Executive functions are the brain’s general-purpose control toolkit, housed largely in the prefrontal cortex. They include inhibitory control, the ability to suppress automatic responses; cognitive flexibility, the capacity to shift between tasks or perspectives; and working memory and attentional processes that keep goals in mind while distractions compete for space. Metacognition, by contrast, is often described as thinking about thinking. It covers the monitoring and control of one’s own mental states, including awareness of thoughts and feelings and the strategies people use to manage them. Emotion regulation, the third player, refers to the processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express those emotions.

The theoretical reason to expect these systems to be linked is compelling. James Gross’s influential process model of emotion regulation holds that reappraisal, reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional event, depends on working memory and cognitive flexibility, while expressive suppression, clamping down on the outward signs of emotion, plausibly depends on inhibitory control. Philip Zelazo and William Cunningham have similarly argued that executive function is the mechanism underlying emotion regulation itself. Meanwhile, researchers such as Claudia Roebers have proposed unifying frameworks in which executive function and metacognition form a single continuum of cognitive self-regulation, and studies in children have repeatedly found longitudinal associations between the two. If the developing brain wires these systems together, one might expect them to travel together in healthy adults as well.

To test these ideas, the Brazilian team individually assessed each participant using a carefully chosen battery of instruments. Executive functions were measured with the Five Digit Test, a Stroop-like task that isolates different components of cognitive control, including reading automaticity, selective attention, inhibitory control, and flexibility. Metacognition was assessed with the Metacognition Scale of Thoughts and Feelings, an instrument the same group had previously constructed and validated to capture how people monitor and regulate their own thoughts and emotional states. Emotion regulation was measured with the Questionnaire of Emotional Regulation, adapted for the Brazilian population, which taps strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, suppression, and redirection of attentional focus. Because each participant was evaluated individually rather than through mass online questionnaires, the quality of the cognitive data is notably higher than in many correlational studies in this field.

The statistical analysis was deliberately robust. The researchers used the Mann-Whitney test to compare groups, Spearman correlations to probe monotonic relationships between the main constructs, and regression analysis to ask which specific subcomponents predicted which specific regulation strategies. This subcomponent-level approach is the study’s real innovation. Rather than collapsing executive function into a single score and metacognition into another, the team treated each construct as a family of distinct abilities, then asked which family members did the predictive work. That granularity matters, because aggregate scores can mask relationships that only appear when the right components are paired together.

The first headline finding is a genuine null result: executive functions and metacognition showed no correlation at all in this adult sample. For anyone steeped in the developmental literature, this is striking. In children, executive function and metacognitive monitoring appear to develop hand in hand, and several theoretical frameworks treat them as two faces of the same self-regulatory coin. The Bahia results suggest that whatever coupling exists early in life may loosen by adulthood, or that the two constructs, when measured with performance-based tasks versus self-report scales, capture genuinely separable dimensions of mental life. The finding echoes a long-standing methodological debate about whether performance measures and ratings of executive function assess the same underlying construct at all.

The second set of findings concerns how these systems feed into emotion regulation, and here the picture becomes beautifully specific. Cognitive flexibility predicted higher scores on attentional redirection, which makes intuitive sense: the ability to shift perspectives is exactly what allows a person to move their attention away from an upsetting stimulus and toward something more neutral or constructive. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, predicted higher suppression, the strategy of holding emotional expressions in check. This mapping is theoretically satisfying, because suppression is essentially an act of response inhibition applied to emotional behavior. The classic demonstration of this link comes from studies showing that people with stronger inhibitory control are better at keeping thoughts better left unsaid from becoming words actually spoken.

Metacognition told a different story. Metacognitive factors predicted cognitive reappraisal and the redirection of focus, two strategies that involve changing how one relates to an emotional situation rather than simply clamping down on its expression. This fits a growing body of work on decentering, the metacognitive capacity to observe thoughts and feelings as transient mental events rather than literal truths. Researchers modeling decentering have argued that metacognitive monitoring is what allows a person to step back from an emotion and reframe it, and clinical approaches such as metacognitive therapy build directly on the idea that beliefs about one’s own cognition regulate emotional distress. The new data provide correlational support for that framework in a typical, non-clinical population.

The practical implications ripple outward in several directions. For education, the results suggest that training programs targeting flexibility might bolster students’ capacity to redirect attention away from academic anxiety, while metacognitive training could strengthen reappraisal skills that protect well-being. For clinical psychology, the finding that distinct executive and metacognitive components predict distinct regulation strategies hints at more precise intervention targets: rather than treating emotion dysregulation as a single problem, therapists might assess which specific upstream ability is weak and tailor treatment accordingly. For everyday readers, the study is a reminder that emotional style is not a fixed personality trait but the downstream product of measurable cognitive machinery, machinery that varies from person to person and can, in principle, be exercised.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. The sample was recruited through snowball sampling, a method that can skew toward particular social networks, and the mean age of roughly 24 years means the oldest adults in the 18-to-55 range were underrepresented. Correlational and regression analyses cannot establish causal direction: it remains possible that habitual use of certain regulation strategies shapes executive and metacognitive abilities over time, rather than the other way around, or that both are shaped by a third factor such as education or socioeconomic background. Self-report measures of emotion regulation also carry well-known biases, since people are not always accurate reporters of their own strategies. Still, by showing that the architecture of self-regulation is more modular than unified, and by pinpointing exactly which components predict which strategies, the study gives researchers a sharper map of the mind’s emotional control system, and a compelling reason to stop treating executive function, metacognition, and emotion regulation as one undifferentiated blob.

