Primenjena psihologija

Promoting Open Science Principles and Primenjena psihologija (Applied Psychology)

David Mellor — 2023-12-28

At its heart, “open science” is a simple matter of sharing key parts of the research process that are traditionally not shared. These include detailed methods, protocols, and other materials needed to conduct the work: detailed analytical steps or code used for data analysis, the raw data collected during an investigation, and preliminary drafts of the manuscript. A default towards not sharing may be for many reasons, but for many years, the largest reason is that it was simply not possible to share raw data before online publication became the standard. That status quo became embedded in lab culture, and simply changing the status quo in a community as decentralized as the scientific community is always going to be a slow process. The fact that sharing more details about the process of scientific research represents a possible risk for the researcher, in a system where only statistically significant findings are publishable (Dickersin 1990; Komukai, Sugita, and Fujimoto 2023) and where others are not required to share their materials, makes it all the more challenging to move beyond the current state. By presenting activities at the Center of Open Science and efforts by the Primenjena psihologija editorial board, we appeal to our readers and fellow researchers to embrace the open science practice and use the examples provided in this special issue as a guidance for their future scientific endeavors.

Family Transmission of Executive Functions: Mix of Traditional and Citizen Science Research Approach

Ilija Milovanović — 2023-12-28

The aim of this study was to examine the family transmission of executive functions deficits (working memory and inhibitory control) from parents to children, using a combination of traditional and citizen science research approaches. The final sample consisted of 110 families with two children (440 participants; 110 pairs of children, 110 fathers and 110 mothers). Children were preadolescent (6 to 10 years old; 24 pairs) or adolescent (11 to 15 years old; 86 pairs) siblings. The research results indicated that the inhibitory control of the mother is related to the inhibitory control of the younger child, and that the inhibitory control of the father is related to the inhibitory control of the older child in the family, regardless of developmental period. In the father-child relationship, it was revealed that there is a strong connection between parental and child working memory. On the other hand, there are significant interaction of mothers' working memory and age of children in the second-born child. Potential mechanisms of transmission were discussed, bearing in mind the specifics of mother's and father's involvement in raising children, as well as the potential direction of this research question towards the sphere of behavioral genetics and parenting styles.

Personality adjectives in Serbian Tweets: An opening

Petar Čolović — 2023-12-28

There has been a great interest in investigating relations between personality and language use on the web or social media. Most of the recent studies are based on mining the users’ information available online and then using machine learning algorithms to predict their personality characteristics. On the other hand, a few studies relied on the traditional lexical hypothesis when exploring personality under the assumption that personality-related attributes could be obtained from dictionaries. However, little is known about personality structure from Twitter/X - do data strictly reflect personality structure as represented by personality models, or as unique personality semantic patterns. The aim of the study was to assess and interpret the personality adjective-based structure contained in tweets. The data were collected from an open-access „Tweet-sr“ Serbian Twitter linguistic corpus (Ljubešić & Klubička, 2014). Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a topic modeling technique, was conducted to extract topics and cosine similarity was used as a measure to determine topic similarities, as well as similarities between the topics and personality dimensions. The results showed that the optimal solution comprised four non-overlapping topics reflecting specific semantic structures. Topics did not replicate trait constructs but were modestly related to them. The largest similarities were found with Extraversion and Agreeableness, pointing out the conceptual importance of these traits when describing interpersonal behavior. Also, no inter-topic differences in word category distributions were found, with the evaluation terms being the second most frequent in three topics. Although tweets are short-form text messages, they have the potential to communicate socially relevant information through personality descriptors.

Coronaphobia – What Do Coronaphobia Scales Measure? An Analysis of 12 Open Instruments and their Correlates

Luna Radević — 2023-12-28

Previous studies confirmed the psychological, psychosomatic, and economic consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak, which lead to the introduction of a new concept of coronaphobia as a persistent and excessive fear of the novel coronavirus. With the beginning of the pandemic, the interest in coronaphobia-related measurement began and until 2021, 12 instruments were created, with a total of 28 (sub)scales. The first aim of this study was to explore the joined factor structure of these measurements. The second aim was to explore a wide range of correlates of coronaphobia (sociodemographic characteristics, general anxiety disorder, Big Five traits, knowledge about coronavirus, and political orientation). The sample included 347 participants (42.1% male) from the general population of Serbia and data were collected in April 2021. Results showed that only one component could be extracted based on 28 (sub)scales of coronaphobia, meaning that physiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of coronaphobia are rather intercorrelated. Furthermore, among explored correlates, general anxiety disorder had the highest contribution to the explanation of coronaphobia. Additionally, Openness showed a negative, and age showed a positive contribution to the explanation of coronaphobia. Our results suggest that coronaphobia should be understood as a syndrome that captures physiological, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects, and that individuals who are already prone to anxiety disorders are more prone to coronaphobia as well.

Open access practice in personality research: a bibliometric perspective

Dejan Pajić — 2023-12-28

The primary aim of this study was to investigate the structure and dynamics of current research in personality psychology, with a particular focus on open access (OA) practices. A set of 57296 research articles in personality psychology indexed in the Scopus database were analyzed based on their online accessibility: closed (39523), green OA (8770), gold OA (4506), bronze OA (2704), and hybrid gold OA (1793). Although the proportion of OA articles in the overall sample was relatively modest (31%), there has been a consistent upward trend since 2012. Notably, the most significant increase was observed in the proportion of gold OA articles, whereas the number of deposited articles (green OA), not otherwise freely available online, experienced a decline. The knowledge domain of non-OA articles in personality psychology can be broadly delineated into five clusters: (Big Five) personality traits, personality disorders, emotion regulation, Dark Triad/Tetrad, and psychometrics. The emergence of COVID-19 as a “hot” research topic resulted with significant differences in the knowledge domain of non-OA and OA articles. Co-authorship network analysis revealed that authors from Western countries act as the central hub in personality research, though this centrality diminishes when only gold OA articles were taken into account. Gold OA articles performed the worst on most impact and outreach metrics except one, significantly surpassed by green OA articles. As a takeaway, it may be said that although you may need a significant amount of money to do the research, you don’t need it to make your research open and make an impact.

Open Science Practice in Western Balkan Countries

Snežana Smederevac — 2023-12-28

This comprehensive review explores the landscape of open science in the Western Balkan Countries (WBCs), offering insights into existing policies, infrastructure, and practices. The analysis spans a spectrum of stakeholders, encompassing decision-makers, research funds, institutions, and individual researchers. The review is structured into four sections, each shedding light on crucial aspects of open science. The initial section investigates Open Science /Open Access (OS/OA) policies in WBCs, providing a foundation for understanding the regulatory landscape. The second section delves into OS/OA repositories within the region, emphasizing the significance of digital platforms for research dissemination. The third section focuses on OA practices, elucidating the prevalence of national OA scientific journal in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Additionally, a bibliometric analysis of OA publishing in the WBCs, based on Scopus-indexed articles since 2012, offers valuable insights into disciplinary representation in OA practices. The final section examines the intersection of OS/OA and public engagement, particularly within the realm of psychology. Highlighting examples from the STAR Center, this section showcases initiatives that contribute to the development of OS/OA policies, infrastructure, and practices in Serbia, underscoring the Center's dedication to citizen science.