combined to create something new, e.g., new “westernized” forms of yoga ( Shearer, 2020 ).

Similarly, the founders of modern academic psychology took up the scientific method, which was originally developed in the context of the natural sciences, and transplanted it to the study of the human psyche in the hope to repeat the success of the natural sciences. By contrast, methods developed specifically in the context of psychology such as psychoanalysis ( Wax, 1995 ) or introspection according to the Würzburg School ( Hackert and Weger, 2018 ) have gained much less ground in academic psychology. The way we understand both the psyche and psychology has been shaped to a great extent by the transfer of the principles of modern science, namely quantitative measurement and experimental methods, although it is not evident per se that this is the best approach to elucidate mental and behavioral phenomena. Applying the methods of the natural sciences to a new and different context, namely to phenomena pertaining to the human psyche , is a truly postmodern endeavor because it juxtaposes two quite distinct areas and merges them into something new—experimental psychology.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology becomes evident on two levels: First, the subject matter—the human psyche —exhibits a postmodern character since mental and behavioral phenomena are highly dependent on the idiosyncratic contexts of the involved individuals, which makes it impossible to establish unambiguous general laws to describe them. Second, experimental psychology itself displays substantial postmodern traits because both its method and the knowledge it produces—although seemingly objective and rooted in the modern scientific worldview—inevitably contain postmodern elements, as will be shown below.

The Experiment as Simulacrum

The term “simulacrum” basically means “copy,” often in the sense of “inferior copy” or “phantasm/illusion.” However, in postmodern usage “simulacrum” has acquired a more nuanced and concrete meaning. “Simulacrum” is a key term in the work of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who arguably presented the most elaborate theory on simulacra (1981/1994). According to Baudrillard, a simulacrum “is the reflection of a profound [‘real’] reality” (16/6). Simulacra, however, are more than identical carbon copies because they gain a life of their own and become “real” in the sense of becoming an own entity. For example, the personality a pop star shows on stage is not “real” in the sense that it is their “normal,” off-stage personality, but it is certainly “real” in the sense that it is perceived by the audience even if they are aware that it might be an “artificial” personality. Two identical cars can also be “different” for one might be used as a means of transportation while the other might be a status symbol. Even an honest video documentation of a certain event is not simply a copy of the events that took place because it lies within the medium video that only certain sections can be recorded from a certain perspective. Additionally, the playback happens in other contexts as the original event, which may also alter the perception of the viewer.

The post-structuralist—an approach closely associated with postmodernism—philosopher Roland Barthes pointed out another important aspect of simulacra. He contended that in order to understand something—an “object” in Barthes’ terminology—we necessarily create simulacra because we “ reconstruct [our italics] an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning [⋯] of this object” ( Barthes, 1963 , 213/214). In other words, when we investigate an object—any phenomenon, either material, mental, or social—we have to perceive it first. This means that we must have some kind of mental representation of the phenomenon/object—and it is crucial to note that this representation is not the same thing as the “real” object itself. All our mental operations are therefore not performed on the “real” object but on mental representations of the object. We decompose a phenomenon in order to understand it, that is, we try to identify its components. In doing so, we effect a change in the object because our phenomenon is no longer the original phenomenon “as it is” for we are performing a mental operation on it, thereby transforming the original phenomenon. Identifying components may be simple, e.g., dividing a tree into roots, trunk, branches, and leaves may seem obvious or even “natural” but it is nevertheless us as investigators who create this structure—the tree itself is probably not aware of it. Now that we have established this structure, we are able to say that the tree consists of several components and name these components. Thus, we have introduced “new” elements into our understanding of the tree. This is the important point, even though the elements, i.e., the branches and leaves themselves “as they are,” have naturally always been “present.” Our understanding of “tree” has therefore changed completely because a tree is now something which is composed of several elements. In that sense, we have changed the original phenomenon by adding something—and this has all happened in our thinking and not in the tree itself. It is also possible to find different structures and different components for the tree, e.g., the brown and the green, which shows that we construct this knowledge.

Next, we can investigate the components to see how they interact with and relate to each other and to the whole system. Also, we can work out their functions and determine the conditions under which a certain event will occur. We can even expand the scope of our investigation and examine the tree in the context of its ecosystem. But no matter what we do or how sophisticated our investigation becomes, everything said above remains true here, too, because neither all these actions listed above nor the knowledge we gain from them are the object itself. Rather, we have added something to the object and the more we know about our object, the more knowledge we have constructed. This addition is what science—gaining knowledge—is all about. Or in the words of Roland Barthes: “the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind” (1963/1972, 214/215).

In principle, this holds truth regarding all scientific investigations. But the more complex phenomena are, the more effort and personal contribution is required on behalf of the investigator to come up with structures, theories, or explanations. Paraphrasing Barthes: When dealing with complex phenomena, more intellect must be added to the object, which means in turn that there are more possibilities for different approaches and perspectives, that is, the constructive element becomes larger. As discussed previously, this does not mean that investigative and interpretative processes are arbitrary. But it is clear from this train of thought that “objectivity” or “truth” in a “positivist,” naïve empiricist “realist,” or absolute sense are not attainable. Nevertheless, we argue here that this is not a drawback, as many critics of postmodernism contend (see above), but rather an advantage because it allows more accurate scientific investigations of true-to-life phenomena, which are typically complex in the case of psychology.

The concepts of simulacra by Baudrillard and Barthes can be combined to provide a description of the experiment in psychology. Accordingly, our understanding of the concept of the “simulacrum” entails that scientific processes—indeed all investigative processes—necessarily need to duplicate the object of their investigation in order to understand it. In doing so, constructive elements are necessarily introduced. These elements are of a varying nature, which means that investigations of one and the same phenomenon may differ from each other and different investigations may find out different things about the phenomenon in question. These investigations then become entities on their own—in the Baudrillardian sense—and therefore simulacra.

In a groundbreaking article on “the meaning and limits of exact science” physicist Max Planck stated that “[a]n experiment is a question which science poses to nature, and a measurement is the recording of nature’s answer” ( Planck, 1949 , 325). The act of “asking a question” implies that the person asking the question has at least a general idea of what the answer might look like ( Heidegger, 1953 , §2). For example: When asking someone for their name, we obviously do not know what they are called, but we assume that they have a name and we also have an idea of how the concept “name” works. Otherwise we could not even conceive, let alone formulate, and pose our question. This highlights how a certain degree of knowledge and understanding of a concept is necessary so that we are able to ask questions about it. Likewise, we need to have a principal idea or assumption of possible mechanisms if we want to find out how more complex phenomena function. It is—at least at the beginning—irrelevant whether these ideas are factually correct or entirely wrong, for without them we would be unable to approach our subject matter in the first place.

The context of the investigator—their general worldview, their previous knowledge and understanding, and their social situation—obviously plays an important part in the process of forming a question which can be asked in the current research context. Although this context may be analyzed along postmodern lines in order to find out how it affects research, production of knowledge, and—when the knowledge is applied—possible (social) consequences, there is a much more profound implication pertaining to the very nature of the experiment as a means to gain knowledge.

Irrespective of whether it is a simple experiment in physics such as Galileo Galilei’s or an experiment on a complex phenomenon from social or cognitive psychology, the experiment is a situation which is specifically designed to answer a certain type of questions, usually causal relationships, such as: “Does A causally affect B?” Excluding the extremely complex discussion on the nature of causality and causation (e.g., Armstrong, 1997 ; Pearl, 2009 ; Paul and Hall, 2013 ), it is crucial to note that we need the experiment as a tool to answer this question. Although we may theorize about a phenomenon and infer causal relationships simply by observing, we cannot—at least according to the prevailing understanding of causality in the sciences—prove causal relationships without the experiment.

The basic idea of the experiment is to create conditions which differ in only one single factor which is suspected as a causal factor for an effect. The influence of all other potential causal relationships is kept identical because they are considered as confounding factors which are irrelevant from the perspective of the research question of the current experiment. Then, if a difference is found in the outcome between the experimental conditions, this is considered as proof that the aspect in question exerts indeed a causal effect. This procedure and the logic behind it are not difficult to understand. However, a closer look reveals that this is actually far from simple or obvious.

To begin with, an experiment is nothing which occurs “naturally” but a situation created for a specific purpose, i.e., an “artificial” situation, because other causal factors exerting influence in “real” life outside the laboratory are deliberately excluded and considered as “confounding” factors. This in itself shows that the experiment contains a substantial postmodern element because instead of creating something it rather re- creates it. This re-creation is of course based on phenomena from the “profound” reality—in the Baudrillardian sense—since the explicit aim is to find out something about this profound reality and not to create something new or something else. However, as stated above, this re-creation must contain constructive elements reflecting the presuppositions, conceptual-theoretical assumptions, and aims of the investigator. By focusing on one factor and by reducing the complexity of the profound reality, the practical operationalization and realization thus reflect both the underlying conceptual structure and the anticipated outcome as they are specifically designed to test for the suspected but hidden or obscured causal relationships.

At this point, another element becomes relevant, namely the all-important role of language, which is emphasized in postmodern thinking (e.g., Harris, 2005 ). Without going into the intricacies of semiotics, there is an explanatory gap ( Chalmers, 2005 )—to borrow a phrase from philosophy of mind—between the phenomenon on the one hand and the linguistic and/or mental representation of it on the other. This relationship is far from clear and it is therefore problematic to assume that our linguistic or mental representations—our words and the concepts they designate—are identical with the phenomena themselves. Although we cannot, at least according to our present knowledge and understanding, fully bridge this gap, it is essential to be aware of it in order to avoid some pitfalls, as will be shown in the examples below.

Even a seemingly simple word like “tree”—to take up once more our previous example—refers to a tangible phenomenon because there are trees “out there.” However, they come in all shapes and sizes, there are different kinds of trees, and every single one of them may be labeled as “tree.” Furthermore, trees are composed of different parts, and the leaf—although part of the tree—has its own word, i.e., linguistic and mental representation. Although the leaf is part of the tree—at least according to our concepts—it is unclear whether “tree” also somehow encompasses “leaf.” The same holds true for the molecular, atomic, or even subatomic levels, where there “is” no tree. Excluding the extremely complex ontological implications of this problem, it has become clear that we are referring to a certain level of granularity when using the word “tree.” The level of granularity reflects the context, aims, and concepts of the investigator, e.g., an investigation of the rain forest as an ecosystem will ignore the subatomic level.

How does this concern experimental psychology? Psychology studies intangible phenomena, namely mental and behavioral processes, such as cognition, memory, learning, motivation, emotion, perception, consciousness, etc. It is important to note that these terms designate theoretical constructs as, for example, memory cannot be observed directly. We may provide the subjects of an experiment a set of words to learn and observe later how many words they reproduce correctly. A theoretical construct therefore describes such relationships between stimulus and behavior, and we may draw conclusions from this observable data about memory. But neither the observable behavior of the subject, the resulting data, nor our conclusions are identical with memory itself.

This train of thought demonstrates the postmodern character of experimental psychology because we construct our knowledge. But there is more to it than that: Even by trying to define a theoretical construct as exactly as possible—e.g., memory as “the process of maintaining information over time” ( Matlin, 2012 , 505) or “the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use this information in the present” ( Sternberg and Sternberg, 2011 , 187)—the explanatory gap between representation and phenomenon cannot be bridged. Rather, it becomes even more complicated because theoretical constructs are composed of other theoretical constructs, which results in some kind of self-referential circularity where constructs are defined by other constructs which refer to further constructs. In the definitions above, for instance, hardly any key term is self-evident and unambiguous for there are different interpretations of the constructs “process,” “maintaining,” “information,” “means,” “retain,” “draw on,” “experiences,” and “use” according to their respective contexts. Only the temporal expressions “over time,” “past,” and “present” are probably less ambiguous here because they are employed as non-technical, everyday terms. However, the definitions above are certainly not entirely incomprehensible—in fact, they are rather easy to understand in everyday language—and it is quite clear what the authors intend to express . The italics indicate constructive elements, which demonstrates that attempts to give a precise definition in the language of science result in fuzziness and self-reference.

Based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, Baudrillard (1981) found an illustrative allegory: a map so precise that it portrays everything in perfect detail—but therefore inevitably so large that it shrouds the entire territory it depicts. Similarly, Taleb (2007) coined the term “ludic fallacy” for mistaking the model/map—in our context: experiments in psychology—for the reality/territory, that is, a mental or behavioral phenomenon. Similar to the functionality of a seemingly “imprecise” map which contains only the relevant landmarks so the user may find their way, the fuzziness of language poses no problems in everyday communication. So why is it a problem in experimental psychology? Since the nature of theoretical constructs in psychology lies precisely in their very fuzziness, the aim of reaching a high degree of granularity and precision in experimental psychology seems to be unattainable (see the various failed attempts to create “perfect” languages which might depict literally everything “perfectly,” e.g., Carapezza and D’Agostino, 2010 ).

Without speculating about ontic or epistemic implications, it is necessary to be aware of the explanatory gap and to refrain from identifying the experiment and the underlying operationalization with the theoretical construct. Otherwise, this gap is “filled” unintentionally and uncontrollably if the results of an experiment are taken as valid proof for a certain theoretical construct, which is actually fuzzy and potentially operationalizable in a variety of ways. If this is not acknowledged, words, such as “memory,” become merely symbols devoid of concrete meaning, much like a glass bead game—or in postmodern terminology: a hyperreality.

Experiments and Hyperreality

“Hyperreality” is another key term in the work of Jean Baudrillard (1981) and it denotes a concept closely related to the simulacrum. Accordingly, in modern society the simulacra are ubiquitous and they form a system of interconnected simulacra which refer to each other rather than to the real, thereby possibly hiding or replacing the real. Consequently, the simulacra become real in their own right and form a “more real” reality, namely the hyperreality. One may or may not accept Baudrillard’s conception, especially the all-embracing social and societal implications, but the core concept of “hyperreality” is nevertheless a fruitful tool to analyze experimental psychology. We have already seen that the experiment displays many characteristics of a simulacrum, so it is not surprising that the concept of hyperreality is applicable here as well, although in a slightly different interpretation than Baudrillard’s.

The hyperreal character of the experiment can be discussed on two levels: the experiment itself and the discourse wherein it is embedded.

On the level of the experiment itself, two curious observations must be taken into account. First, and in contrast to the natural sciences where the investigator is human and the subject matter (mostly) non-human and usually inanimate, in psychology both the investigator and the subject matter are human. This means that the subjects of the experiment, being autonomous persons, are not malleable or completely controllable by the investigator because they bring their own background, history, worldview, expectations, and motivations. They interpret the situation—the experiment—and act accordingly, but not necessarily in the way the investigator had planned or anticipated ( Smedslund, 2016 ). Therefore, the subjects create their own versions of the experiment, or, in postmodern terminology, a variety of simulacra, which may be more or less compatible with the framework of the investigator. This holds true for all subjects of an experiment, which means that the experiment as a whole may also be interpreted as an aggregation of interconnected simulacra—a hyperreality.

The hyperreal character becomes even more evident because what contributes in the end to the interpretation of the results of the experiment are not the actual performances and results of the individual subjects as they were intended by them but rather how their performances and results are handled, seen, and interpreted by the investigator. Even if the investigator tries to be as faithful as possible and aims at an exact and unbiased measurement—i.e., an exact copy—there are inevitably constructive elements which introduce uncertainty into the experiment. Investigators can never be certain what the subjects were actually doing and thinking so they must necessarily work with interpretations. Or in postmodern terms: Because the actual performances and results of the subjects are not directly available the investigators must deal with simulacra. These simulacra become the investigators’ reality and thus any further treatment—statistical analyses, interpretations, or discussions—becomes a hyperreality, that is, a set of interconnected simulacra which have become “real.”

On the level of the discourse wherein the experiment is embedded, another curious aspect also demonstrates the hyperreal character of experimental psychology. Psychology is, according to the standard definition, the scientific study of mental and behavioral processes of the individual (e.g., Gerrig, 2012 ). This definition contains two actually contradictory elements. On the one hand, the focus is on processes of the individual. On the other hand, the—scientific—method to elucidate these processes does not look at individuals per se but aggregates their individual experiences and transforms them into a “standard” experience. The results from experiments, our knowledge of the human psyche, reflect psychological functioning at the level of the mean across individuals. And even if we assume that the mean is only an estimator and not an exact description or prediction, the question remains open how de-individualized observations are related to the experience of an individual. A general mechanism, a law—which was discovered by abstracting from a multitude of individual experiences—is then ( re -)imposed in the opposite direction back onto the individual. In other words, a simulacrum—namely, the result of an experiment—is viewed and treated as reality, thus becoming hyperreal. Additionally, and simply because it is considered universally true, this postulated law acquires thereby a certain validity and “truth”—often irrespective of its actual, factual, or “profound” truth—on its own. Therefore, it can become impossible to distinguish between “profound” and “simulacral” truth, which is the hallmark of hyperreality.

Measuring the Capacity of the Visual Working Memory

Vision is an important sensory modality and there is extensive research on this area ( Hutmacher, 2019 ). Much of our daily experience is shaped by seeing a rich and complex world around us, and it is therefore an interesting question how much visual information we can store and process. Based on the development of a seminal experimental paradigm, Luck and Vogel (1997) have shown that visual working memory has a storage capacity of about four items. This finding is reported in many textbooks (e.g., Baddeley, 2007 ; Parkin, 2013 ; Goldstein, 2015 ) and has almost become a truism in cognitive psychology.

The experimental paradigm developed by Luck and Vogel (1997) is a prime example of an experiment which closely adheres to the scientific principles outlined above. In order to make a very broad and fuzzy phenomenon measurable, simple abstract forms are employed as visual stimuli—such as colored squares, triangles, or lines, usually on a “neutral,” e.g., gray, background—which can be counted in order to measure the capacity of visual working memory. Reducing the exuberant diversity of the “outside visual world” to a few abstract geometric forms is an extremely artificial situation. The obvious contrast between simple geometrical forms and the rich panorama of the “real” visual world illustrates the pitfalls of controlling supposed confounding variables, namely the incontrollable variety of the “real” world and how we see it. Precisely by abstracting and by excluding potential confounding variables it is possible to count the items and to make the capacity of the visual working memory measurable. But in doing so the original phenomenon—seeing the whole world—is lost. In other words: A simulacrum has been created.

The establishment of the experimental paradigm by Luck and Vogel has led to much research and sparked an extensive discussion how the limitation to only four items might be explained (see the summaries by Brady et al., 2011 ; Luck and Vogel, 2013 ; Ma et al., 2014 ; Schurgin, 2018 ). However, critically, several studies have shown that the situation is different when real-world objects are used as visual stimuli rather than simple abstract forms, revealing that the capacity of the visual working memory is higher for real-world objects ( Endress and Potter, 2014 ; Brady et al., 2016 ; Schurgin et al., 2018 ; Robinson et al., 2020 ; also Schurgin and Brady, 2019 ). Such findings show that the discourse about the mechanisms behind the limitations of the visual working memory is mostly about an artificial phenomenon which has no counterpart in “reality”—the perfect example of a hyperreality.

This hyperreal character does not mean that the findings of Luck and Vogel (1997) or similar experiments employing artificial stimuli are irrelevant or not “true.” The results are true—but it is a local truth, only valid for the specific context of specific experiments, and not a global truth which applies to the visual working memory in general . That is, speaking about “visual working memory” based on the paradigm of Luck and Vogel is a mistake because it is actually about “visual working memory for simple abstract geometrical forms in front of a gray background.”

Free Will and Experimental Psychology

The term “free will” expresses the idea of having “a significant kind of control [italics in the original] over one’s actions” ( O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 , n.p.). This concept has occupied a central position in Western philosophy since antiquity because it has far-reaching consequences for our self-conception as humans and our position in the world, including questions of morality, responsibility, and the nature of legal systems (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ). Being a topic of general interest, it is not surprising that experimental psychologists have tried to investigate free will as well.

The most famous study was conducted by Libet et al. (1983) , and this experiment has quickly become a focal point in the extensive discourse on free will because it provides empirical data and a scientific investigation. Libet et al.’s experiment seems to show that the subjective impression when persons consciously decide to act is in fact preceded by objectively measurable but unconscious physical processes. This purportedly proves that our seemingly voluntary actions are actually predetermined by physical processes because the brain has unconsciously reached a decision already before the person becomes aware of it and that our conscious intentions are simply grafted onto it. Therefore, we do not have a free will, and consequently much of our social fabric is based on an illusion. Or so the story goes.

This description, although phrased somewhat pointedly, represents a typical line of thought in the discourse on free will (e.g., the prominent psychologists Gazzaniga, 2011 ; Wegner, 2017 ; see Kihlstrom, 2017 , for further examples).

Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive and highly controversial discussion: For some authors, it is a refutation or at least threat to various concepts of free will, or, conversely, an indicator or even proof for some kind of material determinism. By contrast, other authors deny that the experiment refutes or counts against free will. Furthermore, a third group—whose position we adopt for our further argumentation—denies that Libet’s findings are even relevant for this question at all (for summaries of this complex and extensive discussion and various positions including further references see Nahmias, 2010 ; Radder and Meynen, 2013 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Fischborn, 2016 ; Lavazza, 2016 ; Schurger, 2017 ). Libet’s own position, although not entirely consistent, opposes most notions of free will ( Roskies, 2011 ; Seifert, 2011 ). Given this background, it is not surprising that there are also numerous further experimental studies on various aspects of this subject area (see the summaries by Saigle et al., 2018 ; Shepard, 2018 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

However, we argue that this entire discourse is best understood along postmodern lines as hyperreality and that Libet’s experiment itself is a perfect example of a simulacrum. A closer look at the concrete procedure of the experiment shows that Libet actually asked his participants to move their hand or finger “at will” while their brain activity was monitored with an EEG. They were instructed to keep watch in an introspective manner for the moment when they felt the “urge” to move their hand and to record this moment by indicating the clock-position of a pointer. This is obviously a highly artificial situation where the broad and fuzzy concept of “free will” is abstracted and reduced to the movement of the finger, the only degree of freedom being the moment of the movement. The question whether this is an adequate operationalization of free will is of paramount importance, and there are many objections that Libet’s setup fails to measure free will at all (e.g., Mele, 2007 ; Roskies, 2011 ; Kihlstrom, 2017 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

Before Libet, there was no indication that the decision when to move a finger might be relevant for the concept of free will and the associated discourse. The question whether we have control over our actions referred to completely different levels of granularity. Free will was discussed with respect to questions such as whether we are free to live our lives according to our wishes or whether we are responsible for our actions in social contexts (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ), and not whether we lift a finger now or two seconds later. Libet’s and others’ jumping from very specific situations to far-reaching conclusions about a very broad and fuzzy theoretical construct illustrates that an extremely wide chasm between two phenomena, namely moving the finger and free will, is bridged in one fell swoop.

In other words, Libet’s experiment is a simulacrum as it duplicates a phenomenon from our day-to-day experience—namely free will—but in doing so the operationalization alters and reduces the theoretical construct. The outcome is a questionable procedure whose relationship to the phenomenon is highly controversial. Furthermore, the fact that, despite its tenuous connection to free will, Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive discussion on this subject reveals the hyperreal nature of the entire discourse because what is being discussed is not the actual question—namely free will—but rather a simulacrum. Everything else—the arguments, counter-arguments, follow-up experiments, and their interpretations—built upon Libet’s experiment are basically commentaries to a simulacrum and not on the real phenomena. Therefore, a hyperreality is created where the discourse revolves around entirely artificial phenomena, but where the arguments in this discussion refer back to and affect the real as suggestions are made to alter the legal system and our ideas of responsibility—which, incidentally, is not a question of empirical science but of law, ethics, and philosophy.

All of the above is not meant to say that this whole discourse is meaningless or even gratuitous—on the contrary, our understanding of the subject matter has greatly increased. Although our knowledge of free will has hardly increased, we have gained much insight into the hermeneutics and methodology—and pitfalls!—of investigations of free will, possible consequences on the individual and societal level, and the workings of scientific discourses. And this is exactly what postmodernism is about.

As shown above, there are a number of postmodern elements in the practice of experimental psychology: The prominent role of language, the gap between the linguistic or mental representation and the phenomenon, the “addition of intellect to the object,” the simulacral character of the experiment itself in its attempt to re-create phenomena, which necessarily transforms the “real” phenomenon due to the requirements of the experiment, and finally the creation of a hyperreality if experiments are taken as the “real” phenomenon and the scientific discourse becomes an exchange of symbolic expressions referring to the simulacra created in experiments, replacing the real. All these aspects did not seep gradually into experimental psychology in the wake of postmodernism but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology as they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science.

Given these inherent postmodern traits in experimental psychology, it is puzzling that there is so much resistance against a perceived “threat” of psychology’s scientificness. Although a detailed investigation of the reasons lies outside the scope of this analysis, we suspect there are two main causes: First, an insufficient knowledge of the history of science and understanding of philosophy of science may result in idealized concepts of a “pure” natural science. Second, lacking familiarity with basic tenets of postmodern approaches may lead to the assumption that postmodernism is just an idle game of arbitrary words. However, “science” and “postmodernism” and their respective epistemological concepts are not opposites ( Gergen, 2001 ; Holtz, 2020 ). This is especially true for psychology, which necessarily contains a social dimension because not only the investigators are humans but also the very subject matter itself.

The (over-)reliance on quantitative-experimental methods in psychology, often paired with a superficial understanding of the philosophy of science behind it, has been criticized, either from the theoretical point of view (e.g., Bergmann and Spence, 1941 ; Hearnshaw, 1941 ; Petrie, 1971 ; Law, 2004 ; Smedslund, 2016 ) or because the experimental approach has failed to produce reliable, valid, and relevant applicable knowledge in educational psychology ( Slavin, 2002 ). It is perhaps symptomatic that a textbook teaching the principles of science for psychologists does not contain even one example from experimental psychology but employs only examples from physics, plus Darwin’s theory of evolution ( Wilton and Harley, 2017 ).

On the other hand, the postmodern perspective on experimental psychology provides insight into some pitfalls, as illustrated by the examples above. On the level of the experiment, the methodological requirements imply the creation of an artificial situation, which opens up a gap between the phenomenon as it is in reality and as it is concretely operationalized in the experimental situation. This is not a problem per se as long as is it clear—and clearly communicated!—that the results of the experiment are only valid in a certain context. The problems begin if the movement of a finger is mistaken for free will. Similarly, being aware that local causalities do not explain complex phenomena such as mental and behavioral processes in their entirety also prevents (over-) generalization, especially if communicated appropriately. These limitations make it clear that the experiment should not be made into an absolute or seen as the only valid way of understanding the psyche and the world.

On the level of psychology as an academic discipline, any investigation must select the appropriate level of granularity and strike a balance between the methodological requirements and the general meaning of the theoretical concept in question to find out something about the “real” world. If the level of granularity is so fine that results cannot be tied back to broader theoretical constructs rather than providing a helpful understanding of our psychological functioning, academic psychology is in danger of becoming a self-referential hyperreality.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology also allows for a different view on the so-called replication crisis in psychology. Authors contending that there is no replication crisis often employ arguments which exhibit postmodern elements, such as the emphasis on specific local conditions in experiments which may explain different outcomes of replication studies ( Stroebe and Strack, 2014 ; Baumeister, 2019 ). In other words, they invoke the simulacral character of experiments. This explanation may be valid or not, but the replication crisis has shown the limits of a predominantly experimental approach in psychology.

Acknowledging the postmodern nature of experimental psychology and incorporating postmodern thinking explicitly into our research may offer a way out of this situation. Our subject matter—the psyche —is extremely complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory. And postmodern thinking has proven capable of successfully explaining such phenomena (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ). Thus, paradoxically, by accepting and considering the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs, they often become much clearer ( Ronzitti, 2011 ). Therefore, thinking more along postmodern lines in psychology would actually sharpen the theoretical and conceptual basis of experimental psychology—all the more as experimental psychology has inevitably been a postmodern endeavor since its very beginning.

Author Contributions

RM, CK, and CL developed the idea for this article. RM drafted the manuscript. CK and CL provided feedback and suggestions. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Armstrong, D. M. (1997). A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: CUP.

Google Scholar

Aylesworth, G. (2015). “Postmodernism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. E. N. Zalta. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

Baddeley, A. (2007). Working Memory, Thought, and Action. Oxford: OUP.

Barthes, R. (1963). “L’activité structuraliste,” in Essais Critiques (pp. 215–218). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. [“Structuralist activity.” Translated by R. Howard (1972). In Critical Essays , ed. R. Barthes (Evanston: Northern University Press), 213–220].

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et Simulation . Paris: Galilée. [ Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by S. F. Glaser (1994). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.]

Baumeister, R. F. (2019). “Self-control, ego depletion, and social psychology’s replication crisis,” in Surrounding Self-control (Appendix to chap. 2), ed. A. Mele (New York, NY: OUP). doi: 10.31234/osf.io/uf3cn

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Beebee, H. (2013). Free Will: An Introduction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bergmann, G., and Spence, K. W. (1941). Operationism and theory in psychology. Psychol. Rev. 48, 1–14. doi: 10.1037/h0054874

Bertens, H. (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern. A History. London: Routledge.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., and Alvarez, G. A. (2011). A review of visual memory capacity: beyond individual items and toward structured representations. J. Vis. 11, 1–34. doi: 10.1167/11.5.4

Brady, T. F., Störmer, V. S., and Alvarez, G. A. (2016). Working memory is not fixed-capacity: more active storage capacity for real-world objects than for simple stimuli. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113, 7459–7464. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1520027113

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Brass, M., Furstenberg, A., and Mele, A. R. (2019). Why neuroscience does not disprove free will. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 102, 251–263. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.04.024

Capaldi, E. J., and Proctor, R. W. (2013). “Postmodernism and the development of the psychology of science,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Science , eds G. J. Feist and M. E. Gorman (New York, NY: Springer), 331–352.

Carapezza, M., and D’Agostino, M. (2010). Logic and the myth of the perfect language. Logic Philos. Sci. 8, 1–29. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190869816.003.0001

Chalmers, D. (2005). “Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap,” in Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge. New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism , eds T. Alter and S. Walter (Oxford: OUP), 167–194. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171655.003.0009

Cohen, H. F. (2015). The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History. Cambridge: CUP.

Endress, A. D., and Potter, M. C. (2014). Large capacity temporary visual memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 143, 548–565. doi: 10.1037/a0033934

Fischborn, M. (2016). Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philos. Psychol. 29, 494–502. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York, NY: Ecco.

Gemignani, M., and Peña, E. (2007). Postmodern conceptualizations of culture in social constructionism and cultural studies. J. Theor. Philos. Psychol. 27–28, 276–300. doi: 10.1037/h0091297

Gergen, K. J. (2001). Psychological science in a postmodern context. Am. Psychol. 56, 803–813. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.56.10.803

Gergen, K. J. (2002). Psychological science: to conserve or create? Am. Psychol. 57, 463–464. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.463

Gerrig, R. J. (2012). Psychology and Life , 20th Edn. Boston: Pearson.

Goldstein, E. B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Stamford: Cengage Learning.

Goodwin, C. J. (2015). A History of Modern Psychology , 5th Edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Hackert, B., and Weger, U. (2018). Introspection and the Würzburg school: implications for experimental psychology today. Eur. Psychol. 23, 217–232. doi: 10.1027/1016-9040/a000329

Haig, B. D. (2014). Investigating the Psychological World: Scientific Method in the Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hansen, J. T. (2015). The relevance of postmodernism to counselors and counseling practice. J. Ment. Health Counsel. 37, 355–363. doi: 10.17744/MEHC.37.4.06

Hare-Mustin, R. T., and Marecek, J. (1988). The meaning of difference: gender theory, postmodernism, and psychology. Am. Psychol. 43, 455–464. doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.43.6.455

Harris, R. (2005). The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.

Hearnshaw, L. S. (1941). Psychology and operationism. Aust. J. Psychol. Philos. 19, 44–57. doi: 10.1080/00048404108541506

Heidegger, M. (1953). Sein und Zeit (7. Aufl.). Tübingen: Niemeyer. [ Being and Time . Translated by J. Stambaugh, revised by D. J. Schmidt (2010). Albany: SUNY Press.]

Held, B. S. (2007). Psychology’s Interpretive Turn: The Search for Truth and Agency in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Washington, DC: APA.

Henry, J. (1997). The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Hodge, B. (1999). The Sokal ‘Hoax’: some implications for science and postmodernism. Continuum J. Media Cult. Stud. 13, 255–269. doi: 10.1080/10304319909365797

Hofmann, S. G. (2002). More science, not less. Am. Psychol. 57:462. doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.57.6-7.462a

Holt, R. R. (2005). “The menace of postmodernism to a psychoanalytic psychology,” in Relatedness, Self-definition and Mental Representation: Essays in Honor of Sidney J. Blatt , eds J. S. Auerbach, K. N. Levy, and C. E. Schaffer (London: Routledge), 288–302. doi: 10.4324/9780203337318_chapter_18

Holtz, P. (2020). Does postmodernism really entail a disregard for the truth? Similarities and differences in postmodern and critical rationalist conceptualizations of truth, progress, and empirical research methods. Front. Psychol. 11:545959. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.545959

Holzman, L. (2006). Activating postmodernism. Theory Psychol. 16, 109–123. doi: 10.1177/0959354306060110

Holzman, L., and Morss, J. (eds). (2000). Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hutmacher, F. (2019). Why is there so much more research on vision than on any other sensory modality? Front. Psychol. 10:2246. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02246

Jager, B. (1991). Psychology in a postmodern era. J. Phenomenol. Psychol. 22, 60–71. doi: 10.1163/156916291X00046

Jiménez, J. P. (2015). Psychoanalysis in postmodern times: some questions and challenges. Psychoanal. Inquiry 35, 609–624. doi: 10.1080/07351690.2015.1055221

Kihlstrom, J. F. (2017). Time to lay the Libet experiment to rest: commentary on Papanicolaou (2017). Psycho. Conscious. Theory Res. Pract. 4, 324–329. doi: 10.1037/cns0000124

Kleinert, A. (2009). Der messende Luchs. NTM. Z. Gesch. Wiss. Tech. Med. 17, 199–206. doi: 10.1007/s00048-009-0335-4

Krippner, S. (2001). “Research methodology in humanistic psychology in the light of postmodernity,” in The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges in Theory, Research, and Practice , eds K. J. Schneider, J. F. Bugental, and J. F. Pierson (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications), 290–304. doi: 10.4135/9781412976268.n22

Kruger, D. J. (2002). The deconstruction of constructivism. Am. Psychol. 57, 456–457. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.456

Kvale S. (ed.) (1992). Psychology and Postmodernism. London: SAGE.

Lavazza, A. (2016). Free will and neuroscience: from explaining freedom away to new ways of operationalizing and measuring it. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10:262. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00262

Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Leahey, T. H. (2017). A History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity , 8th Edn. New York, NY: Routledge.

Leffert, M. (2007). A contemporary integration of modern and postmodern trends in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 55, 177–197. doi: 10.1177/00030651070550011001

Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., and Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106, 623–642. doi: 10.1093/brain/106.3.623

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2010). Can psychology become a science? Pers. Individ. Differ. 49, 281–288. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.024

Locke, E. A. (2002). The dead end of postmodernism. Am. Psychol. 57:458. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.458a

Luck, S. J., and Vogel, E. K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions. Nature 390, 279–281. doi: 10.1038/36846

Luck, S. J., and Vogel, E. K. (2013). Visual working memory capacity: from psychophysics and neurobiology to individual differences. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 391–400. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.006

Ma, W. J., Husain, M., and Bays, P. M. (2014). Changing concepts of working memory. Nature Neurosci. 17, 347–356. doi: 10.1038/nn.3655

Mandler, G. (2007). A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martin, J. (2003). Positivism, quantification and the phenomena of psychology. Theory Psychol. 13, 33–38. doi: 10.1177/0959354303013001760

Martin, J., and Sugarman, J. (2009). Middle-ground theorizing, realism, and objectivity in psychology: a commentary on Held (2007). Theory Psychol. 19, 115–122. doi: 10.1177/0959354308101422

Matlin, M. W. (2012). Cognition , 8th Edn. Hoboken: Wiley.

McKenna, M., and Pereboom, D. (2016). Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mele, A. R. (2007). “Decisions, intentions, urges, and free will: why libet has not shown what he says he has,” in Causation and Explanation , eds J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and H. S. Silverstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 241–263.

Michell, J. (2003). The quantitative imperative: positivism, naïve realism and the place of qualitative methods in psychology. Theory Psychol. 13, 5–31. doi: 10.1177/0959354303013001758

Nahmias, E. (2010). “Scientific challenges to free will,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action , eds C. Sandis and T. O’Connor (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell), 345–310. doi: 10.1002/9781444323528.ch44

Nola, R., and Sankey, H. (2014). Theories of Scientific Method. An Introduction. Stocksfield: Acumen.

O’Connor, T., and Franklin, C. (2018). “Free will,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. E. N. Zalta. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Olby, R. C., Cantor, G. N., Christie, J. R. R., and Hodge, M. J. S. (eds). (1991). Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge.

Osterlind, S. J. (2019). The Error of Truth: How History and Mathematics Came Together to Form Our Character and Shape Our Worldview. Oxford: OUP.

Parkin, A. J. (2013). Essential Cognitive Psychology (classic edition). London: Psychology Press.

Paul, L. A., and Hall, N. (2013). Causation: A User’s Guide. Oxford: OUP.

Pearl, J. (2009). Causality. Models, Reasoning, and Inference , 2nd Edn. Cambridge: CUP.

Petrie, H. G. (1971). A dogma of operationalism in the social sciences. Philos. Soc. Sci. 1, 145–160. doi: 10.1177/004839317100100109

Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York, NY: Viking.

Planck, M. (1949). The meaning and limits of exact science. Science 110, 319–327. doi: 10.1126/science.110.2857.319

Radder, H., and Meynen, G. (2013). Does the brain “initiate” freely willed processes? A philosophy of science critique of Libet-type experiments and their interpretation. Theory Psychol. 23, 3–21. doi: 10.1177/0959354312460926

Ramey, H. L., and Grubb, S. (2009). Modernism, postmodernism and (evidence-based) practice. Contemp. Fam. Ther. 31, 75–86. doi: 10.1007/s10591-009-9086-6

Robinson, M. M., Benjamin, A. S., and Irwin, D. E. (2020). Is there a K in capacity? Assessing the structure of visual short-term memory. Cogn. Psychol. 121, 101305. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101305

Ronzitti G. (ed.) (2011). Vagueness: A Guide. Dordrecht: Springer.

Roskies, A. L. (2011). “Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will,” in Conscious Will and Responsibility , eds W. Sinnott-Armstrong and L. Nadel (Oxford: OUP), 11–22. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381641.003.0003

Saigle, V., Dubljević, V., and Racine, E. (2018). The impact of a landmark neuroscience study on free will: a qualitative analysis of articles using Libet and colleagues’ methods. AJOB Neurosci. 9, 29–41. doi: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425756

Schlosser, M. E. (2014). The neuroscientific study of free will: a diagnosis of the controversy. Synthese 191, 245–262. doi: 10.1007/s11229-013-0312-2

Schurger, A. (2017). “The neuropsychology of conscious volition,” in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness , eds S. Schneider and M. Velmans (Malden: Wiley Blackwell), 695–710. doi: 10.1002/9781119132363.ch49

Schurgin, M. W. (2018). Visual memory, the long and the short of it: a review of visual working memory and long-term memory. Attention Percept. Psychophys. 80, 1035–1056. doi: 10.3758/s13414-018-1522-y

Schurgin, M. W., and Brady, T. F. (2019). When “capacity” changes with set size: ensemble representations support the detection of across-category changes in visual working memory. J. Vis. 19, 1–13. doi: 10.1167/19.5.3

Schurgin, M. W., Cunningham, C. A., Egeth, H. E., and Brady, T. F. (2018). Visual long-term memory can replace active maintenance in visual working memory. bioRxiv [Preprint]. doi: 10.1101/381848

Segerstråle U.C.O. (ed.) (2000). Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society. Albany: SUNY Press.

Seifert, J. (2011). In defense of free will: a critique of Benjamin Libet. Rev. Metaphys. 65, 377–407.

Shearer, A. (2020). The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West. London: Hurst & Company.

Shepard, J. (2018). How libet-style experiments may (or may not) challenge lay theories of free will. AJOB Neurosci. 9, 45–47. doi: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425766

Sim, S. (2011). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism , 3rd Edn. London: Routledge.

Sinacore, A. L., and Enns, C. Z. (2005). “Diversity feminisms: postmodern, women-of-color, antiracist, lesbian, third-wave, and global perspectives,” in Teaching and Social Justice: Integrating Multicultural and Feminist Theories in the Classroom , eds C. Z. Enns and A. L. Sinacore (Washington, DC: APA), 41–68. doi: 10.1037/10929-003

Slavin, R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: transforming educational practice and research. Educ. Res. 31, 15–21. doi: 10.3102/0013189X031007015

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychol. Behav. Sci. 50, 185–195. doi: 10.1007/s12124-015-9339-x

Sokal, A. D. (1996). A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca 6, 62–64.

Sternberg, R. J., and Sternberg, K. (2011). Cognitive Psychology , 6th Edn. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.