Subject of Research: The relationships between executive functions, metacognition, and emotion regulation strategies in healthy adults

Article Title: Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults

Article References: Reis, R. M. A., dos Santos Aragão, E. W., da Conceição, J. R. B., & Abreu, J. N. S. (2025). Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Keywords: executive functions, metacognition, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, cognitive reappraisal, suppression, attentional redirection, prefrontal cortex, self-regulation, cognitive psychology, Trends in Psychology

The research, led by Ana Karla Silva Soares of the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil, together with Eduardo França do Nascimento, Renata Tereza dos Passos Costa, Alessandro Teixeira Rezende, and Kátia Regina Bazzano da Silva Rosi, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: to what extent, and in which direction, is the imposter phenomenon related to human values and parenting styles among children? While interest in the origins of imposter feelings has grown steadily in recent decades, few studies have explored the possibility that the seeds of this phenomenon are planted in childhood, long before university examinations, doctoral defenses, or workplace promotions provide the achievements that adults feel unworthy of.

To investigate the question, the team recruited 201 elementary school students between the ages of nine and twelve, with an average age of ten and a standard deviation of 1.06. The sample was mostly female, at 54.5 percent, and overwhelmingly drawn from public schools, which accounted for 97.5 percent of participants. The largest single group, 35 percent of the children, was in the fifth year of schooling. Each participant completed a battery of instruments: the Child Impostor Phenomenon Scale, designed to capture imposter feelings in age-appropriate language; the Reduced Parental Perception Questionnaire, which measures how children perceive the emotional and demanding dimensions of their parents’ behavior; the Questionnaire of Basic Values for Children, grounded in the functionalist theory of human values developed by the Brazilian psychologist Valdiney Gouveia; and a set of sociodemographic questions.

The results, published on 23 October 2025, reveal a consistent pattern of negative associations. The imposter phenomenon was significantly and negatively correlated with a demanding parental style, with a correlation coefficient of r = −.14. In other words, children who perceived their parents as more demanding, in the sense of setting expectations, supervising behavior, and requiring accountability, reported fewer imposter feelings, not more. This finding runs counter to a popular intuition that strict, high-expectation parenting breeds self-doubt. Instead, the data suggest that parental demandingness, a core component of the authoritative parenting style first described by developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind in the 1960s, may provide children with the structure and feedback they need to accurately calibrate their sense of their own abilities.

The value measurements added a second layer of insight. Using the functionalist framework, which organizes human values into distinct orientations that guide behavior, the researchers found that imposter feelings were negatively correlated with both interactive values, at r = −.15, and normative values, at r = −.18. Interactive values, in this theoretical tradition, emphasize relationships, affection, and social connection, while normative values emphasize rules, obligations, and respect for established norms. Children who scored higher on these value orientations tended to report fewer feelings of being an intellectual fraud. The interpretation offered by the functionalist perspective is that children who internalize the importance of norms and interpersonal bonds may develop a more stable and socially anchored sense of self, one less vulnerable to the gap between external achievement and internal self-worth that defines the imposter experience.

Perhaps the most technically interesting result concerned moderation. The researchers found that the demanding style of fathers, specifically paternal requirement, moderated the relationship between normative human values and the imposter syndrome in children. Moderation analysis, a statistical technique popularized in psychology by Andrew Hayes, tests whether the strength or direction of an association between two variables depends on the level of a third variable. In this case, the link between a child’s endorsement of normative values and their imposter feelings was not uniform across all levels of paternal demandingness. The father’s behavioral profile, in effect, changed the terrain on which the child’s values operated. This suggests that values and parenting do not act as independent levers on a child’s psychology but interact in ways that researchers are only beginning to map.

The study’s theoretical grounding is worth unpacking. The concept of the imposter phenomenon originated in 1978, when psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described it among high-achieving women in clinical settings. Subsequent work extended the construct to university students, doctoral candidates, and professionals across many fields, and systematic reviews of measurement scales have catalogued a proliferation of instruments designed to quantify it. Research has linked imposter feelings to perfectionism, low self-esteem, social anxiety, self-handicapping, and psychological distress, and studies have repeatedly implicated family background, including parental rearing styles and parental bonding, as formative influences. What has remained scarce is direct evidence from children themselves, rather than adult recollections of childhood, which are vulnerable to memory distortion and retrospective bias.

By measuring imposter feelings in nine- to twelve-year-olds directly, the Brazilian team provides some of the clearest evidence yet that the phenomenon is not confined to adulthood. The use of a dedicated child-scale instrument, whose factor structure was examined with modern exploratory factor analysis techniques, including methods for selecting the number of common factors, reflects a growing methodological sophistication in this literature. The correlations reported, while modest in magnitude, as is typical for single-variable associations in developmental psychology, are statistically meaningful and point in theoretically coherent directions. A demanding parental style and the internalization of interactive and normative values both appear to act as protective factors against the conviction that one’s successes are undeserved.

The findings carry practical implications for parents, educators, and clinicians. If demandingness, understood as consistent expectations and accountability rather than hostility or control, is associated with fewer imposter feelings, then parenting advice that equates warmth with permissiveness may be missing part of the picture. Baumrind’s classic framework distinguished authoritative parenting, which combines demandingness with responsiveness, from both authoritarian and permissive styles, and decades of research have associated the authoritative profile with better emotional and academic outcomes in children. The present study adds a new outcome to that list: a reduced tendency to discount one’s own accomplishments. Similarly, the protective role of normative and interactive values suggests that children who grow up in environments where rules, obligations, and caring relationships are salient may be better insulated against the self-doubt that undermines performance and well-being.

