20 years of the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest

I joined the British Psychological Society as Editor in 2000, from a Research Lectureship in Glasgow, because I was keen to bring psychological evidence to large audiences in new ways. Within the first year or so, I proposed an extension of the great work Dr Neil Martin had been doing as Associate Editor for 'Research in Brief'. The Research Digest was initially intended as a fortnightly email aimed mostly at students and their teachers/lecturers. Over two decades it has grown into so much more.

In 2003 we recruited Dr Christian Jarrett as our first Editor, and that maiden 'issue' set sail on 1 September. A few years later, we were relative pioneers in catching the blogging wave. Since then, the Research Digest has voyaged on through social media, an app, podcast and more. 

Last year, we brought the Research Digest firmly into the fold in terms of our web and app offering. Users can still access just the Research Digest as a 'Collection', or a separate timeline in The Psychologist app. But you may have noticed its content is usually right there at the top of our homepage. I firmly believe that our coverage – new studies digested by experienced writers with a background in Psychology, to better understand ourselves and our world – should be at the forefront of what we do. 

It also makes a key contribution to the Society's main Royal Charter objective of 'an advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of Psychology pure and applied', and as such our Advisory Committee have always advocated for it to remain free to all as we continue to navigate the ever-changing seas of science and publishing.

Thank you to all who have sailed with us over the years – editors and writers past and present, but also all you readers, and the thousands of researchers whose work we have covered.

Dr Jon Sutton, Managing Editor

The newbie to expert pipeline

Emma Barratt, Editor

Twenty years is quite the lifetime for a publication. 

It's almost double my time in the field. Back in 2010 I was a first year undergraduate, and I remember being more enamoured with the quirks of research than most of my peers. There was something about it that felt like exploration, with all the bizarre methodologies, all the ways it progressed and unpicked itself, and charted unknown territory. 

Research Digest, funnily enough, was the first specialist publication that was there to welcome my curiosity, and my first proper chances to interact with current psychological research. I'd seek out The Psychologist in Newcastle University's Psychology common room, where the newest edition was always kindly provided by lecturers, then flick straight to Digest. An hour or so over lunch break, and a reader could dip into several vastly different areas of investigation, encounter local names, new methods, limitations, and dream up the implications of what they'd just consumed.

It's this kind of variety and accessibility that I think I find so special about Digest. The aim of science communication in general is to break inaccessible language down and make scientific findings accessible for all, regardless of training. For me, as a student in that common room, a straight shooting, friendly look at studies was what helped me find what I loved about the field, and kept me interested. 

The success of Research Digest over the last 20 years tells me I'm not the only one who thinks like this. As your new Editor of Research Digest, I look at our newsletter with over 76,000 subscribers, our 100,000 twitter followers, our thousands of readers per month, and it's clear that a lot of you see value in that approach, too. 

I was lucky enough to get involved with Digest over the course of the pandemic. Before becoming staff, I published some pieces as a freelancer, showcasing how psychological investigations interact with the world outside of the lab; how getting boots on Mars isn't just a tech challenge, it's a human one, for example. I also wrote a textual shake-down on the biological nature of brain fog in long covid for the website, because I find it so important that non-psychologist onlookers see us continuing to dispel myths. 

Championing the importance of our field in a wider context is something I hope we at Digest can continue to do – there are so many opportunities to improve and understand the wider world better with our field. But without translating words from dense journal articles, or applying them practically outside of the confines of our labs, the impact we can have is little. If we do it effectively, though, we can be a real force for good. 

Recent polling suggests that Research Digest online typically attracts students, young readers, and those outside of psychology. I hope that our continued work can give them the same interest in our field that it did for me, sitting in the common room back in 2010. More than that, I hope that it can also be a home for those with more experience in the field, but just as much curiosity. BPS publications are a touchstone for psychologists in the UK, and continuing to strengthen and grow our diverse community will help us all grow in turn. 