Stroebe, W., and Strack, F. (2014). The alleged crisis and the illusion of exact replication. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 9, 59–71. doi: 10.1177/1745691613514450

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York, NY: Random House.

Tarescavage, A. M. (2020). Science Wars II: the insidious influence of postmodern ideology on clinical psychology (commentary on “Implications of ideological bias in social psychology on clinical practice”). Clin. Psychol. Sci. Pract. 27:e12319. doi: 10.1111/cpsp.12319

Teo, T. (2018). Outline of Theoretical Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wax, M. L. (1995). Method as madness science, hermeneutics, and art in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Acad. Psychoanal. 23, 525–543. doi: 10.1521/jaap.1.1995.23.4.525

Wegner, D. M. (2017). The Illusion of Conscious Will , 2nd Edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wilton, R., and Harley, T. (2017). Science and Psychology. London: Routledge.

Keywords : postmodernism, experimental psychology, experiment, methodology, philosophy of science

Citation: Mayrhofer R, Kuhbandner C and Lindner C (2021) The Practice of Experimental Psychology: An Inevitably Postmodern Endeavor. Front. Psychol. 11:612805. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.612805

Received: 30 September 2020; Accepted: 26 November 2020; Published: 12 January 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Mayrhofer, Kuhbandner and Lindner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Roland Mayrhofer, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Advance Articles
• Supplements
• Editor's Choice
• Virtual Issues
• Virtual Roundtables
• Abstract Supplements
• Basic Science
• Circadian Disorders
• Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience of Sleep
• Neurological Disorders
• Sleep Across the Lifespan
• Sleep and Metabolism
• Sleep Disordered Breathing
• Sleep Health and Safety
• Author Guidelines
• Instructions for Reviewers
• Submission Site
• Open Access Options
• Additional Resources
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Why publish with this journal?
• About SLEEP
• Editorial Board
• Dispatch Dates
• Permissions
• Advertising & Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Reprints and ePrints
• Sponsored Supplements
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, disclosure statement.

• < Previous

Sleep duration and mood in adolescents: an experimental study

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Stephen A Booth, Mary A Carskadon, Robyn Young, Michelle A Short, Sleep duration and mood in adolescents: an experimental study, Sleep , Volume 44, Issue 5, May 2021, zsaa253, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaa253

• Permissions Icon Permissions

This study examines the relationship between experimentally manipulated sleep duration and mood in adolescents.

Thirty-four adolescents (20 male), aged 15–17 years, lived in a sleep laboratory for 10 days and 9 nights. They were allocated to one of three sleep “doses” for five consecutive nights for 5, 7.5, or 10 h sleep opportunity per night. Two baseline nights and two recovery nights entailed 10 h sleep opportunity per night. Mood was measured every 3 h during wake using unipolar visual analogue scales measuring the mood states “depressed,” “afraid,” “angry,” “confused,” “anxious,” “happy,” and “energetic.”

Mixed models analyses with post hoc comparisons revealed that participants in the 5-h group, but not the 7.5- or 10-h groups, reported being significantly more depressed, angry, and confused during sleep restriction than at baseline. Adolescents were significantly less happy and energetic during sleep restricted to 5 h and significantly less energetic during sleep restricted to 7.5 h. When adolescents had 10 h sleep opportunities their happiness significantly increased. No statistically significant effects of sleep restriction were found for fear or anxiety, although small-to-moderate effects of sleep restricted to 5 or 7.5 h were found. Two nights of recovery sleep was not sufficient to recover from increased negative mood states for the 5-h group, although recovery occurred for positive mood states.

Given the prevalence of insufficient sleep and the rising incidence of mood disorders and dysregulation in adolescents, these findings highlight the importance of sufficient sleep to mitigate these risks.

Adolescence is a critical maturational stage in terms of heightened risk of the onset of mood disorders. Insufficient experimental evidence exists that elucidates the effect of sleep duration on a range of positive and negative mood states in adolescents. The present study uses sleep restriction and sleep extension protocols to experimentally manipulate sleep duration in 34 adolescents. Results indicated that adolescents reported deteriorated in terms of depression, happiness, anger, confusion and energy. Two nights of recovery sleep did not eliminate mood deficits for negative mood states for the 5-h group, although recovery occurred for positive mood states. Sufficient sleep is crucial to guard against mood deficits in otherwise healthy adolescents.

Adolescence is a time of significant psychological, social, and physiological change [ 1 ] and a vulnerable developmental period during which individuals are at heightened risk of developing a mental illness [ 2 ]. Despite the importance of mood and the commonly held belief that sleep loss perturbs adolescent mood [ 3 , 4 ], rigorous experimental evidence supporting a causal relationship between sleep loss and mood deficits in adolescents is scant. The current experiment tests the causal association between sleep duration and adolescent mood.

Empirical literature on sleep duration and mood has overwhelmingly focused on adults [ 5–7 ]; however, adult findings may not generalize to adolescents. Adolescents differ in terms of their greater sleep need [ 8 , 9 ], types of affective challenges they face [ 10 ], and less mature prefrontal brain regions that are crucial to affective regulation [ 11 ]. As such, research focusing specifically on adolescents is needed. Most of the extant literature focusing on sleep duration and mood in adolescents is cross-sectional. These studies report a correlation of sleep duration and mood, with shorter sleep associated with worse mood [ 12 , 13 ]. Due to the cross-sectional nature of such studies, however, a casual relationship cannot be concluded.

A recent study investigated the effect of sleep restriction and sleep extension on a group of 48 adolescents aged 14–17 years with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder using a 3-week sleep protocol with an experimental crossover design in participants’ homes [ 14 ]. Sleep restriction involved a week with a 6.5 h sleep opportunity per night while sleep extension involved a week of 9.5 h sleep opportunities per night. Parent- and self-reported depressive symptoms were greater during sleep restriction compared to sleep extension, while positive affect was lower. Parents also reported increased negative affect and emotion dysregulation among adolescents during sleep restriction when compared to extension.

Among the limited experimental studies including adolescents, two were performed under continuous monitoring. The sleep of 113 adolescents, aged 15–19 years, was restricted to a 5-h sleep opportunity for seven consecutive nights, with or without a 1-h daytime nap opportunity [ 15 , 16 ]. Mood was assessed three times per day using Positive and Negative Affect Scales (PANAS). Compared to controls, who had 9-h sleep opportunity per night, sleep-restricted adolescents reported significantly lower positive mood scores. The detriment to positive mood was only partially ameliorated by an afternoon nap. Unexpectedly, no change was observed to negative mood. Lo et al. note that adolescents reported that many of the mood states assessed by the PANAS negative mood subscale, such as guilty, afraid, and scared, were not relevant to them [ 15 ]. Differential sensitivity to sleep loss among mood states has been reported in a recent meta-analysis of 361,505 adolescents [ 17 ], with positive mood showing the largest effect in response to shorter sleep (OR = 1.02), followed by anger (OR = .83), depression (OR = .62), and anxiety (OR = .41). The present literature is limited by the paucity of studies that have examined specific mood states [ 18 ]. Other challenges arise in those studies using home-based sleep restriction schedules where breaches of adherence to study protocols regarding sleep and abstinence from napping and caffeine may muddle interpretation [ 19 , 20 ].

The present study addresses the gaps and limitations in current literature by employing a laboratory-based experimental design to measure several discrete mood states over varying “doses” of sleep. The laboratory environment ensures adherence to study protocols and control of environmental variables, such as diet, caffeine consumption, and exercise that are known to affect sleep and mood [ 21–23 ]. The repeated-measures design whereby participants in each condition have their mood compared between baseline, the sleep dose condition, and following recovery sleep provides the opportunity for robust conclusions regarding the causal link between sleep duration and mood.

We hypothesized that self-reported mood will be significantly worse during sleep restriction when compared to extended 10-h baseline and recovery sleep opportunity, with positive moods decreasing and negative moods increasing when sleep is restricted to 5- or 7.5-h sleep opportunity per night, as neither duration allows for sleep that is within the recommended range for adolescents [ 24 ] (i.e. 8–10 h sleep per night).

Participants

Participants were 34 adolescents aged 15–17 years (20 male, M age = 15.91 years ± 0.86) from South Australian high schools. All participants were late- or postpubertal adolescents (Tanner Stage 4 or 5 on the Pubertal Development Scale) [ 25 ]. Prescreening by parent and adolescent self-report, showed that participants were physically and psychologically healthy and were medication-free, with the exception of birth control. Participants were good sleepers, with average sleep durations ≥8 h per night [ 26 ], average sleep onset latencies of ≤30 min per night [ 27 ], and weeknight/weekend bedtime discrepancy less than 2 h [ 28 ], as determined by a survey and a 7-day sleep diary during screening, to reduce confounding effects of preexisting poor sleep and/or sleep disorders. Extreme morning or evening chronotypes were not included (≥44 or ≤22 on the Composite Morningness/Eveningness Scale) [ 29 ] due to effects of chronotype on adolescent sleep and mood [ 30 ], nor were participants indicating less than 8 h sleep per night on average, weekend bedtime delay of 2 h or more, or sleep onset latencies greater than 30 min per night.

Materials and measures

Mood was measured using a series of 100 mm unipolar visual analog scale (VAS), similar to those used in a study by Stern et al. [ 31 ]. These consisted of scales with labels to demonstrate the spectrum of discrete mood experience, with “Not at all (mood)” at the left endpoint and “Extremely (mood)” on the right endpoint. Mood states included “Depressed,” “Afraid,” “Angry,” “Confused,” “Anxious,” “Happy,” and “Energetic.”

At each test administration, participants were asked to describe how they felt “RIGHT NOW” by marking a short vertical line intersecting the scale at some point, placing the mark further to the right to reflect the greater intensity of that mood. Items were scored by measuring the distance in millimeters from the left anchor of the scale to the point at which the participant intersects the scale with a line. Unipolar scales (i.e. spanning the range of not at all sad to extremely sad, as opposed to bipolar scales which may span happy to sad) were selected as they reduce participant confusion as compared to a bipolar scale [ 31 ].

Sleep was recorded prior to the laboratory experiment with sleep diaries, actigraphy, and by getting participants to call and leave a message on the sleep laboratory answering machine confirming their and waketime. During the laboratory experiment, sleep was recording using nightly polysomnography. Further information regarding sleep measurement is provided elsewhere [ 8 ].

This study used a mixed experimental design. The independent variables were sleep duration dose (5, 7.5, and 10 h groups), and sleep condition (Baseline, Experimental Sleep, and Recovery); dependent variables were the mood terms: “Depressed,” “Afraid,” “Angry,” “Confused,” “Anxious,” “Happy,” and “Energetic.”

An active recruitment process was used to recruit adolescent participants through announcements in South Australian high-school newsletters. Parents of potential participants provided an initial telephone screen using the Sleep, Medical, Educational, and Family History Survey [ 12 ]. Adolescent participants meeting preliminary inclusion criteria were sent a questionnaire package that included a modified Sleep Habits Survey, the Smith Composite Morningness/Eveningness questionnaire, the Pubertal Development Scale and the Sleep, Medical, Education and Family History Survey and a 7-day sleep diary and were invited to attend an interview. Upon confirming eligibility and obtaining parental consent and adolescent assent, adolescents were provided a sleep diary and a wrist activity monitor for the week prior to the in-lab study. Participants were allocated in blocks of four participants to one of the three sleep-dose conditions. Adolescents in each study run were in the same condition and were not informed of their sleep opportunity each night until the end of the study. Adolescents were required to maintain a 9.5 h sleep opportunity between 9:30 pm and 07:00 am for five nights prior to the study to eliminate any existing sleep debt before the start of the study. Thirty-seven participants (21 males) were recruited; however, one did not follow the required pre-study sleep protocol and was excluded from the study and two others (both females assigned to the 7.5 h condition) discontinued their participation before the study’s conclusion.

On the first two of nine consecutive laboratory nights, a 10 h sleep opportunity was provided to extinguish any residual sleep debt and provide baseline sleep and mood data. Adolescents’ polysomnographically estimated sleep durations on the adaptation and baseline nights were not significantly different between conditions (all p < .05). Five experimental nights of 5, 7.5, or 10 h sleep opportunity followed, with wake time at 7:30 am regardless of sleep duration. This wake time was chosen to simulate typical rising early for school, as adolescents generally restrict sleep by staying up late rather than getting up early [ 32 ]. Two recovery nights of 10 h sleep opportunity concluded the experiment. The VAS was administered three-hourly across all wake periods, as shown in Figure 1 .

Schematic of the study protocol, displaying days by hours over three sleep dose conditions.

To control environmental variables, participants completed the study in a laboratory free of time-cues, without access to caffeine or to live television or Internet. Participants had access to mobile phones for one 15-min period each day, although Internet access was disabled and phone clocks were altered. Participants spent their time playing board games, doing craft activities, watching prerecorded movies and television series, and interacting with one another and with research staff. The laboratory was light- (<50 lx during wake periods and <1 lx during sleep opportunities) and temperature- (21 ○ C) controlled and sound-attenuated. Participants’ scheduled sleep episodes were recorded using polysomnography to confirm participant sleep times. Findings regarding changes to sleep and attention variables are reported elsewhere [ 8 ].

Statistical analyses

Linear mixed-effects models were used to test differences in mood across sleep conditions (baseline, sleep restriction, and recovery) for both males and females. This analytic approach accounted for both within and between-participant variance [ 33 ]. All models specified a random effect of subject ID. Models for mood specified “Depressed,” “Afraid,” “Angry,” “Confused,” “Anxious,” “Happy,” and “Energetic” as dependent variables. Each model was fully saturated, including all main and interaction effects, for sleep dose (5, 7.5, and 10 h), sleep condition (baseline, sleep restriction, and recovery), and sex. Baseline data collected on day 2 were excluded to reduce acclimatization effects as participants adjusted to a novel environment. Cohen’s d was calculated to indicate effect size.

Results are presented for the interactions between sleep dose group (i.e. 5, 7.5, or 10 h) and study phase (baseline, sleep restriction, or recovery) in Tables 1–2 and Figure 2 . Noted differences refer to statistical significance at a p < .05 level. Effect sizes are presented using Cohen’s d , where .2, .5, and .8 indicate a small, medium, and large effect size, respectively.

Inferential statistics for main effects and interactions of sleep dose and sleep condition on negative mood variables

Final column displays significant post hoc comparisons ( p < .05). Post hoc comparisons for the main effect of “dose” are between subjects’ comparisons while all remaining comparisons are within-subjects.

Note. BL, baseline sleep condition; ES, experimental sleep dose; RC, recovery sleep condition; 5 h, 5 h experimental sleep dose; 7.5 h, 7.5 h experimental sleep dose; 10 h, control group with 10 h sleep dose.

Inferential statistics for the main effects and interactions of experimental sleep dose and sleep condition on positive mood variables

Effect sizes (Cohen’s d ) of changes to mood states between baseline and experimental sleep dose for the 5-, 7.5-, and 10-h sleep dose conditions.

Sleep duration and negative mood

Descriptive statistics for all mood states are provided in the Supplementary Material , and inferential statistics with post hoc test results are provided in Table 1 . Figure 2 illustrates the effect size of the changes in mood states between baseline and experimental sleep dose across the three groups. Overall, the change to mood states across the phases of the study (baseline, experimental sleep dose, and recovery) varied between experimental sleep dose groups for depressed mood, anger, and confusion, but not fear or anxiety. Specifically, participants reported greater depressed mood, anger, and confusion during the experimental sleep dose when compared to baseline, but this effect was only seen when sleep was restricted to 5 h TIB and not during the 7.5 h sleep dose. Depressed mood and fear also increased from experimental sleep dose to recovery for participants in the 5 h group. Confusion increased during recovery when compared to baseline and experimental sleep dose for participants in the 10 h group. No significant changes to other mood states were found between experimental sleep dose and recovery in the 7.5 or 10 h sleep groups.

Sleep duration and positive mood

Inferential statistics and post hoc results are provided in Table 2 . The change to mood states across the phases of the study (baseline, experimental sleep dose, and recovery) varied between sleep dose groups for both happiness and energy. Specifically, participants reported significantly reduced happiness when sleep was restricted to 5 h. They also reported significantly less energy when sleep was restricted to either 5 or 7.5 h sleep opportunities per night. Participants’ happiness increased from baseline to experimental sleep dose in the 10 h sleep dose (control group), and there was a small but nonsignificant increase in energy. Significant increases in happiness and energy also occurred between the experimental sleep period and recovery for adolescents in the 5 and 7.5 h sleep dose groups, while happiness increased between the sleep dose phase and recovery for participants in the 7.5 and 10 h groups.

The aim of the current study was to explore the effect of five nights of sleep limited to either a 5, 7.5, or 10 h sleep opportunity per night on adolescent mood, when compared with baseline and recovery conditions which had 10-h sleep opportunities. Consistent with previous research [ 15–17 , 34 ], positive moods of happiness and energy significantly decreased when sleep was restricted to 5 h sleep opportunity per night, with large effect sizes for both moods. This finding is consistent with results found in adult studies that used a VAS to measure mood [ 5 ], establishing the sensitivity of happiness and energy to sleep loss. It is interesting to note that, although obtaining less than the recommended 8–10 h sleep per night [ 24 , 26 ], positive moods only decreased for energy but not happiness in the 7.5 h group, although a small-to-medium effect size was observed. Conversely, happiness, but not energy, increased from baseline to experimental sleep dose in the 10 h control group, suggesting that when adolescents consistently have the opportunity to obtain optimal sleep, happiness increases.

Results regarding negative mood states of depression, fear, anger, confusion, and anxiety were mixed. Participants in the 5 h group were significantly more depressed, angry, and confused when restricted to 5 h TIB compared to baseline, with large effect sizes for all changes. Likewise, extant research has found that depressed mood, anger, and confusion increased in response to less sleep [ 19 , 35 ]. Similar to results found for positive moods, no changes to negative mood states were observed in the 7.5-h group between baseline and experimental sleep dose, despite not obtaining the recommended duration of sleep.

Fear and anxiety did not increase during the experimental sleep phase for adolescents in the 5 or 7.5 h sleep dose groups. Findings in regard to the sensitivty of anxiety to sleep loss have been mixed [ 34 ]. There are several possible explanations for this discrepancy. First, experimental studies have struggled to replicate cross-sectional results linking less sleep to increased negative mood in adolescents [ 18 , 19 ]. A lack of significant findings in some moods may be a result of a differential sensitivity. It is possible that the “dosage” and chronicity of sleep restriction implemented in the current study, as well as previous experimental research, were sufficient to elicit an increase in depressed mood, anger, and confusion in adolescents, but not fear or anxiety. More chronic sleep restriction may be required to find observable effects. It is important to note that while statistical significance was not reached, the effect size for the increase in anxiety from baseline to sleep restriction was medium ( d = .51) for the 5 h group and small ( d = .27) for the 7.5 h group, thus part of this nonsignificant finding may also reflect a lack of statistical power in the current analyses.

Another possible explanation for the lack of a significant relationship between sleep duration and fear and anxiety has been suggested [ 36 ]. It is argued that individual differences can predict mood responses to restricted sleep, such as a phenomenon where stressful life events influence the development of a person’s genes, making them more susceptible to mood disturbances upon reduced sleep. Restricting sleep reduces cognitive resources needed to dismiss negative stimuli, and those susceptible individuals, having biased attention for negativity, become less able to regulate or reappraise them. This is supported by Gregory et al. [ 37 ], who found that the greatest variance in the relationship between sleep duration and anxiety was accounted for by genetic factors. As the participants recruited for the current study underwent an extensive screening process, ensuring physical and psychological health, this may have minimized the possibility that individuals at higher risk of mood and/or sleep disorders would be included. Fuligni et al. have similarly found that adolescents with greater depressed mood and anxiety need more sleep for optimal mood [ 38 ]. Thus, a sample of adolescents with heightened depressed mood or anxiety at baseline may be less resilient to sleep loss. Although literature reporting this effect focuses on depressed mood and anxiety [ 36 , 37 ], it is possible that the same vulnerabilities apply to other mood states, such as fear. As such, the present results may underestimate the effect that sleep loss has on mood states among the general adolescent population.

As seen in the 5 h sleep dose group, positive mood states of happiness and energy significantly increased from sleep restriction to recovery. In addition, the 7.5 h sleep dose group displayed more energy but not happiness between the sleep restriction and recovery phases. These increases in positive mood states following recovery sleep provide support for the restorative effects of optimal sleep following cumulative sleep loss, allowing adolescents mood to recover to baseline values. For the 10 h sleep dose, happiness increased from baseline to the sleep dose condition, then further increased during recovery. This demonstrates that obtaining optimal sleep increases happiness, with 10 h group participants’ self-reported happiness increasing by more than 10% over the course of the study. Larger effects of sleep loss on mood were found for positive mood states, consistent with recent meta-analytic findings in adolescents [ 17 ]. This highlights the importance of considering positive mood states in research into the impact of sleep on mood and also has important clinical ramifications, given the role of anhedonia in psychological disorders such as depression.