The authors are careful about the limits of their data. The study is correlational, so it cannot establish whether demanding parenting causes lower imposter feelings, whether children who feel less like imposters simply perceive their parents as more demanding, or whether some third factor, such as temperament or socioeconomic conditions, shapes both. The sample, drawn almost entirely from public schools in Brazil, may not generalize to other cultural contexts, and the modest sample size of 201 constrains the precision of the estimates. Data collected from minors are protected by ethical restrictions and are not publicly available, though the authors note they can be shared upon reasonable request with permission from the research ethics committee. The work was funded by Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, and the authors declare no competing interests. Even with these caveats, the study opens a striking window onto the early life of a psychological pattern that has cost countless adults their confidence, and it suggests that the fight against imposter feelings may begin not in the therapist’s office but at the kitchen table, in the daily interplay of expectations, values, and love that shapes who children believe themselves to be.

Subject of Research: The relationship between human values, parenting styles, and the imposter phenomenon in children

Article Title: Evaluating the Role of Human Values and Parenting Styles in the Imposter Syndrome Among Children

Article References: Soares, A. K. S., do Nascimento, E. F., dos Passos Costa, R. T., Rezende, A. T., & da Silva Rosi, K. R. B. (2025). Evaluating the Role of Human Values and Parenting Styles in the Imposter Syndrome Among Children. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00459-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00459-7

Keywords: imposter syndrome, imposter phenomenon, parenting styles, human values, child development, developmental psychology, self-esteem, parental demandingness, Brazil, Trends in Psychology, childhood mental health, academic psychology

The research team, led by Maria Eduarda Cini da Cunha together with Thaís de Castro Jury Arnoud and Luísa Fernanda Habigzang, set out with a deliberately broad question. Rather than asking simply whether pornography causes aggression, they wanted to map the relationships between three variables at once: pornography consumption, the perpetration and experience of sexual violence, and acceptance of rape-related beliefs. Crucially, they also wanted to know how these relationships might differ between men and women, since decades of research have shown that gender shapes both media use and attitudes toward sexual violence in profound ways.

To capture this picture, the researchers combined four instruments. A sociodemographic questionnaire recorded basic characteristics of the sample, which included 481 women and was majority heterosexual, with 436 heterosexual respondents. A dedicated questionnaire measured patterns of pornography consumption, including frequency and type of use. The Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, a widely used psychological instrument originally developed in the United States and adapted for Brazilian Portuguese, quantified agreement with statements that minimize or justify sexual violence, such as the idea that victims provoke assaults through their behavior or clothing. Finally, a questionnaire on sexual behaviors and sexual violence asked respondents directly about experiences of perpetration and victimization.

The analytical strategy is what sets this study apart from much of the existing literature. In addition to standard descriptive statistics, which summarize how common each behavior or belief is in the sample, and comparative analyses, which test for differences between groups such as men and women, the team employed network analysis. This relatively recent technique, made accessible through tools such as the qgraph software package, treats psychological variables as nodes in a network and draws connections, or edges, between those that are statistically related. Instead of asking whether one variable predicts another on average across the whole sample, network analysis reveals the local structure of associations, showing which specific variables cluster together and which serve as bridges connecting otherwise separate clusters. In psychological science, this approach has become popular precisely because attitudes and behaviors rarely operate in isolation; they form systems of mutually reinforcing elements.

The results were striking on several fronts. Descriptively, men in the sample reported higher rates of pornography consumption than women, higher acceptance of rape myths, and higher rates of perpetrating sexual violence. This pattern echoes a large international literature. Studies from Denmark, Poland, Australia, and the United States have consistently found that men consume pornography more frequently than women, and meta-analytic reviews of gender differences in sexuality have documented robust gaps in both explicit media use and attitudes supporting aggression. The Brazilian findings suggest that these international patterns hold in a Latin American context marked by deep patriarchal traditions and persistently high levels of gender-based violence, as documented by the Brazilian Public Security Forum, whose surveys show that a large share of Brazilian women report having suffered some form of violence.

The network analysis delivered the study’s central insight. Within the estimated network, the perpetration of sexual violence emerged as positively and significantly connected to both pornography consumption and rape myth acceptance. In plain terms, the people most likely to report having committed acts of sexual violence were also the people most likely to consume pornography and to endorse beliefs that excuse rape. Importantly, a network edge represents an association, not proof of causation. The analysis cannot determine whether pornography consumption leads to violence, whether violent individuals seek out more explicit material, or whether some third factor, such as adherence to traditional gender norms or hostile sexism, drives all three variables simultaneously. The authors are careful on this point, and the broader literature reflects the same ambiguity. Meta-analyses of general population studies have found small but reliable associations between pornography consumption and actual acts of sexual aggression, while other reviews, including work by Ferguson and Hartley, argue that the causal evidence remains weak and contested.

What the network approach does offer is a way of thinking about these variables as a system. Rape myths have long been understood as a psychological scaffold for sexual violence. First formalized by researcher Martha Burt in 1980, the concept describes prejudicial and false beliefs about sexual aggression that function to deny or justify male violence against women. Subsequent research has shown that people who accept rape myths are more likely to blame victims, less likely to intervene as bystanders, and, in some studies, more likely to perpetrate assault themselves. A systematic review by Yapp and Quayle confirmed a consistent association between rape myth acceptance and male-on-female sexual violence. If pornography consumption is also connected to both of these nodes, as the Brazilian network suggests, then interventions that target rape myths may simultaneously weaken the ties that bind media habits to aggressive behavior.

The content of mainstream pornography provides one plausible mechanism for these connections, and it is a mechanism the authors discuss in light of prior research. Content analyses of popular online videos have documented that aggression, particularly toward women, is common in mainstream material, and studies by researchers such as Eran Shor and Kimberley Seida have found that both the prevalence and the intensity of aggression in popular pornography have increased over time, even as viewers appear to prefer it. Other work has shown that pornography often depicts sexual scripts in which women are objectified and in which resistance is portrayed as performance rather than refusal. According to social learning accounts of media effects, repeated exposure to such scripts can shape viewers’ expectations about what normal, desirable sex looks like, potentially reinforcing beliefs that women secretly want to be coerced. The Brazilian authors cite this body of evidence while stopping short of claiming that their cross-sectional data prove such an effect.