I'm looking forward to writing Digest's next chapters alongside you all. 

On behalf of all those behind Research Digest, both past and present, thank you for your continued support.

Hits and sleepers through changing times

Emma Young, Writer

In May 2017, I joined the Research Digest as a staff writer. At the end of every month, Christian Jarrett – who was Editor at the time – would reveal the 10 most-read posts of that period. Pretty quickly, it became clear to me that some of my stories were more popular than others. Anything to do with romantic relationships, for example, tended to do well. 

Sometimes, though, the hits were unpredictable. That was certainly true for an early post that I wrote on maladaptive daydreaming. The condition affects relatively few people, but the story took on a life of its own, regularly featuring in the monthly Top 10 list even years after it was first published. 

In other cases, early stories that had seemed to feature a relatively minor finding gradually gathered momentum. As more and more supportive research emerged, those first hints of tweaks to thinking snowballed into significant shifts, and our readers' interest in the topic grew, too. 

Now, six years on, and with hundreds of Research Digest posts under my belt, the topics below stand out as those that caught me early, and that have held both my and the readers' attention ever since.

Facial 'expressions'

My first ever post for the Digest was on research that found differences in the facial expressions of men and women. The participants were crowdsourced from France, Germany, China, the US, and the UK. While they watched ads on everything from confectionary to cars on their home computer, the camera streamed images of their face to a remote server. 

The results showed that women smiled more often than the men and also performed more 'inner brow raises', an expression linked to fear and sadness. The team linked these findings to societal expectations that women should be happy. They also found that the men frowned more often. Rather than automatically concluding, though, that this showed that men were angrier, they suggested an alternative explanation: that the men were concentrating harder, or were more confused.

In 2017, the idea that smiles, frowns, grimaces and so on are reliable expressions of specific emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, etc.) was very popular. In some quarters, it still is. But over the past six years, the idea that facial 'expressions' are not what we often take them to be has gained serious traction. 

In 2018, I covered what we dubbed a 'radical new theory' that proposed that facial expressions are not emotional displays but 'tools for social influence'. As an example, according to this theory, when someone smiles at another person, this is a signal that they want to have a positive, friendly interaction – not a simple expression of happiness. This persuasive re-think of what exactly we signal with our faces deservedly attracted plenty of research attention. It was also featured by Malcolm Gladwell, no less, in his 2019 book, Talking to Strangers. 

Then, in 2023, the two architects of the theory, Carlos Crivelli and Alan Fridlund, teamed up with colleague Miles Patterson to publish a review paper criticising the field of non-verbal communication more broadly. The field is plagued with persistent misconceptions and incorrect 'truths', the trio concluded.

In just six years, for me – as for many others – my thoughts on what we do 'express' with our faces and our bodies had been completely overhauled.  

Maladaptive daydreaming 

People with 'maladaptive daydreaming' spend an average of four hours a day lost in their imagination. This was the headline of the story that, against all expectations, was still drawing legions of readers years after its June 2018 publication. 

Maladaptive daydreaming (MD), sometimes known as daydreaming disorder, involves spending hours at a time in a fantasy world. For some sufferers, real world social interactions are replaced with fantasy ones, causing their relationships to deteriorate. The condition is not included in standard mental health diagnostic manuals, but it does have cyber-communities dedicated to it. 

As my post explained, Eli Somer at the University of Haifa and Nirit Soffer-Dudek at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, recruited 77 self-diagnosed sufferers for their study. It was the first to explore the mental health factors that accompany the condition. One of the pair's biggest conclusions was there are links between MD and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sufferers reported feeling compelled to daydream or to carry on daydreaming even after many hours had passed.

In 2020, an independent team studied Saudi medical students and reported that MD harmed their grades and was also linked to higher scores on a measure of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). It's possible that the two conditions drive each other, the researchers suggested: 'MD may develop as a means to escape from the harsh reality and anxiety into a safe fanciful world, and in the opposite way, GAD can emerge due to the inability to adequately manage the time-consuming daydreams and the highly demanding academic obligations.' One of this team's most remarkable findings, though, was that no less than 70 per cent of their sample of medical students had MD. To assess this, they had used the MD scale devised by Eli Somer.

