Our favourite Research Digest stories of 2022

It's been a busy year for the Research Digest. In 2022, we gave our website a much-needed overhaul, combining forces with The Psychologist to provide a one-stop shop for all your psychology news from both publications. We also launched a new app together, for those of you who prefer reading our stories on your phones.  And we've revamped our weekly newsletter too (if you're not already subscribed, you can sign up right here).

Alongside all of these exciting changes, we've continued bringing you our critical analysis of the latest psychology research. For our final post of the year, we're taking a look back at our ten favourite stories of 2022: papers we've enjoyed covering because they were particularly interesting, useful, or thought-provoking.

A good reason to get in contact with that old friend you've been thinking about

For many people, I suspect 2022 was a year of rekindling old friendships after a couple of years of relative isolation. But fear of rejection can make it intimidating to be the first one to get in contact with a long-lost friend. So there was welcome news in a study we covered in August, which found that we underestimate just how much people from our past want to hear from us.

Tackling psychology's gender diversity problem

In countries like the UK and US, women make up the majority of psychology students and junior faculty. And yet, women remain underrepresented in more senior roles. This year we looked at two papers that explored some of the reasons for this underrepresentation.

A paper in Nature Neuroscience found that there is a lack of gender diversity among science's "gatekeepers" — namely, journal editors — suggesting that men disproportionately decide what research gets published. Another study in Psychological Science revealed that women are less likely than men to ask questions at scientific conferences, a difference that may arise because women feel less comfortable and more anxious about participating, and which could model to young researchers that academia is a "male" career.

Adopting a smile can make you feel (a little bit) happier

In October, a group calling themselves the "Many Smiles Collaboration" published the results of a global study into the facial feedback hypothesis, the idea that facial movements influence emotion. This has been a contentious theory, not least because one of the best-known findings in support of the idea — that simply holding a pencil between the teeth to simulate a smile made people feel more amused by humorous cartoons — notoriously failed to replicate.

The results of the new study are interesting and nuanced, suggesting that adopting a smile can indeed make you feel happier, but the effect is small and only applies in some situations. However, perhaps the most exciting thing about this study was its "adversarial" nature. The global group consisted of some researchers who were against the hypothesis, some who were for it, and some who had no strong feelings either way. But despite these clashing views, they worked together to try and overcome some of the limitations of past work. It would be nice to see more research done like this.

The double-edged sword of parenting Instagram accounts

As the father of a toddler, I know all-too-well the mixed feelings that come from scrolling through parenting Instagram. On the one hand, it can be a useful place to get information and form a connection with other people going through the highs and lows of being a parent. On the other, it is rife with bad advice, unrealistic portrayals of parenting, and influencers with holier-than-thou attitudes.

And I'm not alone. A study this year on mothers who used Instagram found that most felt supported by parenting influencers or professional accounts that shared information about child development. But these accounts also made many mums feel less competent.

The psychology of superstitions

From carefully avoiding cracks in the pavement to saluting every magpie that you meet, superstitious behaviour is really common. But why do we have superstitions? Where do they come from? And are they helpful or harmful? Ginny Smith explored these questions in episode 30 of our PsychCrunch podcast.

This year we've also published episodes on why people share false information and on how to better understand your cat. And we've got more episodes in the works for early 2023, so make sure to subscribe to PsychCrunch wherever you get your podcasts.

Highlighting racial disparities in Covid outcomes can backfire

Covid-related psychology research didn't feature as prominently in 2022 as in the past two years. However, we did cover several important pieces of Covid work, and this was perhaps the most troubling. In countries like the UK and US, ethnic and racial minorities have been hardest hit by the disease. But, as guest writer Emma L. Barratt reported, when White people were told the reasons for these disparities — namely that they are the product of long-standing health inequalities — they saw Covid as less of a threat and showed reduced support for public health measures.

The researchers suggest that participants may have been comparing themselves to those more at risk as a way of coping, and this led to them erroneously seeing Covid as less dangerous. But whatever the exact mechanism of this effect, the paper shows the importance of careful messaging when reporting on racial disparities in health outcomes.

The downside of being an extravert

Extraverts tend to be portrayed in a pretty positive light. They are the life of the party, excel in the workplace, and possess outstanding social skills. But there's a bit more to the picture than this: a series of studies in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that we also think extraverted people are poorer listeners. The researchers suggest that we see extraverts' sociability as fairly one-sided, and believe that they are more concerned about seeming sociable than actually paying attention to what others are saying.

For more on the benefits and downsides of being extraverted, check out this piece from August.

Surprise, surprise: fans of horror movies are just as kind as everyone else

People see fans of horror films as less kind, empathetic and compassionate than comedy or drama fans — but there's no truth to this stereotype. That's according to a preprint we covered in June, which found that horror fans scored no lower than others on measures of empathy and compassion, and were just as generous when it came to donating money.

Sometimes psychology research gets criticised for producing results that are self-evident. I expect to most of us it's not the least bit surprising that people who watch horror films are just, well, normal people. But this kind of research is valuable: even if something seems intuitively right, it's still important to show it empirically. And it wasn't that long ago that horror fans were being decried as a danger to society — something to think about when it comes to more modern moral panics.

The psychological effects of your morning coffee

Many of us use coffee to get going in the morning, or to add a little zing to a flagging workday. But caffeine doesn't only boost alertness. Recent research has found that the simulant can help people react faster to moving targets and even improve memory. However, as Emma Young explained in this piece, caffeine can't solve all our problems, and in some cases can have less-than-desirable psychological effects.

Growing up in a city can make you a worse navigator

Early this year, a massive analysis of data from nearly 400,000 players of a mobile game found that people who grew in rural or suburban areas tended to be better at navigating than those who grew up in cities. But this effect also depended on the country people came from. In nations like the United States, where cities tend to be laid out in grid fashion, people who grew up in rural environments had a considerable advantage. But in countries like Austria, where cities developed more organically and roads have lots of twists and turns, this advantage was diminished, presumably because the layout of those cities requires people to develop stronger navigational skills. People from grid-like cities did have one advantage: they were better at navigating grid-like levels of the game. Overall, the study suggests that we develop navigation strategies based on the demands of the environment in which we grew up.