The practical implications of the study are framed in terms of prevention. The authors argue that their results can inform interventions designed to promote sexual and reproductive health and to prevent sexual violence, and they emphasize that such programs should acknowledge how widespread pornography consumption has become rather than treating it as a fringe behavior. In Brazil, where formal sex education remains limited and politically contested, pornography often functions as a de facto source of sexual information for young people, a phenomenon researchers have described as porn as sex education. Comprehensive sexuality education that critically addresses media literacy, consent, and gender equality could, in principle, interrupt the pathway by which distorted sexual scripts harden into rape-supportive beliefs. Bystander intervention programs, which have shown promise in university settings, similarly depend on reducing rape myth acceptance to motivate action.

Like all studies, this one carries limitations that shape how its findings should be read. The sample of 993 adults was recruited in a way that may not represent the full diversity of the Brazilian population, and self-reported data on sensitive topics such as pornography use and sexual violence perpetration are vulnerable to social desirability bias, a problem well documented in the literature, particularly among religious respondents. The cross-sectional design rules out causal inference, and the authors note that the paper’s underlying data are available only by request. Yet the study’s contribution lies less in settling the causality debate than in mapping, with modern network methods, the terrain on which that debate unfolds. In a country where sexual violence remains a daily reality for thousands of women, understanding how consumption habits, cultural myths, and violent behavior connect within the same psychological network is a step toward designing interventions that reach the right targets. The Brazilian findings suggest that those targets include not only individual behavior, but the web of beliefs that makes violence thinkable in the first place.

Subject of Research: Relationships between pornography consumption, sexual violence perpetration and victimization, and rape myth acceptance in Brazilian adults

Article Title: Consumption of Pornography, Sexual Violence, and Rape-Related Beliefs in Brazilian Adults

Article References: Consumption of Pornography, Sexual Violence, and Rape-Related Beliefs in Brazilian Adults. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00508-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00508-1

Keywords: pornography, sexual violence, rape myths, Brazil, network analysis, gender differences, rape myth acceptance, psychology, victimization, perpetration, sex education, Trends in Psychology

The headline metric is the journal’s CiteScore, Elsevier’s measure of average citations per document over a rolling window. In the 2019–2020 baseline period, Trends in Psychology posted a CiteScore of just 0.6, a figure that placed it deep in the lower ranks of general psychology journals. By 2024, that value had climbed to 3.4, an increase of nearly sixfold. In percentile terms, the journal moved from the 17th percentile of its field in 2019 to the 53rd percentile in 2024, crossing the median of General Psychology and joining the majority of journals it competes with for authors and readers. For a publication that had long operated on the periphery of mainstream visibility, crossing that threshold represents a structural change in how the journal is perceived by researchers deciding where to submit their best work.

Corroborating evidence comes from an independent source of citation data. The journal’s h5-index on Google Scholar, which counts the number of articles published in the last five complete years that have each received at least that number of citations, rose from a base of 5 before 2019 to 24 in 2024. The h5-index is deliberately resistant to manipulation by a small number of highly cited papers, because it requires a broad base of articles each accumulating comparable citation counts. A jump from 5 to 24 therefore implies that dozens of papers published in the period are now regularly cited, rather than a handful of outliers carrying the journal’s reputation. Together, the CiteScore and h5-index trajectories suggest a broad-based improvement in the scientific resonance of the work the journal has published.

Perhaps the most striking figure in the editorial concerns raw readership. Annual full-text article requests, the standard proxy for downloads, increased approximately 1,700 percent over the period, from roughly 12,000 in 2020 to an average of about 220,000 in 2023–2024. That is an eighteenfold expansion in the number of times readers worldwide opened and downloaded the journal’s articles each year. Download statistics of this magnitude reflect a combination of factors: more published content, greater discoverability through indexing services and search engines, and a wider geographic distribution of readers who find the journal’s output relevant to their work. Whatever the precise mix of causes, the scale of the increase indicates that the journal’s content is now reaching an audience orders of magnitude larger than the one it served at the start of the decade.

The surge in impact is mirrored by an unprecedented volume of submissions. Total submissions rose from an annual average of 117 in 2019–2020 to a yearly average of 657 in 2023–2024, more than a fivefold increase in the flow of manuscripts arriving at the editorial office. The international component of that flow changed even more dramatically. Submissions from authors outside Brazil grew from an average of 51 per year in the baseline period to around 548 per year in 2023–2024. In proportional terms, the journal went from receiving roughly 40 percent of its submissions from outside Brazil to roughly 80 percent, meaning international authors now constitute the clear majority of its contributor base. This inversion of the journal’s demographic profile is the clearest quantitative evidence that Trends in Psychology has become a global platform rather than a national one with international pretensions.

Acceptance volumes scaled accordingly. The journal accepted an average of 7 articles per year in 2019–2020, compared with an average of 85 articles accepted per year in 2023–2024, a more than tenfold increase in annual output. Notably, around 67 percent of recently accepted articles came from foreign authors, a share lower than the 80 percent international share of submissions. That gap indicates that the journal has not abandoned its role as a vital forum for Brazilian psychology; domestic authors continue to be published at a meaningful rate even as the overall volume expands. The editors describe this balance as maintaining Brazil as a vital forum while significantly expanding the journal’s reach, a formulation that captures the dual identity the publication now occupies as the official journal of the Brazilian Society of Psychology with a worldwide authorship.

