Progress-focused

  Ferber et al. (2024) Ferber et al. (2024) investigate in a recent article how parental factors are related to the intrinsic and extrinsic goals of children. The study is a meta-analysis of 49 reports. These focus on the influence of parental aspirations and parenting styles on the goals that children pursue. The researchers looked at intrinsic goals such as personal growth and relatedness, and extrinsic goals such as wealth and status. The study aimed to provide insight into how parents contribute to the development of these different types of goals in their children. 

In today’s political landscape, we increasingly see irrationality and cheating being employed as strategies to gain and maintain power. This phenomenon not only undermines the foundations of a healthy democracy but also opens the door for leaders who are willing to sacrifice ethics and integrity for personal gain.

Many people feel powerless in the face of big problems like climate change. This sense of powerlessness can prevent them from taking action, because they think their individual efforts make little difference. Recent research by Jankowski, Mlynski, and Job (2024) offers new insights. It discusses how our beliefs about the changeability of the world—a “ growth mindset about the world ”—play a crucial role in breaking through the illusion of powerlessness .

  Recent research by Wang (2024) examines the relationship between self-compassion and posttraumatic growth in adolescents. The research also looked at the role of basic psychological needs.

  In our increasingly complex society, the need for cognition (NFC ) plays an important role. NFC is the tendency of people to like to think, to make cognitive efforts and to derive pleasure from challenging thought processes. A new article by Aerts et al. (2024) discusses this. In this publication, the authors explore how NFC develops during childhood and adolescence, and which factors influence this development. In this article, I discuss the insights and tips from their research. 

Daron Acemoglu , Simon Johnson , and James A. Robinson , authors of the book Why Nations Fail , are the 2024 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel . The prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, was awarded for their research into why some countries are rich and others poor. Their work explains how political and economic institutions determine the prosperity of nations. Institutions—the rules and systems that determine how a society functions—are key to understanding differences in prosperity and poverty, they argue.

Robert J. Sternberg , an influential psychologist and psychometrician known for his extensive work on intelligence , has published an article: “ What is intelligence, really? The futile search for a Holy Grail ” (2024). In this piece, Sternberg, Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, rethinks the nature of intelligence and criticizes the ongoing search for an all-encompassing definition of intelligence.

“I need to control myself.” This simple statement raises a profound question: Who is the “I” that needs to control, and what is the “myself” that needs to be controlled? How can someone be one and the same, yet appear to be made up of many different parts? This confusion shows up not only in language, but also in our thinking about the self. Think of terms like “self-coaching” or “self-compassion.” Who is coaching whom? Who is showing compassion, and to whom? This raises the question: What is the true self? In this article, we’ll look at three key theories that help us better understand the self: mindset theory, self-determination theory (SDT), and Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of ​​the self as a “strange loop.”