It was expected that negative moods would recover from sleep restriction to recovery for participants in the 5 and 7.5 h sleep restriction conditions. Conversely, in the 5 h sleep dose, depressed mood and fear significantly increased from sleep restriction to recovery. It has been suggested that this increase in negative mood may be a natural effect of living in a laboratory environment, as has observed in adult participants given 9 h sleep opportunities over nine nights [ 39 ]. If so, it would be expected that this same pattern would be observed in the 10 h sleep dose group. However, the only mood to demonstrate this effect without sleep loss was confusion. It is possible that the factors leading to increased negative moods in adults placed in a laboratory environment do not affect adolescents in the same way. This may be due to differences in study protocols, or adolescents’ reduced ability to regulate mood following a period of sleep restriction [ 19 ] when faced with a mood-evoking situation (i.e. leaving the laboratory and their new-found friends). As reported elsewhere [ 8 ], salivary dim light melatonin onset showed a significant and dose–response delay in response to sleep restriction. As such, participants in the 5 h condition completed the study with a circadian rhythm that ran nearly 3 h later than it did at baseline. As a result, adolescents were likely to be waking closer to their circadian nadir, which may result in increased sleep inertia and worse mood, even following recovery sleep.

The current study was able to control for many of the confounding factors, which may have influenced the outcomes of prior adolescent sleep research. No other identified adolescent study examining the effect of sleep on mood was completed entirely under laboratory conditions. As such, previous studies were not able to control for exposure to environmental variables and diet, such as caffeine or excessive sugar to the same degree. The laboratory conditions allowed enforced bed/wake times, permitting stronger causal conclusions to be made about the effect of sleep duration on mood without having to consider response biases inflating relationships between subjective sleep and mood measures when both sleep and mood are measured subjectively. However, laboratory conditions present additional challenges, with reduced ecological validity.

Some of the challenges of the laboratory environment in measuring mood outcomes include the effect of an unfamiliar environment, socializing with peers who are not part of their normal friendship groups, and lack of contact with friends and family, which could have been confounding factors in the effect of sleep restriction on mood. It is a possibility that in a more familiar environment, such as participants’ homes, we may expect to see a more ecologically valid indication of the effect of sleep on mood; however, this comes at a cost of greater exposure to extraneous variables. Nonetheless, the inclusion of 7.5 and 10 h sleep dose groups provides a direct comparison between conditions to test the independent effects of sleep “dose” on mood and helps to distinguish between the effects of sleep loss and what may result simply from being in a laboratory environment for an extended period.

An important consideration regarding the current study is that the screening process ensured that participants were both physically and psychologically healthy. Although this is important to minimize exposure to at-risk individuals and to control for confounding variables, it is possible that the sample of the current study was more impervious or resilient to many of the mood disturbances often associated with inadequate sleep. As such, mood effects witnessed in the present study may have been felt more acutely in at-risk individuals, as indicated by prior research [ 36 , 38 ].

Patterns of cumulative sleep loss are increasingly prevalent among adolescents [ 40 ]. The current study found that, when restricted to 5 h sleep for five nights, adolescents’ happiness and energy decreased, depressed mood, anger, and confusion increased, while fear and anxiety did not change. For participants in the 7.5 sleep dose, no significant changes to positive or negative moods were observed between baseline and sleep restriction conditions, and this degree of sleep restriction may require a longer period of time to observe detrimental effects to mood. It is important to note that, while statistical significance was not reached, small-to-medium effect sizes in changes to these mood states were observed between baseline and sleep restriction in the 7.5-h condition. As such, we cannot be sure that, over an extended period of time, that sleep restricted to 7.5 h sleep opportunity per night may not be damaging to mental health.

The implications of the effect of sleep duration on mood relate to the increasing incidence of both sleep loss and mood disorders in adolescents [ 41–43 ], suggesting a greater need for awareness, support, and intervention in promoting healthy sleep for adolescents [ 44 ]. In addition, findings of the current study demonstrate the rapidity of mood decline when adolescent sleep is restricted to 5 h per night, while a more modest amount of sleep loss may require an extended period to see similar effects. Given the prevalence of insufficient sleep and the rising incidence of mood disorders and dysregulation in adolescents, these findings highlight the importance of sufficient sleep to mitigate these risks.

Financial disclosure: The authors have no financial conflicts of interest to declare.

Non-financial disclosure: The authors have no non-financial conflicts of interest to declare.

Brand S , et al.  “Sleep well, our tough heroes!”—in adolescence, greater mental toughness is related to better sleep schedules . Behav Sleep Med. 2014 ; 12 ( 6 ): 444 – 454 .

Google Scholar

Paus T , et al.  Why do many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence? Nat Rev Neurosci. 2008 ; 9 ( 12 ): 947 – 957 .

Fredriksen K , et al.  Sleepless in Chicago: tracking the effects of adolescent sleep loss during the middle school years . Child Dev. 2004 ; 75 ( 1 ): 84 – 95 .

Wolfson AR , et al.  Sleep schedules and daytime functioning in adolescents . Child Dev. 1998 ; 69 ( 4 ): 875 – 887 .

Franzen PL , et al.  Relationships between affect, vigilance, and sleepiness following sleep deprivation . J Sleep Res. 2008 ; 17 ( 1 ): 34 – 41 .

Dinges DF , et al.  Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4–5 hours per night . Sleep. 1997 ; 20 ( 4 ): 267 – 277 .

Kahn M , et al.  Effects of one night of induced night-wakings versus sleep restriction on sustained attention and mood: a pilot study . Sleep Med. 2014 ; 15 ( 7 ): 825 – 832 .

Short MA , et al.  Estimating adolescent sleep need using dose-response modelling . Sleep. 2018;41(4). doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsy011 .

Carskadon MA , et al.  Pubertal changes in daytime sleepiness . Sleep. 1980 ; 2 ( 4 ): 453 – 460 .

Van Petegem S , et al.  On the association between adolescent autonomy and psychosocial functioning: examining decisional independence from a self-determination theory perspective . Dev Psychol. 2012 ; 48 ( 1 ): 76 – 88 .

Strang NM , et al.  Developmental changes in adolescents’ neural response to challenge . Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2011 ; 1 ( 4 ): 560 – 569 .

Short MA , et al.  The sleep patterns and well-being of Australian adolescents . J Adolesc. 2013 ; 36 ( 1 ): 103 – 110 .

Lovato N , et al.  A meta-analysis and model of the relationship between sleep and depression in adolescents: recommendations for future research and clinical practice . Sleep Med Rev. 2014 ; 18 ( 6 ): 521 – 529 .

Becker SP , et al.  Impact of sleep restriction on affective functioning in adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder . J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2020 ; 61 ( 10 ): 1160 – 1168 .

Lo JC , et al.  Cognitive performance, sleepiness, and mood in partially sleep deprived adolescents: the need for sleep study . Sleep. 2016 ; 39 ( 3 ): 687 – 698 .

Lo JC , et al.  Neurobehavioral impact of successive cycles of sleep restriction with and without naps in adolescents . Sleep. 2016 ; 40 ( 2 ). doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsw042 .

Short MA , et al.  The relationship between sleep duration and mood in adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis . Sleep Med Rev. 2020 ; 52 : 101311 .

Talbot LS , et al.  Sleep deprivation in adolescents and adults: changes in affect . Emotion. 2010 ; 10 ( 6 ): 831 – 841 .

Baum KT , et al.  Sleep restriction worsens mood and emotion regulation in adolescents . J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2014 ; 55 ( 2 ): 180 – 190 .

Jiang F , et al.  Effect of chronic sleep restriction on sleepiness and working memory in adolescents and young adults . J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2011 ; 33 ( 8 ): 892 – 900 .

Fox KR . The influence of physical activity on mental well-being . Public Health Nutr. 1999 ; 2 ( 3A ): 411 – 418 .

Lieberman HR , et al.  Effects of caffeine, sleep loss, and stress on cognitive performance and mood during U.S. Navy SEAL training. Sea-Air-Land . Psychopharmacology. 2002 ; 164 ( 3 ): 250 – 261 .

Lopresti AL , et al.  A review of lifestyle factors that contribute to important pathways associated with major depression: diet, sleep and exercise . J Affect Disord. 2013 ; 148 ( 1 ): 12 – 27 .

Hirshkowitz M , et al.  National Sleep Foundation’s sleep time duration recommendations: methodology and results summary . Sleep Health. 2015 ; 1 ( 1 ): 40 – 43 .

Petersen AC , et al.  A self-report measure of pubertal status: reliability, validity, and initial norms . J Youth Adolesc. 1988 ; 17 ( 2 ): 117 – 133 .

Paruthi S , et al.  Recommended amount of sleep for pediatric populations: a consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine . J Clin Sleep Med. 2016 ; 12 ( 6 ): 785 – 786 .

Buysse DJ , et al.  Recommendations for a standard research assessment of insomnia . Sleep. 2006 ; 29 ( 9 ): 1155 – 1173 .

Smith CS , et al.  Evaluation of three circadian rhythm questionnaires with suggestions for an improved measure of morningness . J Appl Psychol. 1989 ; 74 ( 5 ): 728 – 738 .

Tonetti L , et al.  Circadian type and mood seasonality in adolescents . Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2012 ; 66 ( 2 ): 157 – 159 .

Stern RA , et al.  Visual analogue mood scales to measure internal mood state in neurologically impaired patients: description and initial validity evidence . Aphasiology. 1997 ; 11 ( 1 ): 59 – 71 .

Boergers J , et al.  Later school start time is associated with improved sleep and daytime functioning in adolescents . J Dev Behav Pediatr. 2014 ; 35 ( 1 ): 11 – 17 .

Van Dongen HP , et al.  Mixed-model regression analysis and dealing with interindividual differences . Methods Enzymol. 2004 ; 384 : 139 – 171 .

Fuligni AJ , et al.  Daily variation in adolescents’ sleep, activities, and psychological well-being . J Res Adolesc. 2006 ; 16 ( 3 ): 353 – 378 .

Dewald-Kaufmann JF , et al.  Why sleep matters: differences in daytime functioning between adolescents with low and high chronic sleep reduction and short and long sleep durations . J Cog and Behav Psychotherapies . 2013 ; 13 ( 1A ): 171 .

Carskadon MA , et al.  Short sleep as an environmental exposure: a preliminary study associating 5-HTTLPR genotype to self-reported sleep duration and depressed mood in first-year university students . Sleep. 2012 ; 35 ( 6 ): 791 – 796 .

Gregory AM , et al.  Associations between sleep quality and anxiety and depression symptoms in a sample of young adult twins and siblings . J Psychosom Res. 2011 ; 71 ( 4 ): 250 – 255 .

Fuligni AJ , et al.  Individual differences in optimum sleep for daily mood during adolescence . J Clin Child Adolesc. 2017 ; 53 : 1 – 11 .

Paterson JL , et al.  What happens to mood, performance and sleep in a laboratory study with no sleep deprivation? Sleep Biol Rhythms. 2013 ; 11 ( 3 ): 200 – 209 .

Galland BC , et al.  Establishing normal values for pediatric nighttime sleep measured by actigraphy: a systematic review and meta-analysis . Sleep. 2018 . doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsy017 .

Dahl RE , et al.  Pathways to adolescent health sleep regulation and behavior . J Adolesc Health. 2002 ; 31 ( 6 Suppl ): 175 – 184 .

Ireland JL , et al.  The relationship between sleeping problems and aggression, anger, and impulsivity in a population of juvenile and young offenders . J Adolesc Health. 2006 ; 38 ( 6 ): 649 – 655 .

Short MA , et al.  Adolescent sleep restriction effects on cognition and mood . Prog Brain Res. 2019 ; 246 : 55 – 71 .

Short MA , et al.  Sleep and mental health in children and adolescents . In: Grandner MA Sleep and Health . Academic Press ; 2019 : 435 – 445 .

Google Preview

• depressive disorders
• sleep restriction therapy
• sleep duration

Supplementary data

Email alerts

Citing articles via, looking for your next opportunity.

• Recommend to Your Librarian
• Advertising and Corporate Services

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1550-9109
• Print ISSN 0161-8105
• Copyright © 2024 Sleep Research Society
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Experimental (Empirical) Research Articles

• Library vs. Google
• Background Reading
• Keyword Searching
• Evaluating Sources
• Please Note: Searching PsycInfo
• Citing Sources
• Need more help?

How Can I Find Experimental (Empirical) Articles?

Many of the recommended databases in this research guide contain scholarly experimental articles (also known as empirical articles or research studies or primary research). Search in databases like: 

• APA PsycInfo ​
• ScienceDirect

Because those databases are rich in scholarly experimental articles, any well-structured search that you enter will retrieve experimental/empirical articles. These searches, for example, will retrieve many experimental/empirical articles:

• caffeine AND "reaction time"
• aging AND ("cognitive function" OR "cognitive ability")
• "child development" AND play

Experimental (Empirical) Articles: How Will I Know One When I See One?

Scholarly experimental articles  to conduct and publish an experiment, an author or team of authors designs an experiment, gathers data, then analyzes the data and discusses the results of the experiment. a published experiment or research study will therefore  look  very different from other types of articles (newspaper stories, magazine articles, essays, etc.) found in our library databases..

In fact, newspapers, magazines, and websites written by journalists report on psychology research all the time, summarizing published experiments in non-technical language for the general public. Although that kind of article can be interesting to read (and can even lead you to look up the original experiment published by the researchers themselves),  to write a research paper about a psychology topic, you should, generally, use experimental articles written by researchers. The following guidelines will help you recognize an experimental article, written by the researchers themselves and published in a scholarly journal.

Structure of a Experimental Article Typically, an experimental article has the following sections:

• The author summarizes her article
• The author discusses the general background of her research topic; often, she will present a literature review, that is, summarize what other experts have written on this particular research topic
• The author describes the experiment she designed and conducted
• The author presents the data she gathered during her experiment
• The author offers ideas about the importance and implications of her research findings, and speculates on future directions that similar research might take
• The author gives a References list of sources she used in her paper

Look for articles structured in that way--they will be experimental/empirical articles. ​

Also, experimental/empirical articles are written in very formal, technical language (even the titles of the articles sound complicated!) and will usually contain numerical data presented in tables. 

As noted above, when you search in a database like APA PsycInfo, it's really easy to find experimental/empirical articles, once you know what you're looking for. Just in case, though, here is a shortcut that might help:

First, do your keyword search, for example:

In the results screen, on the left-hand side, scroll down until you see "Methodology." You can use that menu to refine your search by limiting the articles to empirical studies only:

You can learn learn more about searching in APA PsycInfo, including advanced search limiters like methodology, age group, etc.,  from this APA guide . 

• << Previous: Resources
• Next: Research Tips >>
• Last Updated: Jul 29, 2024 1:27 PM
• URL: https://libguides.umgc.edu/psychology

Articles on Experimental psychology

Displaying all articles.

Does competition make us less moral? New research says yes, but only a little bit

Ozan Isler , The University of Queensland

6 eyewitnesses misidentified a murderer – here’s what went wrong in the lineup

Laura Smalarz , Arizona State University

Women preferred for STEM professorships – as long as they’re equal to or better than male candidates

Stephen J Ceci , Cornell University and Wendy M Williams , Cornell University

Recreating language’s Big Bang through a game of vocal charades

Marcus Perlman , University of Wisconsin-Madison

Children with gender dysphoria deserve better from the law

Malcolm Smith , Queensland University of Technology

Virtual bodyswapping reduces bias against other races

Manos Tsakiris , Royal Holloway University of London

Anxiety makes us more biased to threat but exercise can change our perception

Adam Heenan , Queen's University, Ontario

Debt collectors are the true ancestors of Facebook’s emotions experiment

Joe Deville , Goldsmiths, University of London

Revisiting Milgram’s shocking obedience experiments

Nick Haslam , The University of Melbourne and Gina Perry , The University of Melbourne

Women act like men when they switch seats at speed dating

Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. , Monmouth University

Cheaters use cognitive tricks to feel good about themselves

Benjamin Le , Haverford College

Ethics stop dodgy experiments but there’s too much red tape

Dr Gerasimos Chatzidamianos , Lancaster University

Related Topics

• Academic hiring
• Cognitive science
• Linguistics
• Social networks

Top contributors

Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne

Lecturer in Mobile Work, Lancaster University

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Manchester Metropolitan University

Associate Professor of Psychology & Department Chair, Haverford College

Professor of Psychology, Monmouth University

Science historian with a specific interest in the history of social psychology., The University of Melbourne

PhD Candidate in Clinical Psychology, Queen's University, Ontario

Professor of Psychology, Director of the Centre for the Politics of Feelings, Royal Holloway University of London

Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology

Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor of Human Development, Cornell University

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University

Research Fellow, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Front Psychol

The Practice of Experimental Psychology: An Inevitably Postmodern Endeavor

The aim of psychology is to understand the human mind and behavior. In contemporary psychology, the method of choice to accomplish this incredibly complex endeavor is the experiment. This dominance has shaped the whole discipline from the self-concept as an empirical science and its very epistemological and theoretical foundations, via research practice and the scientific discourse to teaching. Experimental psychology is grounded in the scientific method and positivism, and these principles, which are characteristic for modern thinking, are still upheld. Despite this apparently stalwart adherence to modern principles, experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are hardly acknowledged as such. Many psychologists take pride in being “real natural scientists” because they conduct experiments, but it is particularly difficult for psychologists to evade certain elements of postmodern thinking in view of the specific nature of their subject matter. Postmodernism as a philosophy emerged in the 20th century as a response to the perceived inadequacy of the modern approach and as a means to understand the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the times. Therefore, postmodernism offers both valuable insights into the very nature of experimental psychology and fruitful ideas on improving experimental practice to better reflect the complexities and ambiguities of human mind and behavior. Analyzing experimental psychology along postmodern lines begins by discussing the implications of transferring the scientific method from fields with rather narrowly defined phenomena—the natural sciences—to a much broader and more heterogeneous class of complex phenomena, namely the human mind and behavior. This ostensibly modern experimental approach is, however, per se riddled with postmodern elements: (re-)creating phenomena in an experimental setting, including the hermeneutic processes of generating hypotheses and interpreting results, is no carbon copy of “reality” but rather an active construction which reflects irrevocably the pre-existing ideas of the investigator. These aspects, analyzed by using postmodern concepts like hyperreality and simulacra, did not seep in gradually but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology, and they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science. We illustrate this theoretical analysis with the help of two examples, namely experiments on free will and visual working memory. The postmodern perspective reveals some pitfalls in the practice of experimental psychology. Furthermore, we suggest that accepting the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs in psychology and thinking more along postmodern lines would actually clarify many theoretical problems in experimental psychology.

Introduction

Postmodernism is, in essence, an attempt to achieve greater clarity in our perception, thinking, and behavior by scrutinizing their larger contexts and preconditions, based on the inextricably intertwined levels of both the individual and the society. Psychology also studies the human mind and behavior, which indicates that psychology should dovetail with postmodern approaches. In the 1990s and early 2000s, several attempts were made to introduce postmodern thought as potentially very fruitful ideas into general academic psychology ( Jager, 1991 ; Kvale, 1992 ; Holzman and Morss, 2000 ; Holzman, 2006 ). However, overall they were met with little response.

Postmodern thoughts have been taken up by several fringe areas of academic psychology, e.g., psychoanalysis ( Leffert, 2007 ; Jiménez, 2015 ; but see Holt, 2005 ), some forms of therapy and counseling ( Ramey and Grubb, 2009 ; Hansen, 2015 ), humanistic ( Krippner, 2001 ), feminist and gender ( Hare-Mustin and Marecek, 1988 ; Sinacore and Enns, 2005 ), or cultural psychology ( Gemignani and Peña, 2007 ).

However, there is resistance against suggestions to incorporate postmodern ideas into the methodology and the self-perception of psychology as academic—and scientific!—discipline. In fact, postmodern approaches are often rejected vehemently, sometimes even very vocally. For instance, Gergen (2001) argued that the “core tenets” of postmodernism are not at odds with those of scientific psychology but rather that they can enrich the discipline by opening up new possibilities. His suggestions were met with reservation and were even outright rejected on the following grounds: postmodernism, “like anthrax of the intellect, if allowed [our italics] into mainstream psychology, […] will poison the field” ( Locke, 2002 , 458), that it “wishes to return psychology to a prescientific subset of philosophy” ( Kruger, 2002 , 456), and that psychology “needs fewer theoretical and philosophical orientations, not more” ( Hofmann, 2002 , 462; see also Gergen ’s, 2001 , replies to the less biased and more informed commentaries on his article).