The transformation was not only quantitative. The thematic composition of the journal’s content shifted substantially over the period. In 2019–2020, coverage was concentrated, with psychometrics and psychological assessment dominating the listed topic occurrences at roughly 30 percent. By the more recent period, the editors report a significant amplification and diversification of fields, with mental health and psychometrics leading the topical distribution but with cross-cultural psychology emerging as an area of high relevance. This diversification matters for the journal’s scientific identity: a publication dominated by a single methodological specialty tends to attract a narrow community of authors and citers, whereas a journal that hosts work spanning assessment, mental health, and cross-cultural research can participate in a much wider range of scholarly conversations. The editors interpret this shift as attesting to the journal’s openness to a wider variety of research areas and its capacity to host a comprehensive academic dialogue.

Editorial operations appear to have kept pace with the growth in volume. In 2024, the journal recorded an author satisfaction rate of 91 percent, a figure the editors present as evidence of an efficient and respectful editorial experience despite the more than fivefold increase in manuscript flow. Sustaining service quality during rapid scaling is a well-known challenge in academic publishing, since review capacity, editorial staffing, and production workflows all come under pressure as submission counts climb. The editors attribute much of the journal’s success to its Editorial Board, which they describe as nationally rooted but globally expert, currently composed of academics from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, the United States, Luxembourg, Georgia, Turkey, and China. They also credit managing editor Felipe Vilanova for his assistance over the last years, along with Springer editors Bruno Fiuza and Kimberly Poss.

The retrospective is also notable for what it reveals about the governance of the journal. Costa and Marsico state that their tenure is concluding as a result of their decision, informed by strategic differences with the Brazilian Society of Psychology regarding the journal’s continued future growth and development. The editorial does not elaborate on the nature of those differences, but the framing makes clear that the outgoing editors view the period they led as one of deliberate, strategic expansion rather than passive growth. Their decision to publish a data-rich account of the journal’s trajectory at the moment of their departure provides the scientific community with an unusually transparent record of what a sustained editorial strategy can achieve for a mid-ranked national journal seeking international standing.

The broader significance of the Trends in Psychology story lies in what it suggests about the changing geography of scientific publishing. The editors emphasize that the journal, originating from Brazil, is dedicated to fostering dialogue within the international research community, particularly with authors from the Global South. Journals based outside the traditional publishing centers of North America and Western Europe have historically struggled to attract international submissions, citation visibility, and readership, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which visibility begets submissions begets impact. The metrics documented in this editorial, from the 1,700 percent rise in downloads to the crossing of the citation median, offer a concrete case study of how that cycle can be broken. As the outgoing editors put it in their closing reflection, they hope the journal remains committed to advancing psychological science and providing a dynamic, inclusive, and impactful space, from Brazil, for researchers worldwide.

Subject of Research: Editorial retrospective of bibliometric and readership growth at the journal Trends in Psychology from 2019 to 2024

Article Title: Trends in Psychology: a Remarkable Period of Growth and Global Impact 2019–2024

Article References: Brandelli Costa, A., & Marsico, G. (2025). Trends in Psychology: a Remarkable Period of Growth and Global Impact 2019–2024. Trends in Psychology, 33(4), 1225-1226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00510-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00510-7

Keywords: Trends in Psychology, bibliometrics, CiteScore, h5-index, scientific publishing, Global South, Brazilian Society of Psychology, cross-cultural psychology, mental health, psychometrics, journal impact, editorial governance

The dominant modern framework, shaped by landmark work from Miyake and colleagues in 2000 and refined by Adele Diamond and others, treats executive functions as a multidimensional construct with three core components: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibition. Working memory stores and manipulates information in the moment; cognitive flexibility allows thoughts and actions to shift when circumstances change; inhibition suppresses irrelevant stimuli, intrusive thoughts, or premature responses. Yet while this tripartite view is widely accepted, most studies have treated inhibition as a single, unitary quantity, measured with one task and entered into models as one number. That shortcut, the new research argues, has obscured crucial structure.

Cognitive psychologists such as Harnishfeger and Nigg long ago proposed that inhibition is itself multidimensional, comprising at least three distinct processes that differ in the level of mental representation they act upon and the stage of processing at which they operate. Perceptual inhibition works at the earliest stage, dampening the activation of representations triggered by distracting stimuli in the environment, a function sometimes called interference control or attentional inhibition. Cognitive inhibition operates deeper into processing, suppressing unnecessary or intrusive memories and thoughts that could otherwise hijack attention. Response inhibition intervenes latest of all, in the moments before an action is emitted, holding back automatic or habitual motor responses that conflict with current goals. The new study is, to the authors’ knowledge, the first to test competing models of how the major executive functions relate to one another while explicitly separating these inhibitory types.

The researchers recruited 313 young adults aged 17 to 20, students at the University of Valencia who volunteered and completed computerized cognitive tasks in supervised group sessions. This developmental window was chosen deliberately: executive functions reach their peak of efficiency in early adulthood, yet few studies have mapped their interrelationships at precisely this stage, when processes may be becoming increasingly specialized. Participants completed three tasks from the TAC battery, a computer-based assessment system, with reaction time and accuracy recorded on every trial. The sessions lasted forty-five minutes each, and data collection continued over three months in groups of thirty to forty participants.

Perceptual inhibition was assessed with a conjunctive visual search task, in which participants hunted for a blue square among red squares and blue circles. Because every distractor shared one feature with the target, the task guarantees visual interference, and the efficiency of perceptual inhibition was indexed by the difference in response time between a no-distractor baseline condition and a condition with four distractors. Response inhibition and cognitive flexibility were both measured with the Finger Task, a Simon-type paradigm in which hand icons appear on the left or right of a screen. In congruent blocks, participants respond on the same side as the stimulus; in incongruent blocks, they must suppress that dominant tendency and respond on the opposite side, and the performance gap between blocks indexes response inhibition. A mixed block, requiring alternation between the two rules, provided the switching-cost measure of cognitive flexibility. Visuospatial working memory was assessed with a dual task in which participants recalled the positions of colored crosses in a four-by-four matrix while simultaneously naming colors in a secondary interference task.