That same year, Somer and colleagues reported the results of a survey of people in more than 70 countries, which found that levels of maladaptive daydreaming were higher during Covid-19 lockdowns. This study also found that people with 'probable MD' who reported pre-existing anxiety and depression had felt a greater urge to daydream during the pandemic, and had found it harder to control this behaviour. Like the Saudi study, then, these results linked anxiety and MD.

Though MD seems to be enduringly popular with the wider public, it is still relatively under-studied. Even basic questions, such as, 'How common is it?', are yet to be answered. Research in Israel published in 2022 concludes that perhaps 2.5 per cent of the Israeli-Jewish population suffer from it. Clearly, this is massively lower than the rate found for the Saudi medical students. Why there should be such a disparity is not clear. 

But if there are still many questions about MD, one thing's for sure – there are plenty of people out there who will be very interested in hearing the answers.

Conversation 

In 2018, I wrote a light but positive story about conversation. In contrast to the well-publicised findings of earlier work, a study in Psychological Science led by Anne Milek found that there's no need to avoid small talk in favour of profound conversation. According to this later, larger study, the level of small talk that participants engaged in made no difference whatsoever to their life satisfaction. 

This turned out to be just the first in a series of good-news stories about conversation in particular, and our interactions with other people in general. 

Later that year, I covered the 'liking gap' – how we underestimate the positive first impression that we make on strangers. Three years on, I was able to report that the same thing had been found for children. This work showed that kids as young as five underestimate how much their peers like them. 

Then, in 2022, came work on London-area train commuters finding that we mistakenly think strangers are less likely to want to talk to us than they actually are. 'People may avoid pleasant conversations with strangers because of mis-calibrated concerns about starting them,' concluded Juliana Schroeder and colleagues. 

The positive findings about conversation don't stop there. In fact, they keep coming. In 2023, for example, a study in the US found that just one 'quality' conversation with a friend in a day makes people feel happier and less stressed. (The team defined 'quality' as really listening, showing care, and taking time to value the other's opinions.) This held not just for lonelier people, but even for people who reported having fulfilling lives. 

Striking up a conversation, especially with a stranger, is something that makes many people feel anxious – especially post-Covid-19. In fact, at least part of the reason that studies on conversation are so appealing to readers now is surely because for so long we were starved of it. In changing times, the topics that the public and researchers alike find most compelling can of course change, too.

Digesting research is about more than academia

Emily Reynolds, Writer

The world of psychological research is impossibly vast, and over the last few years I've written hundreds of stories on topics ranging from automation, to memory, to coffee's relationship to impulse buying. It's been an eclectic and exciting mix. 

The one subject I keep returning to, however, is societal change – how psychological research can help us understand our social, political, and personal worlds, as well as how the three things intersect. 

There have been stories about politics – about how and why we vote, the personality traits that influence political leanings, and how the political landscape impacts our mental health. We've covered lots on gender: myths about sex differences, sexism, and looking beyond the binary. We've shared research on race, class, and disability, and the experiences of many marginalised groups. Much of the research on relationships, education, healthcare, and childhood we've covered also touches on these topics. 

Part of my fascination with social change has its roots in social action. With the right approach and attention, psychological research reaches beyond just being academic; it can have a serious impact in the real world, too. Our coverage often reflects this, with many, many of the studies we cover at the Research Digest concluding with strong and material suggestions for interventions, some of which are small-scale, and some larger. 

For example, much of the education or healthcare research we cover gives us suggestions on how teachers and healthcare workers can practically change the way they work to make life easier for minoritised or typically-excluded people; the adjustments needed to make neurodivergent people more comfortable in eating disorder treatment, to use one example. 