In the following years, and continuing the so-called science wars of the 1990s ( Segerstråle, 2000 ), several other attacks were launched against a perceived rise or even dominance of postmodern thought in psychology. Held(2007 ; see also the rebuttal by Martin and Sugarman, 2009 ) argued that anything postmodern would undermine rationality and destroy academic psychology. Similarly, postmodernism was identified—together with “radical environmentalism” and “pseudoscience” among other things—as a “key threat to scientific psychology” ( Lilienfeld, 2010 , 282), or as “inimical to progress in the psychology of science” ( Capaldi and Proctor, 2013 , 331). The following advice was given to psychologists: “We [psychologists] should also push back against the pernicious creep of these untested concepts into our field” ( Tarescavage, 2020 , 4). Furthermore, the term “postmodern” is even employed as an all-purpose invective in a popular scientific book by psychologist Steven Pinker (2018) .

Therefore, it seems that science and experimental psychology on the one hand and postmodern thinking on the other are irreconcilable opposites. However, following Gergen (2001) and Holtz (2020) , we argue that this dichotomy is only superficial because postmodernism is often misunderstood. A closer look reveals that experimental psychology contains many postmodern elements. Even more, there is reason to assume that a postmodern perspective may be beneficial for academic psychology: First, the practice of experimental psychology would be improved by integrating postmodern thinking because it reveals a side of the human psyche for which experimental psychology is mostly blind. Second, the postmodern perspective can tell us much about the epistemological and social background of experimental psychology and how this affects our understanding of the human psyche.

A Postmodern Perspective on Experimental Psychology

Experimental psychology and the modern scientific worldview.

It lies within the nature of humans to try to find out more about themselves and their world, but the so-called Scientific Revolution of the early modern period marks the beginning of a new era in this search for knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, which has led to impressive achievements in the natural sciences and the explanation of the physical world (e.g., Olby et al., 1991 ; Henry, 1997 ; Cohen, 2015 ; Osterlind, 2019 ), is based on the following principle: to “measure what can be measured and make measurable what cannot be measured.” This famous appeal—falsely attributed to Galileo Galilei but actually from the 19th century ( Kleinert, 2009 )—illustrates the two fundamental principles of modern science: First, the concept of “measurement” encompasses the idea that phenomena can be quantified, i.e., expressed numerically. Second, the concept of “causal connections” pertains to the idea that consistent, non-random relationships can be established between measurable phenomena. Quantification allows that relationships between phenomena can be expressed, calculated, and predicted in precise mathematical and numerical terms.

However, there are two important issues to be aware of. First, while it is not difficult to measure “evident” aspects, such as mass and distance, more complex phenomena cannot be measured easily. In such cases, it is therefore necessary to find ways of making these “elusive” phenomena measurable. This can often only be achieved by reducing complex phenomena to their simpler—and measurable!—elements. For instance, in order to measure memory ability precisely, possible effects of individual preexisting knowledge which introduce random variance and thus impreciseness have to be eliminated. Indeed, due to this reason, in many memory experiments, meaningless syllables are used as study material.

Second, it is not difficult to scientifically prove a causal relationship between a factor and an outcome if the relationship is simple, that is, if there is only one single factor directly influencing the outcome. In such a case, showing that a manipulation of the factor causes a change in the outcome is clear evidence for a causal relationship because there are no other factors which may influence the outcome as well. However, in situations where many factors influence an outcome in a complex, interactive way, proving a causal relationship is much more difficult. To prove the causal effect of one factor in such a situation the effects of all other factors—called confounding factors from the perspective of the factor of interest—have to be eliminated so that a change in the outcome can be truly attributed to a causal effect of the factor of interest. However, this has an important implication: The investigator has to divide the factors present in a given situation into interesting versus non-interesting factors with respect to the current context of the experiment. Consequently, while experiments reveal something about local causal relationships, they do not necessarily provide hints about the net effect of all causal factors present in the given situation.

The adoption of the principles of modern science has also changed psychology. Although the beginnings of psychology—as the study of the psyche —date back to antiquity, psychology as an academic discipline was established in the mid to late 19th century. This enterprise was also inspired by the success of the natural sciences, and psychology was explicitly modeled after this example by Wilhelm Wundt—the “father of experimental psychology”—although he emphasized the close ties to the humanities as well. The experiment quickly became the method of choice. There were other, more hermeneutic approaches during this formative phase of modern psychology, such as psychoanalysis or introspection according to the Würzburg School, but their impact on academic psychology was limited. Behaviorism emerged as a direct reaction against these perceived unscientific approaches, and its proponents emphasized the scientific character of their “new philosophy of psychology.” It is crucial to note that in doing so they also emphasized the importance of the experiment and the necessity of quantifying directly observable behavior in psychological research. Behaviorism quickly became a very influential paradigm which shaped academic psychology. Gestalt psychologists, whose worldview is radically different from behaviorism, also relied on experiments in their research. Cognitive psychology, which followed, complemented, and partly superseded behaviorism, relies heavily on the experiment as a means to gain insight into mental processes, although other methods such as modeling are employed as well. Interestingly, there is a fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology, which do not rely on the experiment, and the other above-mentioned approaches as the former focus on the psychic functioning of individuals, whereas the latter focus more on global laws of psychic functioning across individuals. This is reflected in the fact that psychological laws in experimental psychology are established on the arithmetic means across examined participants—a difference we will elaborate on later in more detail. Today, psychology is the scientific —in the sense of empirical-quantitative—study of the human mind and behavior, and the experiment is often considered the gold standard in psychological research (e.g., Mandler, 2007 ; Goodwin, 2015 ; Leahey, 2017 ).

The experiment is closely associated with the so-called scientific method ( Haig, 2014 ; Nola and Sankey, 2014 ) and the epistemological tenets philosophy of positivism—in the sense as Martin (2003) ; Michell (2003) , and Teo (2018) explain—which sometimes exhibit characteristics of naïve empiricism. Roughly speaking, the former consists of observing, formulating hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses in experiments. The latter postulates that knowledge is based on sensory experience, that it is testable, independent of the investigator and therefore objective as it accurately depicts the world as it is. This means that in principle all of reality can not only be measured but eventually be entirely explained by science. This worldview is attacked by postmodern thinkers who contend that the world is far more complex and that the modern scientific approach cannot explain all of reality and its phenomena.

The Postmodern Worldview

Postmodern thinking (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ) has gained momentum since the 1980s, and although neither the term “postmodernism” nor associated approaches can be defined in a unanimous or precise way, they are characterized by several intertwined concepts, attitudes, and aims. The most basic trait is a general skepticism and the willingness to question literally everything from the ground up—even going so far as to question not only the foundation of any idea, but also the question itself. This includes the own context, the chosen premises, thinking, and the use of language. Postmodernism therefore has a lot in common with science’s curiosity to understand the world: the skeptical attitude paired with the desire to discover how things really are.

Postmodern investigations often start by looking at the language and the broader context of certain phenomena due to the fact that language is the medium in which many of our mental activities—which subsequently influence our behavior—take place. Thus, the way we talk reveals something about how and why we think and act. Additionally, we communicate about phenomena using language, which in turn means that this discourse influences the way we think about or see those phenomena. Moreover, this discourse is embedded in a larger social and historical context, which also reflects back on the use of language and therefore on our perception and interpretation of certain phenomena.

Generally speaking, postmodern investigations aim at detecting and explaining how the individual is affected by societal influences and their underlying, often hidden ideas, structures, or mechanisms. As these influences are often fuzzy, contradictory, and dependent on their context, the individual is subject to a multitude of different causalities, and this already complex interplay is further complicated by the personal history, motivations, aims, or ways of thinking of the individual. Postmodernism attempts to understand all of this complexity as it is in its entirety.

The postmodern approaches have revealed three major general tendencies which characterize the contemporary world: First, societies and the human experience since the 20th century have displayed less coherence and conversely a greater diversity than the centuries before in virtually all areas, e.g., worldviews, modes of thinking, societal structures, or individual behavior. Second, this observation leads postmodern thinkers to the conclusion that the grand narratives which dominated the preceding centuries and shaped whole societies by providing frames of references have lost—at least partially—their supremacy and validity. Examples are religious dogmas, nationalism, industrialization, the notion of linear progress—and modern science because it works according to certain fundamental principles. Third, the fact that different but equally valid perspectives, especially on social phenomena or even whole worldviews, are possible and can coexist obviously affects the concepts of “truth,” “reality,” and “reason” in such a way that these concepts lose their immutable, absolute, and universal or global character, simply because they are expressions and reflections of a certain era, society, or worldview.

At this point, however, it is necessary to clarify a common misconception: Interpreting truth, reality, or reason as relative, subjective, and context-dependent—as opposed to absolute, objective, and context-independent—does naturally neither mean that anything can be arbitrarily labeled as true, real, or reasonable, nor, vice versa, that something cannot be true, real, or reasonable. For example, the often-quoted assumption that postmodernism apparently even denies the existence of gravity or its effects as everything can be interpreted arbitrarily or states that we cannot elucidate these phenomena with adequate accuracy because everything is open to any interpretation ( Sokal, 1996 ), completely misses the point.

First, postmodernism is usually not concerned with the laws of physics and the inanimate world as such but rather focuses on the world of human experience. However, the phenomenon itself, e.g., gravity, is not the same as our scientific knowledge of phenomena—our chosen areas of research, methodological paradigms, data, theories, and explanations—or our perception of phenomena, which are both the results of human activities. Therefore, the social context influences our scientific knowledge, and in that sense scientific knowledge is a social construction ( Hodge, 1999 ).

Second, phenomena from human experience, although probably more dependent on the social context than physical phenomena, cannot be interpreted arbitrarily either. The individual context—such as the personal history, motivations, aims, or worldviews—determines whether a certain behavior makes sense for a certain individual in a certain situation. As there are almost unlimited possible backgrounds, this might seem completely random or arbitrary from an overall perspective. But from the perspective of an individual the phenomenon in question may be explained entirely by a theory for a specific—and not universal—context.

As described above, the postmodern meta-perspective directly deals with human experience and is therefore especially relevant for psychology. Moreover, any discipline—including the knowledge it generates—will certainly benefit from understanding its own (social) mechanisms and implications. We will show below that postmodern thinking not only elucidates the broader context of psychology as an academic discipline but rather that experimental psychology exhibits a number of aspects which can best be described as facets of postmodern thinking although they are not acknowledged as such.

The Postmodern Context of Experimental Psychology

Paradoxically, postmodern elements have been present since the very beginning of experimental psychology although postmodernism gained momentum only decades later. One of the characteristics of postmodernism is the transplantation of certain elements from their original context to new contexts, e.g., the popularity of “Eastern” philosophies and practices in contemporary “Western” societies. These different elements are often juxtaposed and combined to create something new, e.g., new “westernized” forms of yoga ( Shearer, 2020 ).

Similarly, the founders of modern academic psychology took up the scientific method, which was originally developed in the context of the natural sciences, and transplanted it to the study of the human psyche in the hope to repeat the success of the natural sciences. By contrast, methods developed specifically in the context of psychology such as psychoanalysis ( Wax, 1995 ) or introspection according to the Würzburg School ( Hackert and Weger, 2018 ) have gained much less ground in academic psychology. The way we understand both the psyche and psychology has been shaped to a great extent by the transfer of the principles of modern science, namely quantitative measurement and experimental methods, although it is not evident per se that this is the best approach to elucidate mental and behavioral phenomena. Applying the methods of the natural sciences to a new and different context, namely to phenomena pertaining to the human psyche , is a truly postmodern endeavor because it juxtaposes two quite distinct areas and merges them into something new—experimental psychology.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology becomes evident on two levels: First, the subject matter—the human psyche —exhibits a postmodern character since mental and behavioral phenomena are highly dependent on the idiosyncratic contexts of the involved individuals, which makes it impossible to establish unambiguous general laws to describe them. Second, experimental psychology itself displays substantial postmodern traits because both its method and the knowledge it produces—although seemingly objective and rooted in the modern scientific worldview—inevitably contain postmodern elements, as will be shown below.

The Experiment as Simulacrum

The term “simulacrum” basically means “copy,” often in the sense of “inferior copy” or “phantasm/illusion.” However, in postmodern usage “simulacrum” has acquired a more nuanced and concrete meaning. “Simulacrum” is a key term in the work of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who arguably presented the most elaborate theory on simulacra (1981/1994). According to Baudrillard, a simulacrum “is the reflection of a profound [‘real’] reality” (16/6). Simulacra, however, are more than identical carbon copies because they gain a life of their own and become “real” in the sense of becoming an own entity. For example, the personality a pop star shows on stage is not “real” in the sense that it is their “normal,” off-stage personality, but it is certainly “real” in the sense that it is perceived by the audience even if they are aware that it might be an “artificial” personality. Two identical cars can also be “different” for one might be used as a means of transportation while the other might be a status symbol. Even an honest video documentation of a certain event is not simply a copy of the events that took place because it lies within the medium video that only certain sections can be recorded from a certain perspective. Additionally, the playback happens in other contexts as the original event, which may also alter the perception of the viewer.

The post-structuralist—an approach closely associated with postmodernism—philosopher Roland Barthes pointed out another important aspect of simulacra. He contended that in order to understand something—an “object” in Barthes’ terminology—we necessarily create simulacra because we “ reconstruct [our italics] an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning [⋯] of this object” ( Barthes, 1963 , 213/214). In other words, when we investigate an object—any phenomenon, either material, mental, or social—we have to perceive it first. This means that we must have some kind of mental representation of the phenomenon/object—and it is crucial to note that this representation is not the same thing as the “real” object itself. All our mental operations are therefore not performed on the “real” object but on mental representations of the object. We decompose a phenomenon in order to understand it, that is, we try to identify its components. In doing so, we effect a change in the object because our phenomenon is no longer the original phenomenon “as it is” for we are performing a mental operation on it, thereby transforming the original phenomenon. Identifying components may be simple, e.g., dividing a tree into roots, trunk, branches, and leaves may seem obvious or even “natural” but it is nevertheless us as investigators who create this structure—the tree itself is probably not aware of it. Now that we have established this structure, we are able to say that the tree consists of several components and name these components. Thus, we have introduced “new” elements into our understanding of the tree. This is the important point, even though the elements, i.e., the branches and leaves themselves “as they are,” have naturally always been “present.” Our understanding of “tree” has therefore changed completely because a tree is now something which is composed of several elements. In that sense, we have changed the original phenomenon by adding something—and this has all happened in our thinking and not in the tree itself. It is also possible to find different structures and different components for the tree, e.g., the brown and the green, which shows that we construct this knowledge.

Next, we can investigate the components to see how they interact with and relate to each other and to the whole system. Also, we can work out their functions and determine the conditions under which a certain event will occur. We can even expand the scope of our investigation and examine the tree in the context of its ecosystem. But no matter what we do or how sophisticated our investigation becomes, everything said above remains true here, too, because neither all these actions listed above nor the knowledge we gain from them are the object itself. Rather, we have added something to the object and the more we know about our object, the more knowledge we have constructed. This addition is what science—gaining knowledge—is all about. Or in the words of Roland Barthes: “the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind” (1963/1972, 214/215).

In principle, this holds truth regarding all scientific investigations. But the more complex phenomena are, the more effort and personal contribution is required on behalf of the investigator to come up with structures, theories, or explanations. Paraphrasing Barthes: When dealing with complex phenomena, more intellect must be added to the object, which means in turn that there are more possibilities for different approaches and perspectives, that is, the constructive element becomes larger. As discussed previously, this does not mean that investigative and interpretative processes are arbitrary. But it is clear from this train of thought that “objectivity” or “truth” in a “positivist,” naïve empiricist “realist,” or absolute sense are not attainable. Nevertheless, we argue here that this is not a drawback, as many critics of postmodernism contend (see above), but rather an advantage because it allows more accurate scientific investigations of true-to-life phenomena, which are typically complex in the case of psychology.

The concepts of simulacra by Baudrillard and Barthes can be combined to provide a description of the experiment in psychology. Accordingly, our understanding of the concept of the “simulacrum” entails that scientific processes—indeed all investigative processes—necessarily need to duplicate the object of their investigation in order to understand it. In doing so, constructive elements are necessarily introduced. These elements are of a varying nature, which means that investigations of one and the same phenomenon may differ from each other and different investigations may find out different things about the phenomenon in question. These investigations then become entities on their own—in the Baudrillardian sense—and therefore simulacra.

In a groundbreaking article on “the meaning and limits of exact science” physicist Max Planck stated that “[a]n experiment is a question which science poses to nature, and a measurement is the recording of nature’s answer” ( Planck, 1949 , 325). The act of “asking a question” implies that the person asking the question has at least a general idea of what the answer might look like ( Heidegger, 1953 , §2). For example: When asking someone for their name, we obviously do not know what they are called, but we assume that they have a name and we also have an idea of how the concept “name” works. Otherwise we could not even conceive, let alone formulate, and pose our question. This highlights how a certain degree of knowledge and understanding of a concept is necessary so that we are able to ask questions about it. Likewise, we need to have a principal idea or assumption of possible mechanisms if we want to find out how more complex phenomena function. It is—at least at the beginning—irrelevant whether these ideas are factually correct or entirely wrong, for without them we would be unable to approach our subject matter in the first place.

The context of the investigator—their general worldview, their previous knowledge and understanding, and their social situation—obviously plays an important part in the process of forming a question which can be asked in the current research context. Although this context may be analyzed along postmodern lines in order to find out how it affects research, production of knowledge, and—when the knowledge is applied—possible (social) consequences, there is a much more profound implication pertaining to the very nature of the experiment as a means to gain knowledge.

Irrespective of whether it is a simple experiment in physics such as Galileo Galilei’s or an experiment on a complex phenomenon from social or cognitive psychology, the experiment is a situation which is specifically designed to answer a certain type of questions, usually causal relationships, such as: “Does A causally affect B?” Excluding the extremely complex discussion on the nature of causality and causation (e.g., Armstrong, 1997 ; Pearl, 2009 ; Paul and Hall, 2013 ), it is crucial to note that we need the experiment as a tool to answer this question. Although we may theorize about a phenomenon and infer causal relationships simply by observing, we cannot—at least according to the prevailing understanding of causality in the sciences—prove causal relationships without the experiment.

The basic idea of the experiment is to create conditions which differ in only one single factor which is suspected as a causal factor for an effect. The influence of all other potential causal relationships is kept identical because they are considered as confounding factors which are irrelevant from the perspective of the research question of the current experiment. Then, if a difference is found in the outcome between the experimental conditions, this is considered as proof that the aspect in question exerts indeed a causal effect. This procedure and the logic behind it are not difficult to understand. However, a closer look reveals that this is actually far from simple or obvious.

To begin with, an experiment is nothing which occurs “naturally” but a situation created for a specific purpose, i.e., an “artificial” situation, because other causal factors exerting influence in “real” life outside the laboratory are deliberately excluded and considered as “confounding” factors. This in itself shows that the experiment contains a substantial postmodern element because instead of creating something it rather re- creates it. This re-creation is of course based on phenomena from the “profound” reality—in the Baudrillardian sense—since the explicit aim is to find out something about this profound reality and not to create something new or something else. However, as stated above, this re-creation must contain constructive elements reflecting the presuppositions, conceptual-theoretical assumptions, and aims of the investigator. By focusing on one factor and by reducing the complexity of the profound reality, the practical operationalization and realization thus reflect both the underlying conceptual structure and the anticipated outcome as they are specifically designed to test for the suspected but hidden or obscured causal relationships.

At this point, another element becomes relevant, namely the all-important role of language, which is emphasized in postmodern thinking (e.g., Harris, 2005 ). Without going into the intricacies of semiotics, there is an explanatory gap ( Chalmers, 2005 )—to borrow a phrase from philosophy of mind—between the phenomenon on the one hand and the linguistic and/or mental representation of it on the other. This relationship is far from clear and it is therefore problematic to assume that our linguistic or mental representations—our words and the concepts they designate—are identical with the phenomena themselves. Although we cannot, at least according to our present knowledge and understanding, fully bridge this gap, it is essential to be aware of it in order to avoid some pitfalls, as will be shown in the examples below.

Even a seemingly simple word like “tree”—to take up once more our previous example—refers to a tangible phenomenon because there are trees “out there.” However, they come in all shapes and sizes, there are different kinds of trees, and every single one of them may be labeled as “tree.” Furthermore, trees are composed of different parts, and the leaf—although part of the tree—has its own word, i.e., linguistic and mental representation. Although the leaf is part of the tree—at least according to our concepts—it is unclear whether “tree” also somehow encompasses “leaf.” The same holds true for the molecular, atomic, or even subatomic levels, where there “is” no tree. Excluding the extremely complex ontological implications of this problem, it has become clear that we are referring to a certain level of granularity when using the word “tree.” The level of granularity reflects the context, aims, and concepts of the investigator, e.g., an investigation of the rain forest as an ecosystem will ignore the subatomic level.