With these measures in hand, the team used structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation to compare two theoretical architectures. The first, rooted in the inhibitory framework of Hasher and colleagues, proposes a mediated cascade: inhibitory processes safeguard the limited resources of working memory by filtering out irrelevant information, and working memory in turn supports cognitive flexibility. On this view, individual differences in inhibitory efficiency are the primary engine of variation across all executive tasks. The second, based on Diamond’s model, proposes a flatter, inclusive architecture in which inhibition and working memory are relatively distinct processes that both contribute to cognitive flexibility. The researchers also tested a constrained variant that removed working memory entirely, to verify its contribution to the fuller model.

The results were revealing. Both main models fit the data well, but the inclusive, non-mediated architecture corresponding to Diamond’s framework provided the best fit, and the constrained model without working memory failed outright, confirming that working memory belongs in any adequate account. Within the winning model, a significant relationship emerged between response inhibition and visuospatial working memory: participants who were faster and more accurate at suppressing the dominant response tendency also performed better on the working memory span task. This finding echoes the inhibitory theory’s central claim that controlling impulses and inappropriate responses frees processing resources for maintaining and manipulating information. Yet perceptual inhibition showed no such link to working memory, and the two inhibitory processes were themselves uncorrelated, evidence that they operate as relatively independent mechanisms rather than expressions of a single inhibitory faculty.

Perhaps the most striking result was what did not appear. Neither inhibitory process showed a direct effect on cognitive flexibility performance in this sample. The authors interpret this absence through the lens of developmental specialization: in early adulthood, when executive functions reach their operational peak, they may also reach maximal differentiation, so that complex abilities like task switching draw on underlying processes in ways that are too specific to register as simple direct paths. The study’s models explained a modest share of the variance in flexibility, a reminder that single experimental tasks, with their well-known impurity, capture only part of any executive construct. The authors are candid about limitations, including the non-probabilistic sample, the underrepresentation of men, the use of a single task per construct, and the omission of cognitive inhibition, the third inhibitory process, which future work should incorporate alongside other age groups.

Even with those caveats, the implications are substantial. If inhibition is multidimensional, then studies that collapse it into one measure are averaging away real structure, potentially explaining why the literature on executive function relationships has produced inconsistent findings. Training programs, clinical assessments, and educational interventions that target inhibition may need to specify which inhibition they mean: suppressing a distracting sight, dismissing an intrusive thought, and withholding an impulsive action are separable skills, and the new data suggest they do not travel together. The finding that response inhibition, but not perceptual inhibition, tracks working memory performance offers a concrete, testable bridge between two of psychology’s most studied constructs. As the authors conclude, analyzing inhibition through a genuinely multidimensional lens, rather than as a monolithic brake on behavior, is essential for understanding how the mind’s control systems are wired, and the present study provides one of the clearest demonstrations yet of why that distinction matters.

Subject of Research: The relationships among executive functions, including distinct inhibitory processes, working memory, and cognitive flexibility in young adults

Article Title: Executive Functions Interplay: A Multidimensional Model Including Different Inhibitory Processes

Article References: López-Ramón, M. F., Richard´s, M. M., Musso, M. F., Aydmune, Y., Bario, D., & Introzzi, I. M. (2026). Executive Functions Interplay: A Multidimensional Model Including Different Inhibitory Processes. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00511-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00511-6

Keywords: executive functions, inhibition, working memory, cognitive flexibility, perceptual inhibition, response inhibition, structural equation modeling, young adults, cognitive psychology, attention, self-regulation, Trends in Psychology

The theoretical foundation of the study rests on Social Representations Theory, a framework first proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici in 1961. The theory examines the commonsense knowledge that groups produce through social communication, and it identifies two core processes: objectification, in which abstract ideas become concrete and real, and anchoring, in which new information is integrated into pre-existing systems of thought. Crucially, later work by William Doise and colleagues argued that social representations are not necessarily sets of fully shared beliefs. Instead, they function as organizing principles of position-taking, meaning that people can hold divergent, even opposing, views of the same object while remaining anchored in a common symbolic framework. This insight is what makes the Brazilian case so revealing: consensus and dissensus coexist, structured by deeper shared principles.

Brazil offers a particularly fertile setting for such an investigation. The country’s contemporary political landscape is marked by intense polarization, weakening democratic institutions, and the strategic mobilization of historical narratives by political actors seeking to reshape collective memory along ideological lines. The authors note that the traditional founding myth of racial democracy, the idea that Brazil’s identity rests on harmonious fusion of white, Black, and indigenous peoples, has lost its unifying power. As animosity between political camps has grown, this myth has diluted, leaving social groups more distant from one another and national identities more fragmented. In a polarized environment, competing versions of the past become weapons in symbolic conflicts over the present.

To capture these dynamics empirically, the researchers recruited 420 Brazilian adults through online channels, including messaging groups and university networks, supplemented by snowball sampling. The sample included 173 participants aged 18 to 30, 111 aged 45 to 65, 98 aged 30 to 45, and 9 over 65. Women made up 63 percent of respondents, and politically, 38.2 percent identified with the Left, 34.7 percent with the Center, 9.5 percent with the Right, and 17.6 percent with no political camp. Each participant rated their positive and negative emotions toward ten historical events on a seven-point scale: the Arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family, Independence, Abolition of Slavery, the Proclamation of the Republic, the Military Dictatorship, the Free Vote Movement, the 1988 Federal Constitution, the Real Plan, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2022 presidential election.

