JARMAC Featured Content
Each quarter we present a selection of high quality papers from the latest JARMAC issue. These articles are nominated by the journal’s editors and are considered to be of interest to everyone with a broad interest in applied memory and cognition. Please click on the article titles within each post to be directed to the full article.
Questions regarding the research can be addressed to the corresponding author.
All articles are free to access for 3 months within publication.
JARMAC Editors Choice: Volume 15 Issue 1
Concept creep and the calibration of harm
Haslam, Nick; Tse, Jesse S. Y.
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 15(1) of Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (see record 2027-56641-001). The following errors occurred in the reporting of natural language processing study findings in the “Historical Changes in Mental Health Concepts” section. These errors do not affect the broad conclusions of natural language processing research on concept creep. First, the statement that “Baes et al. (2024) showed that the generic concepts ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental health’ both broadened horizontally in the Corpus of Historical American English/Corpus of Contemporary American English and psychology corpora” should have made this claim only about the psychology corpus. Next, the statement that “Xiao et al. (2023) obtained evidence for the vertical creep of ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ after statistically controlling for an important confound” should be revised to “Xiao et al. (2023) obtained evidence of a confound that may obscure the vertical creep of ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression.’” Finally, the statement that “Baes, Haslam, and Vylomova (2023) found evidence of rising pathologization of a range of unpleasant experiences (e.g., stress, anger, distress, grief, stress, worry)” should be revised to “Baes, Haslam, and Vylomova (2023) found evidence of rising pathologization of a range of unpleasant experiences (i.e., addiction, grief, stress, worry).”] Concept creep occurs when harm-related concepts broaden their meanings. It has been implicated in variety of significant cultural developments in recent years, from political polarization and “safetyism” to the mental health crisis. This article presents the theory of concept creep and reviews research on the phenomenon and its implications. Special attention is paid to the expansion of mental health–related concepts. We argue that this semantic inflation has several beneficial consequences, such as eroding stigma and promoting help-seeking, but may also worsen mental health via self-diagnosis and trivialize serious mental health problems. Applied cognitive psychologists have important roles to play in clarifying the mechanisms and effects of concept creep and designing interventions to address them. We raise three research priorities: understanding judgments of mental disorder as signal detection, modeling how conceptual inflation trivializes some harms while exaggerating others, and determining how best to counter mental health misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Captured memories: The impact of first-person versus third-person viewpoint photographs on remembering personal experiences.
Diehl, Kristin; Barash, Alixandra; Ko, Minjeong; Gal, Zauberman
People take a staggering number of photos to capture experiences. How do features of the photos people review affect how they will remember these experiences? Across five studies, both in field settings and using respondents’ own experiences and photos (N = 709), we find that reviewing a single or multiple photos that included the self shifts people’s memories toward an observer’s memory perspective, rather than that of their original experience. However, when reviewing photos that depict a first-person viewpoint, memories are recalled more from an actor’s memory perspective. While prior research explicitly instructed people to adopt a particular viewpoint during recall without photos, or examined the effect of recall involving photos correlationally, we causally demonstrate how this shift can occur naturally, by simply reviewing photos. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