How does this concern experimental psychology? Psychology studies intangible phenomena, namely mental and behavioral processes, such as cognition, memory, learning, motivation, emotion, perception, consciousness, etc. It is important to note that these terms designate theoretical constructs as, for example, memory cannot be observed directly. We may provide the subjects of an experiment a set of words to learn and observe later how many words they reproduce correctly. A theoretical construct therefore describes such relationships between stimulus and behavior, and we may draw conclusions from this observable data about memory. But neither the observable behavior of the subject, the resulting data, nor our conclusions are identical with memory itself.

This train of thought demonstrates the postmodern character of experimental psychology because we construct our knowledge. But there is more to it than that: Even by trying to define a theoretical construct as exactly as possible—e.g., memory as “the process of maintaining information over time” ( Matlin, 2012 , 505) or “the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use this information in the present” ( Sternberg and Sternberg, 2011 , 187)—the explanatory gap between representation and phenomenon cannot be bridged. Rather, it becomes even more complicated because theoretical constructs are composed of other theoretical constructs, which results in some kind of self-referential circularity where constructs are defined by other constructs which refer to further constructs. In the definitions above, for instance, hardly any key term is self-evident and unambiguous for there are different interpretations of the constructs “process,” “maintaining,” “information,” “means,” “retain,” “draw on,” “experiences,” and “use” according to their respective contexts. Only the temporal expressions “over time,” “past,” and “present” are probably less ambiguous here because they are employed as non-technical, everyday terms. However, the definitions above are certainly not entirely incomprehensible—in fact, they are rather easy to understand in everyday language—and it is quite clear what the authors intend to express . The italics indicate constructive elements, which demonstrates that attempts to give a precise definition in the language of science result in fuzziness and self-reference.

Based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, Baudrillard (1981) found an illustrative allegory: a map so precise that it portrays everything in perfect detail—but therefore inevitably so large that it shrouds the entire territory it depicts. Similarly, Taleb (2007) coined the term “ludic fallacy” for mistaking the model/map—in our context: experiments in psychology—for the reality/territory, that is, a mental or behavioral phenomenon. Similar to the functionality of a seemingly “imprecise” map which contains only the relevant landmarks so the user may find their way, the fuzziness of language poses no problems in everyday communication. So why is it a problem in experimental psychology? Since the nature of theoretical constructs in psychology lies precisely in their very fuzziness, the aim of reaching a high degree of granularity and precision in experimental psychology seems to be unattainable (see the various failed attempts to create “perfect” languages which might depict literally everything “perfectly,” e.g., Carapezza and D’Agostino, 2010 ).

Without speculating about ontic or epistemic implications, it is necessary to be aware of the explanatory gap and to refrain from identifying the experiment and the underlying operationalization with the theoretical construct. Otherwise, this gap is “filled” unintentionally and uncontrollably if the results of an experiment are taken as valid proof for a certain theoretical construct, which is actually fuzzy and potentially operationalizable in a variety of ways. If this is not acknowledged, words, such as “memory,” become merely symbols devoid of concrete meaning, much like a glass bead game—or in postmodern terminology: a hyperreality.

Experiments and Hyperreality

“Hyperreality” is another key term in the work of Jean Baudrillard (1981) and it denotes a concept closely related to the simulacrum. Accordingly, in modern society the simulacra are ubiquitous and they form a system of interconnected simulacra which refer to each other rather than to the real, thereby possibly hiding or replacing the real. Consequently, the simulacra become real in their own right and form a “more real” reality, namely the hyperreality. One may or may not accept Baudrillard’s conception, especially the all-embracing social and societal implications, but the core concept of “hyperreality” is nevertheless a fruitful tool to analyze experimental psychology. We have already seen that the experiment displays many characteristics of a simulacrum, so it is not surprising that the concept of hyperreality is applicable here as well, although in a slightly different interpretation than Baudrillard’s.

The hyperreal character of the experiment can be discussed on two levels: the experiment itself and the discourse wherein it is embedded.

On the level of the experiment itself, two curious observations must be taken into account. First, and in contrast to the natural sciences where the investigator is human and the subject matter (mostly) non-human and usually inanimate, in psychology both the investigator and the subject matter are human. This means that the subjects of the experiment, being autonomous persons, are not malleable or completely controllable by the investigator because they bring their own background, history, worldview, expectations, and motivations. They interpret the situation—the experiment—and act accordingly, but not necessarily in the way the investigator had planned or anticipated ( Smedslund, 2016 ). Therefore, the subjects create their own versions of the experiment, or, in postmodern terminology, a variety of simulacra, which may be more or less compatible with the framework of the investigator. This holds true for all subjects of an experiment, which means that the experiment as a whole may also be interpreted as an aggregation of interconnected simulacra—a hyperreality.

The hyperreal character becomes even more evident because what contributes in the end to the interpretation of the results of the experiment are not the actual performances and results of the individual subjects as they were intended by them but rather how their performances and results are handled, seen, and interpreted by the investigator. Even if the investigator tries to be as faithful as possible and aims at an exact and unbiased measurement—i.e., an exact copy—there are inevitably constructive elements which introduce uncertainty into the experiment. Investigators can never be certain what the subjects were actually doing and thinking so they must necessarily work with interpretations. Or in postmodern terms: Because the actual performances and results of the subjects are not directly available the investigators must deal with simulacra. These simulacra become the investigators’ reality and thus any further treatment—statistical analyses, interpretations, or discussions—becomes a hyperreality, that is, a set of interconnected simulacra which have become “real.”

On the level of the discourse wherein the experiment is embedded, another curious aspect also demonstrates the hyperreal character of experimental psychology. Psychology is, according to the standard definition, the scientific study of mental and behavioral processes of the individual (e.g., Gerrig, 2012 ). This definition contains two actually contradictory elements. On the one hand, the focus is on processes of the individual. On the other hand, the—scientific—method to elucidate these processes does not look at individuals per se but aggregates their individual experiences and transforms them into a “standard” experience. The results from experiments, our knowledge of the human psyche, reflect psychological functioning at the level of the mean across individuals. And even if we assume that the mean is only an estimator and not an exact description or prediction, the question remains open how de-individualized observations are related to the experience of an individual. A general mechanism, a law—which was discovered by abstracting from a multitude of individual experiences—is then ( re -)imposed in the opposite direction back onto the individual. In other words, a simulacrum—namely, the result of an experiment—is viewed and treated as reality, thus becoming hyperreal. Additionally, and simply because it is considered universally true, this postulated law acquires thereby a certain validity and “truth”—often irrespective of its actual, factual, or “profound” truth—on its own. Therefore, it can become impossible to distinguish between “profound” and “simulacral” truth, which is the hallmark of hyperreality.

Measuring the Capacity of the Visual Working Memory

Vision is an important sensory modality and there is extensive research on this area ( Hutmacher, 2019 ). Much of our daily experience is shaped by seeing a rich and complex world around us, and it is therefore an interesting question how much visual information we can store and process. Based on the development of a seminal experimental paradigm, Luck and Vogel (1997) have shown that visual working memory has a storage capacity of about four items. This finding is reported in many textbooks (e.g., Baddeley, 2007 ; Parkin, 2013 ; Goldstein, 2015 ) and has almost become a truism in cognitive psychology.

The experimental paradigm developed by Luck and Vogel (1997) is a prime example of an experiment which closely adheres to the scientific principles outlined above. In order to make a very broad and fuzzy phenomenon measurable, simple abstract forms are employed as visual stimuli—such as colored squares, triangles, or lines, usually on a “neutral,” e.g., gray, background—which can be counted in order to measure the capacity of visual working memory. Reducing the exuberant diversity of the “outside visual world” to a few abstract geometric forms is an extremely artificial situation. The obvious contrast between simple geometrical forms and the rich panorama of the “real” visual world illustrates the pitfalls of controlling supposed confounding variables, namely the incontrollable variety of the “real” world and how we see it. Precisely by abstracting and by excluding potential confounding variables it is possible to count the items and to make the capacity of the visual working memory measurable. But in doing so the original phenomenon—seeing the whole world—is lost. In other words: A simulacrum has been created.

The establishment of the experimental paradigm by Luck and Vogel has led to much research and sparked an extensive discussion how the limitation to only four items might be explained (see the summaries by Brady et al., 2011 ; Luck and Vogel, 2013 ; Ma et al., 2014 ; Schurgin, 2018 ). However, critically, several studies have shown that the situation is different when real-world objects are used as visual stimuli rather than simple abstract forms, revealing that the capacity of the visual working memory is higher for real-world objects ( Endress and Potter, 2014 ; Brady et al., 2016 ; Schurgin et al., 2018 ; Robinson et al., 2020 ; also Schurgin and Brady, 2019 ). Such findings show that the discourse about the mechanisms behind the limitations of the visual working memory is mostly about an artificial phenomenon which has no counterpart in “reality”—the perfect example of a hyperreality.

This hyperreal character does not mean that the findings of Luck and Vogel (1997) or similar experiments employing artificial stimuli are irrelevant or not “true.” The results are true—but it is a local truth, only valid for the specific context of specific experiments, and not a global truth which applies to the visual working memory in general . That is, speaking about “visual working memory” based on the paradigm of Luck and Vogel is a mistake because it is actually about “visual working memory for simple abstract geometrical forms in front of a gray background.”

Free Will and Experimental Psychology

The term “free will” expresses the idea of having “a significant kind of control [italics in the original] over one’s actions” ( O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 , n.p.). This concept has occupied a central position in Western philosophy since antiquity because it has far-reaching consequences for our self-conception as humans and our position in the world, including questions of morality, responsibility, and the nature of legal systems (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ). Being a topic of general interest, it is not surprising that experimental psychologists have tried to investigate free will as well.

The most famous study was conducted by Libet et al. (1983) , and this experiment has quickly become a focal point in the extensive discourse on free will because it provides empirical data and a scientific investigation. Libet et al.’s experiment seems to show that the subjective impression when persons consciously decide to act is in fact preceded by objectively measurable but unconscious physical processes. This purportedly proves that our seemingly voluntary actions are actually predetermined by physical processes because the brain has unconsciously reached a decision already before the person becomes aware of it and that our conscious intentions are simply grafted onto it. Therefore, we do not have a free will, and consequently much of our social fabric is based on an illusion. Or so the story goes.

This description, although phrased somewhat pointedly, represents a typical line of thought in the discourse on free will (e.g., the prominent psychologists Gazzaniga, 2011 ; Wegner, 2017 ; see Kihlstrom, 2017 , for further examples).

Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive and highly controversial discussion: For some authors, it is a refutation or at least threat to various concepts of free will, or, conversely, an indicator or even proof for some kind of material determinism. By contrast, other authors deny that the experiment refutes or counts against free will. Furthermore, a third group—whose position we adopt for our further argumentation—denies that Libet’s findings are even relevant for this question at all (for summaries of this complex and extensive discussion and various positions including further references see Nahmias, 2010 ; Radder and Meynen, 2013 ; Schlosser, 2014 ; Fischborn, 2016 ; Lavazza, 2016 ; Schurger, 2017 ). Libet’s own position, although not entirely consistent, opposes most notions of free will ( Roskies, 2011 ; Seifert, 2011 ). Given this background, it is not surprising that there are also numerous further experimental studies on various aspects of this subject area (see the summaries by Saigle et al., 2018 ; Shepard, 2018 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

However, we argue that this entire discourse is best understood along postmodern lines as hyperreality and that Libet’s experiment itself is a perfect example of a simulacrum. A closer look at the concrete procedure of the experiment shows that Libet actually asked his participants to move their hand or finger “at will” while their brain activity was monitored with an EEG. They were instructed to keep watch in an introspective manner for the moment when they felt the “urge” to move their hand and to record this moment by indicating the clock-position of a pointer. This is obviously a highly artificial situation where the broad and fuzzy concept of “free will” is abstracted and reduced to the movement of the finger, the only degree of freedom being the moment of the movement. The question whether this is an adequate operationalization of free will is of paramount importance, and there are many objections that Libet’s setup fails to measure free will at all (e.g., Mele, 2007 ; Roskies, 2011 ; Kihlstrom, 2017 ; Brass et al., 2019 ).

Before Libet, there was no indication that the decision when to move a finger might be relevant for the concept of free will and the associated discourse. The question whether we have control over our actions referred to completely different levels of granularity. Free will was discussed with respect to questions such as whether we are free to live our lives according to our wishes or whether we are responsible for our actions in social contexts (e.g., Beebee, 2013 ; McKenna and Pereboom, 2016 ; O’Connor and Franklin, 2018 ), and not whether we lift a finger now or two seconds later. Libet’s and others’ jumping from very specific situations to far-reaching conclusions about a very broad and fuzzy theoretical construct illustrates that an extremely wide chasm between two phenomena, namely moving the finger and free will, is bridged in one fell swoop.

In other words, Libet’s experiment is a simulacrum as it duplicates a phenomenon from our day-to-day experience—namely free will—but in doing so the operationalization alters and reduces the theoretical construct. The outcome is a questionable procedure whose relationship to the phenomenon is highly controversial. Furthermore, the fact that, despite its tenuous connection to free will, Libet’s experiment sparked an extensive discussion on this subject reveals the hyperreal nature of the entire discourse because what is being discussed is not the actual question—namely free will—but rather a simulacrum. Everything else—the arguments, counter-arguments, follow-up experiments, and their interpretations—built upon Libet’s experiment are basically commentaries to a simulacrum and not on the real phenomena. Therefore, a hyperreality is created where the discourse revolves around entirely artificial phenomena, but where the arguments in this discussion refer back to and affect the real as suggestions are made to alter the legal system and our ideas of responsibility—which, incidentally, is not a question of empirical science but of law, ethics, and philosophy.

All of the above is not meant to say that this whole discourse is meaningless or even gratuitous—on the contrary, our understanding of the subject matter has greatly increased. Although our knowledge of free will has hardly increased, we have gained much insight into the hermeneutics and methodology—and pitfalls!—of investigations of free will, possible consequences on the individual and societal level, and the workings of scientific discourses. And this is exactly what postmodernism is about.

As shown above, there are a number of postmodern elements in the practice of experimental psychology: The prominent role of language, the gap between the linguistic or mental representation and the phenomenon, the “addition of intellect to the object,” the simulacral character of the experiment itself in its attempt to re-create phenomena, which necessarily transforms the “real” phenomenon due to the requirements of the experiment, and finally the creation of a hyperreality if experiments are taken as the “real” phenomenon and the scientific discourse becomes an exchange of symbolic expressions referring to the simulacra created in experiments, replacing the real. All these aspects did not seep gradually into experimental psychology in the wake of postmodernism but have been present since the very inception of experimental psychology as they are necessarily inherent in its philosophy of science.

Given these inherent postmodern traits in experimental psychology, it is puzzling that there is so much resistance against a perceived “threat” of psychology’s scientificness. Although a detailed investigation of the reasons lies outside the scope of this analysis, we suspect there are two main causes: First, an insufficient knowledge of the history of science and understanding of philosophy of science may result in idealized concepts of a “pure” natural science. Second, lacking familiarity with basic tenets of postmodern approaches may lead to the assumption that postmodernism is just an idle game of arbitrary words. However, “science” and “postmodernism” and their respective epistemological concepts are not opposites ( Gergen, 2001 ; Holtz, 2020 ). This is especially true for psychology, which necessarily contains a social dimension because not only the investigators are humans but also the very subject matter itself.

The (over-)reliance on quantitative-experimental methods in psychology, often paired with a superficial understanding of the philosophy of science behind it, has been criticized, either from the theoretical point of view (e.g., Bergmann and Spence, 1941 ; Hearnshaw, 1941 ; Petrie, 1971 ; Law, 2004 ; Smedslund, 2016 ) or because the experimental approach has failed to produce reliable, valid, and relevant applicable knowledge in educational psychology ( Slavin, 2002 ). It is perhaps symptomatic that a textbook teaching the principles of science for psychologists does not contain even one example from experimental psychology but employs only examples from physics, plus Darwin’s theory of evolution ( Wilton and Harley, 2017 ).

On the other hand, the postmodern perspective on experimental psychology provides insight into some pitfalls, as illustrated by the examples above. On the level of the experiment, the methodological requirements imply the creation of an artificial situation, which opens up a gap between the phenomenon as it is in reality and as it is concretely operationalized in the experimental situation. This is not a problem per se as long as is it clear—and clearly communicated!—that the results of the experiment are only valid in a certain context. The problems begin if the movement of a finger is mistaken for free will. Similarly, being aware that local causalities do not explain complex phenomena such as mental and behavioral processes in their entirety also prevents (over-) generalization, especially if communicated appropriately. These limitations make it clear that the experiment should not be made into an absolute or seen as the only valid way of understanding the psyche and the world.

On the level of psychology as an academic discipline, any investigation must select the appropriate level of granularity and strike a balance between the methodological requirements and the general meaning of the theoretical concept in question to find out something about the “real” world. If the level of granularity is so fine that results cannot be tied back to broader theoretical constructs rather than providing a helpful understanding of our psychological functioning, academic psychology is in danger of becoming a self-referential hyperreality.

The postmodern character of experimental psychology also allows for a different view on the so-called replication crisis in psychology. Authors contending that there is no replication crisis often employ arguments which exhibit postmodern elements, such as the emphasis on specific local conditions in experiments which may explain different outcomes of replication studies ( Stroebe and Strack, 2014 ; Baumeister, 2019 ). In other words, they invoke the simulacral character of experiments. This explanation may be valid or not, but the replication crisis has shown the limits of a predominantly experimental approach in psychology.

Acknowledging the postmodern nature of experimental psychology and incorporating postmodern thinking explicitly into our research may offer a way out of this situation. Our subject matter—the psyche —is extremely complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory. And postmodern thinking has proven capable of successfully explaining such phenomena (e.g., Bertens, 1995 ; Sim, 2011 ; Aylesworth, 2015 ). Thus, paradoxically, by accepting and considering the inherently fuzzy nature of theoretical constructs, they often become much clearer ( Ronzitti, 2011 ). Therefore, thinking more along postmodern lines in psychology would actually sharpen the theoretical and conceptual basis of experimental psychology—all the more as experimental psychology has inevitably been a postmodern endeavor since its very beginning.