The analytical engine of the study was Latent Profile Analysis, a statistical technique conducted in RStudio that identifies hidden subgroups within a sample based on patterns of responses. Similar in spirit to factor analysis, LPA uses mixture modeling to cluster individuals who answer in statistically similar ways, producing mutually exclusive profiles. The researchers evaluated competing models using three indicators: the Akaike Information Criterion and the Bayesian Information Criterion, both of which favor simpler, more efficient models with lower values, and Entropy, which measures classification accuracy on a scale from 0 to 1. After balancing these indicators, a six-subgroup model emerged as the best statistical fit, revealing six distinct ways of emotionally positioning oneself toward Brazilian history.

The first profile, labeled Nationalists, tended to rate highly positive those events that showcased Brazilian autonomy and initiative, such as Independence, the Proclamation of the Republic, and the homegrown economic stabilization program known as the Real Plan, while rating lower events in which Brazil did not take the leading role, like the arrival of the Portuguese Royal Family. A second profile, the Youth Nationalists, shared much of this national pride but diverged in evaluating the 1980s: they rated the Free Vote Movement and the 1988 Constitution lower, while expressing strong positivity toward the 2022 election. As their name suggests, 58.1 percent of this group was under 30, illustrating how social insertion, in this case generational position, shapes position-taking on the national past.

The Democrats profile, representing 8.8 percent of the sample and composed predominantly of women with left-wing affiliations, celebrated events embodying equality and citizenship, such as the Free Vote Movement and the Citizen Constitution of 1988, while rating the Royal Family’s arrival and the Military Dictatorship negatively. Intriguingly, this group also rated Abolition of Slavery lower than other profiles did. The authors interpret this not as a rejection of emancipation but as a historically informed disillusionment: abolition in 1888 functioned largely as a legal rupture that left the hierarchies of the slaveholding elite intact, and the Democrats’ enthusiasm for the 1988 Constitution suggests they value events that produced genuine structural change over symbolic milestones that did not. The Oligarchs profile, by contrast, was exclusively male and half right-leaning, and it rated events concentrating power in specific groups, such as the Royal Family’s arrival and the Military Dictatorship, very positively, while disfavoring egalitarian moments like the Republic’s proclamation and the 1988 Constitution.

Two further profiles completed the picture. The Historical Constants, 7.38 percent of the sample, rated nearly all events uniformly high, above 4.5 except for the dictatorship, showing little differentiation. Drawing on prior cross-cultural research by Hanke and colleagues, the authors interpret this consistency not as disengagement but as a distinct evaluative orientation marked by low polarization and a preference for non-extreme positions. Finally, the Republicans, the largest profile at 45.47 percent, displayed strongly polarized ratings: extreme positivity toward Independence, the Republic’s proclamation, abolition, the 1988 Constitution, and the 2022 election, paired with sharp negativity toward the dictatorship and monarchical power. Predominantly female and left-affiliated, this group exemplifies what Doise described as emotionally charged consensus anchored in core moral beliefs, a cohesive collective narrative celebrating democratic institutions and civic engagement.

Perhaps the study’s most striking theoretical contribution lies in what unites these six divergent profiles. Despite their conflicting evaluations, all subgroups appear organized around a single common principle: an orientation toward a project for society and an imagined collective future. The same event can serve as a utopia for one group and a dystopia for another, a future to be achieved or a future to be avoided. Building on work by Zittoun and Gillespie on collective imagination and by de Saint-Laurent on the role of memory in envisioning possible futures, the authors argue that remembering is fundamentally future-oriented. Groups select which past events to valorize in order to delineate the society they wish to construct, effectively sketching competing versions of Brazilian national identity. The authors caution that their sample, recruited online and overrepresenting left-leaning participants, does not fully represent Brazil’s population, and that the single-item emotional scale cannot capture participants’ subjective meanings directly. Still, the findings carry practical weight: in a world marked by rising polarization, understanding how groups use memory to imagine the future may illuminate not only what divides societies, but also what could bring them together.

Subject of Research: Group variations in emotional position-taking toward major Brazilian historical events and their link to imagined collective futures

Article Title: Historical Memories of Great Brazilian Events: Group Variations in Position-Taking

Article References: Eskinazi, R., de Fátima de Souza Santos, M., & Wagoner, B. (2026). Historical Memories of Great Brazilian Events: Group Variations in Position-Taking. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00517-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00517-8

Keywords: collective memory, social representations, Brazil, historical memory, Latent Profile Analysis, social psychology, polarization, national identity, political affiliation, collective future, Trends in Psychology, intergroup relations

The research team, led by Roseane Christhina da Nova Sá-Serafim, Gabriella Tambara Nunes de Souza, and Emerson Do Bú, designed the study around a deceptively simple question: if national and state-level documents recommend specific practices for hospital psychologists, are those recommendations actually being followed? The answer, in many cases, is no. Using an online questionnaire that presented 30 statements derived from the main guideline documents governing Brazilian hospital psychology, participants rated how closely each statement reflected their daily practice and how strongly they believed it should be implemented as a guideline. The statements spanned two domains distilled from existing professional references: the management of hospital psychology services, covering team organization, supervision, protocol development, and working conditions, and the professional performance of hospital psychologists, covering direct patient and caregiver care, interprofessional collaboration, documentation, emergency response, and bereavement support.

The technical core of the analysis was a comparison between current practice and intention to implement. For each statement, the researchers used one-sample t-tests to determine whether a practice was performed systematically, benchmarking mean ratings against the scale midpoint of 3.5 on a six-point agreement scale. Paired-sample t-tests then compared each current-practice rating with its corresponding intention-to-implement rating, revealing where professionals see room for standardization. The results showed that several recommended practices are not consistently institutionalized. In the management domain, only the systematization of psychological assessment and performance protocols failed to differ significantly from the midpoint, suggesting these activities lack routinized, standardized execution. In the performance domain, two gaps stood out: psychologists do not uniformly cap their caseloads at 12 patients per 12-hour shift, and 24-hour availability of psychological services is not systematically guaranteed across hospitals.

These two practical gaps carry significant clinical weight. The absence of round-the-clock psychological support is especially consequential in emergency departments, intensive care units, and palliative care settings, where emotional crises do not respect office hours. Meanwhile, the inconsistency around patient-per-shift limits points to a workload problem that extends beyond convenience. Unregulated caseloads can produce work overload, elevating the risk of burnout syndrome among psychologists and, by extension, threatening the quality and equity of care delivered to patients and families. The study’s authors note that clear workload standards, combined with adequate staffing, leadership support, and documentation infrastructure, are precisely the organizational conditions that implementation science identifies as decisive for translating professional consensus into routine practice.

Not everything, however, needs fixing. Several practices scored as well-established, with no meaningful difference between current performance and intention to implement. These include organizing the work process, attending to psychological complications, providing care to caregivers when needed, intervening with grieving family members, and refraining from communicating test results, a task typically reserved for physicians. This pattern suggests that while the structural and managerial scaffolding of hospital psychology remains uneven, the core relational and clinical work, listening to patients, supporting families, facilitating communication within the multidisciplinary team, is already deeply embedded in daily routines across the country.

To test whether the intention to adopt guidelines varied systematically across professional and institutional characteristics, the researchers turned to confirmatory factor analysis and analysis of variance. The two-factor structure of the intention measure fit the data well, with excellent fit indices including a comparative fit index of 0.984 and strong internal consistency for both dimensions. The subsequent ANOVAs, however, told a subtler story. Intentions to implement guideline-based practices were uniformly high across the sample, so high that the researchers describe a ceiling effect: with almost everyone expressing strong endorsement, restricted variance limits the ability to detect reliable differences between subgroups. Within that constraint, two institutional variables emerged with marginal, preliminary associations. Psychologists in public hospitals showed greater intention than those in private hospitals to implement management guidelines, and professionals in medium-sized hospitals expressed stronger intentions regarding practice guidelines than those in small hospitals.

Neither finding should be read as definitive. The authors are explicit that marginal effects falling between conventional significance thresholds of 0.05 and 0.10 should be treated as preliminary signals rather than confirmatory evidence, particularly given uneven subgroup sizes in this exploratory sample. More importantly, individual characteristics such as gender, academic degree, type of contract, hospital region, city type, and theoretical orientation showed no reliable association with intentions. The interpretive takeaway is not that these variables are irrelevant, but that universal endorsement of standardization flattens the differences the researchers hoped to detect. Hospital management model and size may still matter as proxies for governance arrangements, administrative oversight, documentation infrastructure, and service complexity, all of which shape how feasible and legitimate standardization feels within a given institution.

The study frames its central concept, intention to implement, through the lens of implementation science rather than assuming that agreement automatically produces action. Drawing on classic behavioral research, including the theory of planned behavior and meta-analytic evidence of a persistent intention-behavior gap, the authors distinguish endorsement from implementation. A professional can strongly agree that guidelines are valuable and appropriate while facing structural barriers, limited staffing coverage, inadequate documentation systems, or uneven institutional support, that prevent routine adoption. This distinction tempers causal interpretation of the results and clarifies what regulatory bodies can realistically do: leverage the observed professional consensus to advance guideline development, while investing in the organizational supports, training, supervision, and monitoring mechanisms that make fidelity achievable in real hospital conditions.

The urgency of standardization is underscored by recent crises. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the devastating floods that struck Rio Grande do Sul in 2024, hospital psychologists were called upon to deliver coordinated psychological support under extreme conditions, often without clear reference parameters. Well-defined guidelines, the authors argue, can reduce stress and trauma for both patients and healthcare teams during emergencies, promote evidence-based intervention, and facilitate collaboration among health professionals. Yet most Brazilian states lack the specific, objective guidelines that a handful of pioneering regional councils have already produced, such as the Siga Psi document in Paraíba and the technical note from Minas Gerais, which addresses professional qualification, team sizing, occupational health and safety, and medical record registration.

Looking forward, the researchers propose a pragmatic research agenda: translate the most strongly endorsed recommendations into a structured guideline package with clear operational definitions, examine feasibility and fidelity across public, private, and differently sized hospital contexts, and evaluate downstream outcomes ranging from service coverage and documentation quality to team communication, staff wellbeing, and patient- and caregiver-reported results. The study’s own limitations, including non-representative regional sampling and a lengthy questionnaire that may have induced cognitive fatigue, point toward larger and more balanced replications. What the current findings establish is a baseline: Brazilian hospital psychologists overwhelmingly want standardization, many recommended practices already function well, but the managerial and organizational conditions needed to institutionalize guidelines consistently remain a work in progress across the country’s hospitals.

Subject of Research: Current clinical practices of hospital psychologists in Brazil and their intentions to implement standardized guidelines in psychological care.

Article Title: Hospital Psychology in Brazil: Current Practices and Intentions to Implement Guidelines in Psychological Care

Article References: da Nova Sá-Serafim, R. C., de Souza, G. T. N., & Do Bú, E. (2026). Hospital Psychology in Brazil: Current Practices and Intentions to Implement Guidelines in Psychological Care. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00525-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00525-8

Keywords: hospital psychology, Brazil, clinical guidelines, implementation science, psychological care, burnout, public hospitals, standardization, multidisciplinary teams, workload, evidence-based practice, Trends in Psychology