Author Contributions

RM, CK, and CL developed the idea for this article. RM drafted the manuscript. CK and CL provided feedback and suggestions. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

• Armstrong D. M. (1997). A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: CUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Aylesworth G. (2015). “ Postmodernism ,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Zalta E. N. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ [ Google Scholar ]
• Baddeley A. (2007). Working Memory, Thought, and Action. Oxford: OUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Barthes R. (1963). “ L’activité structuraliste ,” in Essais Critiques (pp. 215–218). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. [“Structuralist activity.” Translated by R. Howard (1972). In Critical Essays , ed. Barthes R. (Evanston: Northern University Press; ), 213–220]. [ Google Scholar ]
• Baudrillard J. (1981). Simulacres et Simulation . Paris: Galilée. [ Simulacra and Simulation . Translated by S. F. Glaser (1994) . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F. (2019). “ Self-control, ego depletion, and social psychology’s replication crisis ,” in Surrounding Self-control (Appendix to chap. 2) , ed. Mele A. (New York, NY: OUP; ). 10.31234/osf.io/uf3cn [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Beebee H. (2013). Free Will: An Introduction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bergmann G., Spence K. W. (1941). Operationism and theory in psychology. Psychol. Rev. 48 1–14. 10.1037/h0054874 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bertens H. (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern. A History. London: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brady T. F., Konkle T., Alvarez G. A. (2011). A review of visual memory capacity: beyond individual items and toward structured representations. J. Vis. 11 1–34. 10.1167/11.5.4 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brady T. F., Störmer V. S., Alvarez G. A. (2016). Working memory is not fixed-capacity: more active storage capacity for real-world objects than for simple stimuli. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113 7459–7464. 10.1073/pnas.1520027113 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brass M., Furstenberg A., Mele A. R. (2019). Why neuroscience does not disprove free will. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 102 251–263. 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.04.024 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Capaldi E. J., Proctor R. W. (2013). “ Postmodernism and the development of the psychology of science ,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Science , eds Feist G. J., Gorman M. E. (New York, NY: Springer; ), 331–352. [ Google Scholar ]
• Carapezza M., D’Agostino M. (2010). Logic and the myth of the perfect language. Logic Philos. Sci. 8 1–29. 10.1093/oso/9780190869816.003.0001 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Chalmers D. (2005). “ Phenomenal concepts and the explanatory gap ,” in Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge. New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism , eds Alter T., Walter S. (Oxford: OUP; ), 167–194. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171655.003.0009 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cohen H. F. (2015). The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History. Cambridge: CUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Endress A. D., Potter M. C. (2014). Large capacity temporary visual memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 143 548–565. 10.1037/a0033934 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fischborn M. (2016). Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philos. Psychol. 29 494–502. 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gazzaniga M. S. (2011). Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York, NY: Ecco. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gemignani M., Peña E. (2007). Postmodern conceptualizations of culture in social constructionism and cultural studies. J. Theor. Philos. Psychol. 27–28 276–300. 10.1037/h0091297 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gergen K. J. (2001). Psychological science in a postmodern context. Am. Psychol. 56 803–813. 10.1037/0003-066X.56.10.803 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gergen K. J. (2002). Psychological science: to conserve or create? Am. Psychol. 57 463–464. 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.463 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gerrig R. J. (2012). Psychology and Life , 20th Edn Boston: Pearson. [ Google Scholar ]
• Goldstein E. B. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Stamford: Cengage Learning. [ Google Scholar ]
• Goodwin C. J. (2015). A History of Modern Psychology , 5th Edn Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hackert B., Weger U. (2018). Introspection and the Würzburg school: implications for experimental psychology today. Eur. Psychol. 23 217–232. 10.1027/1016-9040/a000329 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Haig B. D. (2014). Investigating the Psychological World: Scientific Method in the Behavioral Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hansen J. T. (2015). The relevance of postmodernism to counselors and counseling practice. J. Ment. Health Counsel. 37 355–363. 10.17744/MEHC.37.4.06 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hare-Mustin R. T., Marecek J. (1988). The meaning of difference: gender theory, postmodernism, and psychology. Am. Psychol. 43 455–464. 10.1037//0003-066X.43.6.455 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Harris R. (2005). The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hearnshaw L. S. (1941). Psychology and operationism. Aust. J. Psychol. Philos. 19 44–57. 10.1080/00048404108541506 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Heidegger M. (1953). Sein und Zeit (7. Aufl.). Tübingen: Niemeyer. [ Being and Time . Translated by J. Stambaugh, revised by D. J. Schmidt (2010) . Albany: SUNY Press.] [ Google Scholar ]
• Held B. S. (2007). Psychology’s Interpretive Turn: The Search for Truth and Agency in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Washington, DC: APA. [ Google Scholar ]
• Henry J. (1997). The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. Basingstoke: Macmillan. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hodge B. (1999). The Sokal ‘Hoax’: some implications for science and postmodernism. Continuum J. Media Cult. Stud. 13 255–269. 10.1080/10304319909365797 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hofmann S. G. (2002). More science, not less. Am. Psychol. 57 : 462 10.1037//0003-066X.57.6-7.462a [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holt R. R. (2005). “ The menace of postmodernism to a psychoanalytic psychology ,” in Relatedness, Self-definition and Mental Representation: Essays in Honor of Sidney J. Blatt , eds Auerbach J. S., Levy K. N., Schaffer C. E. (London: Routledge; ), 288–302. 10.4324/9780203337318_chapter_18 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holtz P. (2020). Does postmodernism really entail a disregard for the truth? Similarities and differences in postmodern and critical rationalist conceptualizations of truth, progress, and empirical research methods. Front. Psychol. 11 : 545959 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.545959 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holzman L. (2006). Activating postmodernism. Theory Psychol. 16 109–123. 10.1177/0959354306060110 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holzman L., Morss J. (eds). (2000). Postmodern Psychologies, Societal Practice, and Political Life. New York, NY: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hutmacher F. (2019). Why is there so much more research on vision than on any other sensory modality? Front. Psychol. 10 : 2246 . 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02246 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jager B. (1991). Psychology in a postmodern era. J. Phenomenol. Psychol. 22 60–71. 10.1163/156916291X00046 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jiménez J. P. (2015). Psychoanalysis in postmodern times: some questions and challenges. Psychoanal. Inquiry 35 609–624. 10.1080/07351690.2015.1055221 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kihlstrom J. F. (2017). Time to lay the Libet experiment to rest: commentary on Papanicolaou (2017). Psycho. Conscious. Theory Res. Pract. 4 324–329. 10.1037/cns0000124 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kleinert A. (2009). Der messende Luchs. NTM. Z. Gesch. Wiss. Tech. Med. 17 199–206. 10.1007/s00048-009-0335-4 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Krippner S. (2001). “ Research methodology in humanistic psychology in the light of postmodernity ,” in The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology: Leading Edges in Theory, Research, and Practice , eds Schneider K. J., Bugental J. F., Pierson J. F. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications; ), 290–304. 10.4135/9781412976268.n22 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kruger D. J. (2002). The deconstruction of constructivism. Am. Psychol. 57 456–457. 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.456 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kvale S. (ed.) (1992). Psychology and Postmodernism. London: SAGE. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lavazza A. (2016). Free will and neuroscience: from explaining freedom away to new ways of operationalizing and measuring it. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 10 : 262 . 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00262 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Law J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Leahey T. H. (2017). A History of Psychology: From Antiquity to Modernity , 8th Edn New York, NY: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Leffert M. (2007). A contemporary integration of modern and postmodern trends in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 55 177–197. 10.1177/00030651070550011001 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Libet B., Gleason C. A., Wright E. W., Pearl D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain 106 623–642. 10.1093/brain/106.3.623 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lilienfeld S. O. (2010). Can psychology become a science? Pers. Individ. Differ. 49 281–288. 10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.024 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Locke E. A. (2002). The dead end of postmodernism. Am. Psychol. 57 : 458 10.1037/0003-066X.57.6-7.458a [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Luck S. J., Vogel E. K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions. Nature 390 279–281. 10.1038/36846 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Luck S. J., Vogel E. K. (2013). Visual working memory capacity: from psychophysics and neurobiology to individual differences. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17 391–400. 10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.006 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ma W. J., Husain M., Bays P. M. (2014). Changing concepts of working memory. Nature Neurosci. 17 347–356. 10.1038/nn.3655 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mandler G. (2007). A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Martin J. (2003). Positivism, quantification and the phenomena of psychology. Theory Psychol. 13 33–38. 10.1177/0959354303013001760 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Martin J., Sugarman J. (2009). Middle-ground theorizing, realism, and objectivity in psychology: a commentary on Held (2007). Theory Psychol. 19 115–122. 10.1177/0959354308101422 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Matlin M. W. (2012). Cognition , 8th Edn Hoboken: Wiley. [ Google Scholar ]
• McKenna M., Pereboom D. (2016). Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mele A. R. (2007). “ Decisions, intentions, urges, and free will: why libet has not shown what he says he has ,” in Causation and Explanation , eds Campbell J. K., O’Rourke M., Silverstein H. S. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; ), 241–263. [ Google Scholar ]
• Michell J. (2003). The quantitative imperative: positivism, naïve realism and the place of qualitative methods in psychology. Theory Psychol. 13 5–31. 10.1177/0959354303013001758 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nahmias E. (2010). “ Scientific challenges to free will ,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Action , eds Sandis C., O’Connor T. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; ), 345–310. 10.1002/9781444323528.ch44 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nola R., Sankey H. (2014). Theories of Scientific Method. An Introduction. Stocksfield: Acumen. [ Google Scholar ]
• O’Connor T., Franklin C. (2018). “ Free will ,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Zalta E. N. Available online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ [ Google Scholar ]
• Olby R. C., Cantor G. N., Christie J. R. R., Hodge M. J. S. (eds). (1991). Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Osterlind S. J. (2019). The Error of Truth: How History and Mathematics Came Together to Form Our Character and Shape Our Worldview. Oxford: OUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Parkin A. J. (2013). Essential Cognitive Psychology (classic edition) . London: Psychology Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Paul L. A., Hall N. (2013). Causation: A User’s Guide. Oxford: OUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Pearl J. (2009). Causality. Models, Reasoning, and Inference , 2nd Edn Cambridge: CUP. [ Google Scholar ]
• Petrie H. G. (1971). A dogma of operationalism in the social sciences. Philos. Soc. Sci. 1 145–160. 10.1177/004839317100100109 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pinker S. (2018). Enlightenment Now. The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York, NY: Viking. [ Google Scholar ]
• Planck M. (1949). The meaning and limits of exact science. Science 110 319–327. 10.1126/science.110.2857.319 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Radder H., Meynen G. (2013). Does the brain “initiate” freely willed processes? A philosophy of science critique of Libet-type experiments and their interpretation. Theory Psychol. 23 3–21. 10.1177/0959354312460926 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ramey H. L., Grubb S. (2009). Modernism, postmodernism and (evidence-based) practice. Contemp. Fam. Ther. 31 75–86. 10.1007/s10591-009-9086-6 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Robinson M. M., Benjamin A. S., Irwin D. E. (2020). Is there a K in capacity? Assessing the structure of visual short-term memory. Cogn. Psychol. 121 101305 . 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101305 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ronzitti G. (ed.) (2011). Vagueness: A Guide. Dordrecht: Springer. [ Google Scholar ]
• Roskies A. L. (2011). “ Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will ,” in Conscious Will and Responsibility , eds Sinnott-Armstrong W., Nadel L. (Oxford: OUP; ), 11–22. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195381641.003.0003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Saigle V., Dubljević V., Racine E. (2018). The impact of a landmark neuroscience study on free will: a qualitative analysis of articles using Libet and colleagues’ methods. AJOB Neurosci. 9 29–41. 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425756 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schlosser M. E. (2014). The neuroscientific study of free will: a diagnosis of the controversy. Synthese 191 245–262. 10.1007/s11229-013-0312-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schurger A. (2017). “ The neuropsychology of conscious volition ,” in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness , eds Schneider S., Velmans M. (Malden: Wiley Blackwell; ), 695–710. 10.1002/9781119132363.ch49 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schurgin M. W. (2018). Visual memory, the long and the short of it: a review of visual working memory and long-term memory. Attention Percept. Psychophys. 80 1035–1056. 10.3758/s13414-018-1522-y [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schurgin M. W., Brady T. F. (2019). When “capacity” changes with set size: ensemble representations support the detection of across-category changes in visual working memory. J. Vis. 19 1–13. 10.1167/19.5.3 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schurgin M. W., Cunningham C. A., Egeth H. E., Brady T. F. (2018). Visual long-term memory can replace active maintenance in visual working memory. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 10.1101/381848 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Segerstråle U.C.O. (ed.) (2000). Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society. Albany: SUNY Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Seifert J. (2011). In defense of free will: a critique of Benjamin Libet. Rev. Metaphys. 65 377–407. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shearer A. (2020). The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West. London: Hurst & Company. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shepard J. (2018). How libet-style experiments may (or may not) challenge lay theories of free will. AJOB Neurosci. 9 45–47. 10.1080/21507740.2018.1425766 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sim S. (2011). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism , 3rd Edn London: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sinacore A. L., Enns C. Z. (2005). “ Diversity feminisms: postmodern, women-of-color, antiracist, lesbian, third-wave, and global perspectives ,” in Teaching and Social Justice: Integrating Multicultural and Feminist Theories in the Classroom , eds Enns C. Z., Sinacore A. L. (Washington, DC: APA; ), 41–68. 10.1037/10929-003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Slavin R. E. (2002). Evidence-based education policies: transforming educational practice and research. Educ. Res. 31 15–21. 10.3102/0013189X031007015 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Smedslund J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychol. Behav. Sci. 50 185–195. 10.1007/s12124-015-9339-x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sokal A. D. (1996). A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca 6 62–64. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sternberg R. J., Sternberg K. (2011). Cognitive Psychology , 6th Edn Wadsworth: Cengage Learning. [ Google Scholar ]
• Stroebe W., Strack F. (2014). The alleged crisis and the illusion of exact replication. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 9 59–71. 10.1177/1745691613514450 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Taleb N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York, NY: Random House. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tarescavage A. M. (2020). Science Wars II: the insidious influence of postmodern ideology on clinical psychology (commentary on “Implications of ideological bias in social psychology on clinical practice”). Clin. Psychol. Sci. Pract. 27 : e12319 10.1111/cpsp.12319 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Teo T. (2018). Outline of Theoretical Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wax M. L. (1995). Method as madness science, hermeneutics, and art in psychoanalysis. J. Am. Acad. Psychoanal. 23 525–543. 10.1521/jaap.1.1995.23.4.525 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wegner D. M. (2017). The Illusion of Conscious Will , 2nd Edn Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wilton R., Harley T. (2017). Science and Psychology. London: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]

Compulsive citizenship behavior and turnover intention: a two-stage moderated mediation model of emotional exhaustion and mindfulness

• Published: 29 July 2024

Cite this article

• Huai-Liang Liang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0897-7778 1  

This study aimed to investigate the moderating effect of mindfulness on the relationship between compulsive citizenship behavior (CCB) and emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, affects turnover intention. Specifically, this study developed and evaluated a two-stage moderated mediation model in which employee mindfulness moderates the pathway from CCB to turnover intention through emotional exhaustion, which is achieved by suppressing emotional and behavioral responses. To validate the proposed model, the author conducted two studies involving the measurement and manipulation of CCB and mindfulness. Study 1 employed a time-lag design to explore these relationships among 421 employees, whereas Study 2 extended this analysis to 592 employees through a scenario-based experimental laboratory study. Study 1 did not demonstrate the expected attenuation of the relationship between CCB and emotional exhaustion among individuals with higher trait mindfulness. Study 2 confirmed these findings through a scenario-based laboratory study that elucidated the critical moderating role of mindfulness in these relationships. This study also presents relevant theoretical and practical implications for future research.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to restrictions e.g., their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Atzmüller, C., & Steiner P. M. (2010). Experimental vignette studies in survey research. Methodology: European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, 6 (3), 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1027/1614-2241/a000014

Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 51 (6), 1173–1182. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.51.6.1173

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Bolino, M. C., Klotz, A. C., Turnley, W. H., & Harvey, J. (2013). Exploring the dark side of organizational citizenship behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior , 34 (4), 542–559. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1847

Article   Google Scholar  

Bozionelos, N., & Simmering, M. J. (2022). Methodological threat or myth? Evaluating the current state of evidence on common method variance in human resource management research. Human Resource Management Journal , 32 (1), 194–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12398

Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 84 (4), 822–848. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.822

Burton, J. P., & Barber, L. K. (2019). The role of mindfulness in response to abusive supervision. Journal of Managerial Psychology , 34 (5), 339–352. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-11-2018-0505

Chen, P., Xu, Y., Sparrow, P., & Cooper, C. (2023). Compulsory citizenship behaviour and work-family conflict: A moderated mediation model. Current Psychology , 42 , 6641–6652. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01973-4

Glomb, T. M., Duffy, M. K., Bono, J. E., & Yang, T. (2011). Mindfulness at work. In A. Joshi, H. Liao, & J. J. Martocchio (Eds.), Research in personnel and human resources management (pp. 115–157). Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-7301(2011)0000030005

Good, D. J., Lyddy, C. J., Glomb, T. M., Bono, J. E., Brown, K. W., Duffy, M. K., Baer, R. A., Brewer, J. A., & Lazar, S. W. (2016). Contemplating mindfulness at work: An integrative review. Journal of Management , 42 (1), 114–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315617003

Hawkes, A. J., & Neale, C. M. (2020). Mindfulness beyond wellbeing: Emotion regulation and team-member exchange in the workplace. Australian Journal of Psychology , 72 (1), 20–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajpy.12255

He, P., Peng, Z., & Zhao, H. (2019). How and when compulsory citizenship behavior leads to employee silence: A Moderated Mediation Model based on Moral Disengagement and Supervisor–Subordinate Guanxi views. Journal of Business Ethics , 155 , 259–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3550-2

Hom, P. W., & Griffeth, R. W. (1991). Structural equations modeling test of a turnover theory: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Journal of Applied Psychology , 76 (3), 350–366. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.76.3.350

Jöreskog, K. G., & Sörbom, D. (2006). LISREL for Windows . Scientific Software International.

Google Scholar  

Junça-Silva, A., Mosteo, L., & Lopes, R. R. (2023). The role of mindfulness on the relationship between daily micro-events and daily gratitude: A within-person analysis. Personality and Individual Differences , 200 , 111891. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111891

Liang, H. L. (2022). Compulsory citizenship behavior and facades of conformity: A moderated mediation model of neuroticism and citizenship pressure. Psychological Reports , 125 (6), 1341–1361. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941211031794

Liang, H. L., Yeh, T. K., & Wang, C. H. (2022). Compulsory citizenship behavior and its outcomes: Two mediation models. Frontiers in Psychology , 13 , 1–9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.766952

Lin, K. J., Savani, K., & Ilies, R. (2019). Doing good, feeling good? The roles of helping motivation and citizenship pressure. Journal of Applied Psychology , 104 (8), 1020–1035. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000392

Liu, F., Chow, I. H., & Huang, M. (2019). Increasing compulsory citizenship behavior and workload: Does impression management matter? Frontiers in Psychology , 10 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01726 . Article 1726.

Loi, T. I., Kuhn, K. M., Sahaym, A., Butterfield, K. D., & Tripp, T. M. (2020). From helping hands to harmful acts: When and how employee volunteering promotes workplace deviance. Journal of Applied Psychology , 105 (9), 944–958. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000477

Lu, L., Lee, H-M., & Shieh, T-Y. (2005). Occupational Stress, Health and Occupational Burnout among dentists: A study of clinical dentists in Kaohsiung. Research in Applied Psychology , 27 (Chinese), 59–80. http://ir.kmu.edu.tw/handle/310902000/8327

Lu, C-Q., Sun, J-W., & Du, D-Y. (2016). The relationships between employability, emotional exhaustion, and turnover intention: The moderation of perceived career opportunity. Journal of Career Development , 43 (1), 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845315576372

Maertz, C. P., & Griffeth, R. W. (2004). Eight motivational forces and voluntary turnover: A theoretical synthesis with implications for research. Journal of Management , 30 (5), 667–683. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jm.2004.04.001

Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Organizational Behavior , 2 (2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205

McNeish, D., & Wolf, M. G. (2023). Dynamic fit index cutoffs for confirmatory factor analysis models. Psychological Methods , 28 (1), 61–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000425

Mo, S., & Shi, J. (2017). Linking ethical leadership to employee burnout, workplace deviance and performance: Testing the mediating roles of trust in leader and surface acting. Journal of Business Ethics , 144 (2), 293–303. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2821-z

Mölders, S., Brosi, P., Spörrle, M., & Welpe, I. M. (2019). The effect of top management trustworthiness on turnover intentions via negative emotions: The moderating role of gender. Journal of Business Ethics , 156 (4), 957–969. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3600-9

Muller, D., Judd, C. M., & Yzerbyt, V. Y. (2005). When moderation is mediated and mediation is moderated. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 89 , 852–863. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.852

Peltokorpi, V. (2019). Abusive supervision and emotional exhaustion: The moderating role of power distance orientation and the mediating role of interaction avoidance. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources , 57 (3), 251–275. https://doi.org/10.1111/1744-7941.12188

Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2012). Sources of method bias in social science research and recommendations on how to control it. Annual Review of Psychology , 63 , 539–569. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100452

Preacher, K. J., Rucker, D. D., & Hayes, A. F. (2007). Addressing moderated mediation hypotheses: Theory, methods, and prescriptions. Multivariate Behavioral Research , 42 (1), 185–227. https://doi.org/10.1080/00273170701341316

Rosen, C. C., Harris, K. J., & Kacmar, K. M. (2009). The emotional implications of organizational politics: A process model. Human Relations , 62 (1), 27–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726708099836

Shaffakat, S., Otaye-Ebede, L., Reb, J., Chandwani, R., & Vongswasdi, P. (2022). Mindfulness attenuates both emotional and behavioral reactions following psychological contract breach: A two-stage moderated mediation model. Journal of Applied Psychology , 107 (3), 425–443. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000878

Sherf, E. N., Parke, M. R., & Isaakyan, S. (2021). Distinguishing voice and silence at work: Unique relationships with perceived impact, psychological safety, and burnout. Academy of Management Journal , 64 (1), 114–148. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1428

Suthatorn, P., & Charoensukmongkol, P. (2023). Effects of trust in organizations and trait mindfulness on optimism and perceived stress of flight attendants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personnel Review , 52 (3), 882–899. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-06-2021-0396

Thau, S., & Mitchell, M. S. (2010). Self-gain or self-regulation impairment? Tests of competing explanations of the supervisor abuse and employee deviance relationship through perceptions of distributive justice. Journal of Applied Psychology , 95 (6), 1009–1031. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020540

Tillman, C. J., Gonzalez, K., Crawford, W. S., & Lawrence, E. R. (2018). Affective responses to abuse in the workplace: The role of hope and affective commitment. International Journal of Selection and Assessment , 26 (1), 57–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12203

Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2006). Compulsory citizenship behavior: Theorizing some Dark sides of the good Soldier Syndrome in Organizations. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour , 36 (1), 77–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2006.00297.x

Vigoda-Gadot, E. (2007). Redrawing the boundaries of OCB? An empirical examination of compulsory Extra-role Behavior in the Workplace. Journal of Business and Psychology , 21 (3), 377–405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-006-9034-5

Weiss, H. M., & Cropanzano, R. (1996). Affective events theory: A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes and consequences of affective experiences at work. Research in Organizational Behavior , 18 , 1–74.

Williams, L. J., & O’Boyle, E. H. (2015). Ideal, nonideal, and no-marker variables: The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) marker technique works when it matters. Journal of Applied Psychology , 100 (5), 1579–1602. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038855

Zhao, H., Peng, Z., & Chen, H. K. (2014). Compulsory citizenship behavior and organizational citizenship behavior: The role of organizational identification and perceived interactional justice. The Journal of Psychology, 148 (2), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.2013.768591

Download references

No funding was received.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Da-Yeh University, Dacun Township, Changhua County, Taiwan

Huai-Liang Liang

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Huai-Liang Liang .

Ethics declarations

Ethical approval.

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Conflicts of interest

The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Liang, HL. Compulsive citizenship behavior and turnover intention: a two-stage moderated mediation model of emotional exhaustion and mindfulness. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06341-6

Download citation

Accepted : 28 June 2024

Published : 29 July 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06341-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Mindfulness
• Emotional exhaustion
• Compulsory citizenship behavior
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

Consciousness

The hard problem of...psychology, how psychology was the first science of consciousness..

Posted July 20, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

The hard problem of consciousness was made famous by the philosopher David Chalmers. He presented it at the first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in 1994. He defined it as the problem of “how and why” physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective conscious experiences (i.e., the taste of wine or seeing the colors of a rainbow). He further elaborated on the analysis a few years later in his influential book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory .

Part of what made his analysis helpful was that Chalmers differentiated what he called the “easy” problems from the “hard” ones. The easy problems deal with brain functions and behavior. For example, to explain why a frog zapped a fly with its tongue, we can think of its brain as a kind of neuro-information processing center that governs the frog’s body. That system has a template that picks up visual stimuli that behave the way flying insects behave. And there are motor reflex programs that shoot the tongue out.

But does the frog actually see the fly? Does success or failure at snatching the fly result in feelings of pleasure or frustration? Is there anything that it is like to be a frog from the inside? Or, are frogs “zombies” (i.e., the philosophical term for there being no subjective conscious experience at all)? As lively as frogs are “from the outside,” it is an open scientific question if they have subjective conscious experiences.

In The Conscious Mind , Chalmers labeled the easy problems as being “psychological” in nature. These are problems having to do with behavioral outputs and related neurocognitive functions, but have no direct relation to subjective experience. In contrast, he labeled subjective experiences the “phenomenal” aspects of the mind. The difference between the two is clear in the case of the frog. We know a lot about the frog's neurocognitive activity, defined in terms of the functional relations between the frog’s brain and its behavior in its environmental context. However, we know little about its phenomenal experience, including the question of whether it has any.

UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge 1 , aligns with Chalmer’s analysis in many regards. However, it comes at the problem from an entirely new angle. Chalmers was first trained as a physicist, and then he became a philosopher. As such, he comes at the question from the vantage point of its philosophical nature. This can be framed by the question: What is consciousness, and how does it fit inside the physical universe?

I am trained as a clinical psychologist. My journey toward a unified theory of psychology started at about the time as the new science of consciousness was being born. At that time, I was learning to become a psychotherapist and wanted a coherent scientific framework in which to ground my approach. It turns out there is not one. Why? Because, as I have detailed in many blogs, journal articles, and two books 1,2,3,4,5 , psychology is not a coherent discipline. It lacks a coherent identity and subject matter. It is something I have labeled "the problem of psychology."

Why and how did the problem of psychology emerge? Psychology started out as the science of consciousness. We can see this in two of its earliest established lines. First there were the psychophysicists in the middle of the 19 th century. They looked at the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation and developed the “psychophysical laws” that continue to impact research today (e.g., absolute threshold and just noticeable difference). Then came Wilhelm Wundt, who officially founded the science of psychology in 1879. He framed it as the science of human consciousness and trained folks in the methods of introspection. Wundt’s methods and findings came under attack by both functionalists and behaviorists, and his approach, which came to be known as structuralism, died.

The reason it died was because there was “gap” when it came to subjective experience. The gap was both epistemological and ontological. The epistemological gap was the fact that the nature of science is that it is based on behaviors that can be measured and verified via intersubjective agreement. The ontological gap is what Chalmers points to as the hard problem.

Behaviorists like John Watson thought of the brain as being like a set of wires on a switchboard, and behavior was produced by how electrical impulses cause reflexes. But consciousness was a mystery and was banned from behavioral psychology. Decades later, the cognitive revolution happened and cognitive psychology embraced the concept of the brain as a kind of neuro-information processing system. The result has been that psychology became aligned with functional analyses of behavior and mental processes, analyzed through the methods of science.

However, as I have made clear in my writings on the problem of psychology, this means psychology completely failed to solve the ontological problem. That is, the science of psychology has been defined as a methods-based discipline—psychologists do not have a clear, consensually agreed-upon framework for what they mean by “the mind.”

The Current Science of Consciousness Is Round 2

The 30 years since the first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference have seen an explosion of interest in consciousness. However, despite all the activity, serious problems are emerging. A recent, massive review on the “landscape” of theories of consciousness identified almost 85 different angles and approaches! There is debate about whether progress is being made on the hard problem. Consider that in 1998, the neuroscientist Christoph Koch bet Chalmers a fine case of wine that progress in the field would be made in the next 25 years at answering the question of what consciousness is. Koch lost the bet and paid up in 2023 . There has also been serious infighting between different approaches . For example, last year Integrated Information Theory, which is one of the more popular and heavily researched approaches, came under attack in the form of an open letter of over 100 scholars accusing it of being “pseudoscience.” This attack was reminiscent of the attack the behaviorists launched against Wundt and the structuralists.

My father is an emeritus professor of history. A common phrase in our household growing up was one of the great adage of historians: Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Given that scientific psychology started out being defined as the science of consciousness but failed, one might think that the history of psychology and the problem that emerged would be relevant to the new science of consciousness. However, as far as I could tell, not a single approach in the massive review on the landscape of consciousness addresses the problem of psychology. Instead, the ideas were mostly from philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists grappling with how consciousness fits in the universe as defined by physics. As a theoretical psychologist who knows the history of psychology, I am here to say, “We have been here before!”

The hard problem of consciousness surfaced more than a century ago, and it ended up breaking psychology. As such, maybe we need a new frame on this problem. Perhaps we should return to the problem of psychology, and see if we can grip the problem from that angle. When you do this from the perspective of UTOK a whole new solution to the difficulties becomes apparent 1 .

1. Henriques, G. (2022). A new synthesis for solving the problem of psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap . Palgrave MacMillan. (see Appendix C for the specific chapter references).

2. Henriques, G. R. (2011). A new unified theory of psychology . New York: Springer.

3. Henriques, G. (2008). The problem of psychology and the integration of human knowledge: Contrasting Wilson’s Consilience with the Tree of Knowledge System. Theory and Psychology, 18, 731-755.

4. Henriques, G. R. (2004). Psychology defined. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 60, 1207-1221.

5. Henriques, G. R. (2003). The tree of knowledge system and the theoretical unification of psychology. Review of General Psychology, 7, 150-182.

Note that the above references provide a systematic argument for the clarifying the nature of problem of psychology and its solution. The Unified Theory of Knowledge is a new philosophical system that coherently aligns the natural sciences, the human psyche, and the collective wisdom traditions. The result transforms our understanding of the hard problem into a resolution.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Free APA Journals ™ Articles

Recently published articles from subdisciplines of psychology covered by more than 90 APA Journals™ publications.

For additional free resources (such as article summaries, podcasts, and more), please visit the Highlights in Psychological Research page.

• Basic / Experimental Psychology
• Clinical Psychology
• Core of Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology, School Psychology, and Training
• Forensic Psychology
• Health Psychology & Medicine
• Industrial / Organizational Psychology & Management
• Neuroscience & Cognition
• Social Psychology & Social Processes
• Moving While Black: Intergroup Attitudes Influence Judgments of Speed (PDF, 71KB) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General February 2016 by Andreana C. Kenrick, Stacey Sinclair, Jennifer Richeson, Sara C. Verosky, and Janetta Lun
• Recognition Without Awareness: Encoding and Retrieval Factors (PDF, 116KB) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition September 2015 by Fergus I. M. Craik, Nathan S. Rose, and Nigel Gopie
• The Tip-of-the-Tongue Heuristic: How Tip-of-the-Tongue States Confer Perceptibility on Inaccessible Words (PDF, 91KB) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition September 2015 by Anne M. Cleary and Alexander B. Claxton
• Cognitive Processes in the Breakfast Task: Planning and Monitoring (PDF, 146KB) Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale September 2015 by Nathan S. Rose, Lin Luo, Ellen Bialystok, Alexandra Hering, Karen Lau, and Fergus I. M. Craik
• Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge (PDF, 138KB) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General June 2015 by Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil
• Client Perceptions of Corrective Experiences in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An Exploratory Pilot Study (PDF, 62KB) Journal of Psychotherapy Integration March 2017 by Jasmine Khattra, Lynne Angus, Henny Westra, Christianne Macaulay, Kathrin Moertl, and Michael Constantino
• Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Developmental Trajectories Related to Parental Expressed Emotion (PDF, 160KB) Journal of Abnormal Psychology February 2016 by Erica D. Musser, Sarah L. Karalunas, Nathan Dieckmann, Tara S. Peris, and Joel T. Nigg
• The Integrated Scientist-Practitioner: A New Model for Combining Research and Clinical Practice in Fee-For-Service Settings (PDF, 58KB) Professional Psychology: Research and Practice December 2015 by Jenna T. LeJeune and Jason B. Luoma
• Psychotherapists as Gatekeepers: An Evidence-Based Case Study Highlighting the Role and Process of Letter Writing for Transgender Clients (PDF, 76KB) Psychotherapy September 2015 by Stephanie L. Budge
• Perspectives of Family and Veterans on Family Programs to Support Reintegration of Returning Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PDF, 70KB) Psychological Services August 2015 by Ellen P. Fischer, Michelle D. Sherman, Jean C. McSweeney, Jeffrey M. Pyne, Richard R. Owen, and Lisa B. Dixon
• "So What Are You?": Inappropriate Interview Questions for Psychology Doctoral and Internship Applicants (PDF, 79KB) Training and Education in Professional Psychology May 2015 by Mike C. Parent, Dana A. Weiser, and Andrea McCourt
• Cultural Competence as a Core Emphasis of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (PDF, 81KB) Psychoanalytic Psychology April 2015 by Pratyusha Tummala-Narra
• The Role of Gratitude in Spiritual Well-Being in Asymptomatic Heart Failure Patients (PDF, 123KB) Spirituality in Clinical Practice March 2015 by Paul J. Mills, Laura Redwine, Kathleen Wilson, Meredith A. Pung, Kelly Chinh, Barry H. Greenberg, Ottar Lunde, Alan Maisel, Ajit Raisinghani, Alex Wood, and Deepak Chopra
• Nepali Bhutanese Refugees Reap Support Through Community Gardening (PDF, 104KB) International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation January 2017 by Monica M. Gerber, Jennifer L. Callahan, Danielle N. Moyer, Melissa L. Connally, Pamela M. Holtz, and Beth M. Janis
• Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence (PDF, 384KB) Psychological Bulletin February 2016 by Benjamin Harkin, Thomas L. Webb, Betty P. I. Chang, Andrew Prestwich, Mark Conner, Ian Kellar, Yael Benn, and Paschal Sheeran
• Youth Violence: What We Know and What We Need to Know (PDF, 388KB) American Psychologist January 2016 by Brad J. Bushman, Katherine Newman, Sandra L. Calvert, Geraldine Downey, Mark Dredze, Michael Gottfredson, Nina G. Jablonski, Ann S. Masten, Calvin Morrill, Daniel B. Neill, Daniel Romer, and Daniel W. Webster
• Supervenience and Psychiatry: Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (PDF, 113KB) Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology November 2015 by Charles M. Olbert and Gary J. Gala
• Constructing Psychological Objects: The Rhetoric of Constructs (PDF, 108KB) Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology November 2015 by Kathleen L. Slaney and Donald A. Garcia
• Expanding Opportunities for Diversity in Positive Psychology: An Examination of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity (PDF, 119KB) Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne August 2015 by Meghana A. Rao and Stewart I. Donaldson
• Racial Microaggression Experiences and Coping Strategies of Black Women in Corporate Leadership (PDF, 132KB) Qualitative Psychology August 2015 by Aisha M. B. Holder, Margo A. Jackson, and Joseph G. Ponterotto
• An Appraisal Theory of Empathy and Other Vicarious Emotional Experiences (PDF, 151KB) Psychological Review July 2015 by Joshua D. Wondra and Phoebe C. Ellsworth
• An Attachment Theoretical Framework for Personality Disorders (PDF, 100KB) Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne May 2015 by Kenneth N. Levy, Benjamin N. Johnson, Tracy L. Clouthier, J. Wesley Scala, and Christina M. Temes
• Emerging Approaches to the Conceptualization and Treatment of Personality Disorder (PDF, 111KB) Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne May 2015 by John F. Clarkin, Kevin B. Meehan, and Mark F. Lenzenweger
• A Complementary Processes Account of the Development of Childhood Amnesia and a Personal Past (PDF, 585KB) Psychological Review April 2015 by Patricia J. Bauer
• Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Social Orientation (PDF, 238KB) Psychology and Aging March 2016 by Denis Gerstorf, Christiane A. Hoppmann, Corinna E. Löckenhoff, Frank J. Infurna, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner, and Nilam Ram
• Student Threat Assessment as a Standard School Safety Practice: Results From a Statewide Implementation Study (PDF, 97KB) School Psychology Quarterly June 2018 by Dewey Cornell, Jennifer L. Maeng, Anna Grace Burnette, Yuane Jia, Francis Huang, Timothy Konold, Pooja Datta, Marisa Malone, and Patrick Meyer
• Can a Learner-Centered Syllabus Change Students’ Perceptions of Student–Professor Rapport and Master Teacher Behaviors? (PDF, 90KB) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology September 2016 by Aaron S. Richmond, Jeanne M. Slattery, Nathanael Mitchell, Robin K. Morgan, and Jared Becknell
• Adolescents' Homework Performance in Mathematics and Science: Personal Factors and Teaching Practices (PDF, 170KB) Journal of Educational Psychology November 2015 by Rubén Fernández-Alonso, Javier Suárez-Álvarez, and José Muñiz
• Teacher-Ready Research Review: Clickers (PDF, 55KB) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology September 2015 by R. Eric Landrum
• Enhancing Attention and Memory During Video-Recorded Lectures (PDF, 83KB) Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology March 2015 by Daniel L. Schacter and Karl K. Szpunar
• The Alleged "Ferguson Effect" and Police Willingness to Engage in Community Partnership (PDF, 70KB) Law and Human Behavior February 2016 by Scott E. Wolfe and Justin Nix
• Randomized Controlled Trial of an Internet Cognitive Behavioral Skills-Based Program for Auditory Hallucinations in Persons With Psychosis (PDF, 92KB) Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal September 2017 by Jennifer D. Gottlieb, Vasudha Gidugu, Mihoko Maru, Miriam C. Tepper, Matthew J. Davis, Jennifer Greenwold, Ruth A. Barron, Brian P. Chiko, and Kim T. Mueser
• Preventing Unemployment and Disability Benefit Receipt Among People With Mental Illness: Evidence Review and Policy Significance (PDF, 134KB) Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal June 2017 by Bonnie O'Day, Rebecca Kleinman, Benjamin Fischer, Eric Morris, and Crystal Blyler
• Sending Your Grandparents to University Increases Cognitive Reserve: The Tasmanian Healthy Brain Project (PDF, 88KB) Neuropsychology July 2016 by Megan E. Lenehan, Mathew J. Summers, Nichole L. Saunders, Jeffery J. Summers, David D. Ward, Karen Ritchie, and James C. Vickers
• The Foundational Principles as Psychological Lodestars: Theoretical Inspiration and Empirical Direction in Rehabilitation Psychology (PDF, 68KB) Rehabilitation Psychology February 2016 by Dana S. Dunn, Dawn M. Ehde, and Stephen T. Wegener
• Feeling Older and Risk of Hospitalization: Evidence From Three Longitudinal Cohorts (PDF, 55KB) Health Psychology Online First Publication — February 11, 2016 by Yannick Stephan, Angelina R. Sutin, and Antonio Terracciano
• Anger Intensification With Combat-Related PTSD and Depression Comorbidity (PDF, 81KB) Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy January 2016 by Oscar I. Gonzalez, Raymond W. Novaco, Mark A. Reger, and Gregory A. Gahm
• Special Issue on eHealth and mHealth: Challenges and Future Directions for Assessment, Treatment, and Dissemination (PDF, 32KB) Health Psychology December 2015 by Belinda Borrelli and Lee M. Ritterband
• Posttraumatic Growth Among Combat Veterans: A Proposed Developmental Pathway (PDF, 110KB) Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy July 2015 by Sylvia Marotta-Walters, Jaehwa Choi, and Megan Doughty Shaine
• Racial and Sexual Minority Women's Receipt of Medical Assistance to Become Pregnant (PDF, 111KB) Health Psychology June 2015 by Bernadette V. Blanchfield and Charlotte J. Patterson
• An Examination of Generational Stereotypes as a Path Towards Reverse Ageism (PDF, 205KB) The Psychologist-Manager Journal August 2017 By Michelle Raymer, Marissa Reed, Melissa Spiegel, and Radostina K. Purvanova
• Sexual Harassment: Have We Made Any Progress? (PDF, 121KB) Journal of Occupational Health Psychology July 2017 By James Campbell Quick and M. Ann McFadyen
• Multidimensional Suicide Inventory-28 (MSI-28) Within a Sample of Military Basic Trainees: An Examination of Psychometric Properties (PDF, 79KB) Military Psychology November 2015 By Serena Bezdjian, Danielle Burchett, Kristin G. Schneider, Monty T. Baker, and Howard N. Garb
• Cross-Cultural Competence: The Role of Emotion Regulation Ability and Optimism (PDF, 100KB) Military Psychology September 2015 By Bianca C. Trejo, Erin M. Richard, Marinus van Driel, and Daniel P. McDonald
• The Effects of Stress on Prospective Memory: A Systematic Review (PDF, 149KB) Psychology & Neuroscience September 2017 by Martina Piefke and Katharina Glienke
• Don't Aim Too High for Your Kids: Parental Overaspiration Undermines Students' Learning in Mathematics (PDF, 164KB) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology November 2016 by Kou Murayama, Reinhard Pekrun, Masayuki Suzuki, Herbert W. Marsh, and Stephanie Lichtenfeld
• Sex Differences in Sports Interest and Motivation: An Evolutionary Perspective (PDF, 155KB) Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences April 2016 by Robert O. Deaner, Shea M. Balish, and Michael P. Lombardo
• Asian Indian International Students' Trajectories of Depression, Acculturation, and Enculturation (PDF, 210KB) Asian American Journal of Psychology March 2016 By Dhara T. Meghani and Elizabeth A. Harvey
• Cynical Beliefs About Human Nature and Income: Longitudinal and Cross-Cultural Analyses (PDF, 163KB) January 2016 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebracht
• Annual Review of Asian American Psychology, 2014 (PDF, 384KB) Asian American Journal of Psychology December 2015 By Su Yeong Kim, Yishan Shen, Yang Hou, Kelsey E. Tilton, Linda Juang, and Yijie Wang
• Resilience in the Study of Minority Stress and Health of Sexual and Gender Minorities (PDF, 40KB) Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity September 2015 by Ilan H. Meyer
• Self-Reported Psychopathy and Its Association With Criminal Cognition and Antisocial Behavior in a Sample of University Undergraduates (PDF, 91KB) Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement July 2015 by Samantha J. Riopka, Richard B. A. Coupland, and Mark E. Olver

Journals Publishing Resource Center

Find resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing with APA Journals™.

Visit the resource center

Journals information

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Journal statistics and operations data
• Special Issues
• Email alerts
• Copyright and permissions

Contact APA Publications