On a larger scale, digesting research on political action can help activists understand why people believe certain things and act the way they do, fostering understanding and helping formulate wider social change. They can also help us understand the mechanisms of how we relate to each other. We recently covered research that suggested that co-operation, though differing in type and frequency across cultures, looks like a universal thing; writing about research like this has a potentially profound impact, allowing readers to learn more about what unites our species.

For research to offer a true window into society, that means how it's conducted is also important. Many studies, even while they look critically at hegemonic power structures or structural oppression, can replicate these dynamics. Studies that exclusively use WEIRD participants – that is, White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic – are highly prevalent, with some research suggesting that up to 90 per cent of studies draw from this demographic. Highlighting this, and covering studies that actively seek to reach beyond WEIRD demographics, is an important part of my work.

Some of this is about looking at co-produced research, which truly follows the ethos of 'nothing about us without us', while other examples are instructive in a different way. For instance, I wrote an in-depth feature about unwitting participants in research, where social media datasets are used for research into mental health. Some of those I spoke to were upset by the idea their personal reflections on mental health could be used, without their consent, by academics. While affecting the world outside of academia is the goal, being able to highlight these issues within our field is a valuable opportunity to improve the way we investigate, too. 

Understanding ourselves and our social world is the first step to improving it – which makes sharing, understanding, and digesting psychological research a vital tool for social change. I remain just as excited about covering these pieces, and highlighting potential for positive change, as I did when I started at the Digest in 2019.

A critical friend through changing times

Matthew Warren, former Research Digest Editor, on its ethos [online extra]

Twenty years ago, the British Psychological Society's Research Digest began as a plain text email newsletter, sent out every fortnight with a main target audience of A-level psychology students and their teachers. Today, it's an integral part of The Psychologist and broader Society website, providing daily analysis of the latest psychological research to a large audience right around the world.  

Clearly, a lot has changed in the past 20 years. But the Digest also retains much of its character and ethos from those early days, which helps to explain its enduring appeal. 

Never merely a cheerleader

I had the privilege of editing the Research Digest between 2019 and 2023, and constantly at the back of my mind during this time was the following passage from our website, written many years ago: 'The Research Digest showcases psychological science while also casting a critical eye over its methods. The team … strive to write in a style that educates, entertains and generates interest, but without resorting to hype.'

It was this approach that appealed to me when I first joined, and one that I tried to maintain during my tenure. With some notable exceptions, the Digest doesn't often do traditional science journalism – we don't usually go out and interview experts or seek outside comment on papers. But that doesn't mean that we are simply doing PR for psychology. Instead, we are like a critical friend, probing and criticising where necessary, pushing the field to improve, and never just acting as a cheerleader.

What does this mean in practice? In part, it means employing independent writers with degrees in psychology, who can use their expertise to provide critical commentary on individual research papers. But it is also about grappling with some of the wider issues affecting the field, whether that's considering how to make psychology more diverse and representative, or pointing out how flawed methodology is undermining whole areas research. And this has always been something that the Digest has done well. Before my tenure, under editor Christian Jarrett, the Digest reported on the growing realisation that much of psychology was failing to replicate, for instance, and regularly covered how modern research is challenging some of the so-called 'classic' findings in psychology.

The blog era

Today, the Digest is fairly unique in its approach, at least in the UK: there are few other outlets with a focus on psychology that also boast the in-house expertise to critically appraise research. 

But this wasn't always the case. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw an explosion in science blogs, and psychology was particularly well-represented. The Guardian's blog network, for instance, included psychology blogs Brain Flapping and Head Quarters, written by experts like Dean Burnett, Pete Etchells and Molly Crocket, who provided critical commentary on research and dissected media coverage of psychology.

Similarly, pseudonymous blogger Neuroskeptic amassed a huge following with their sceptical look at neuroscience research, which ultimately became part of Discover's blog portal, while the Mind Hacks blog, written by Tom Stafford and Vaughan Bell, was particularly well-regarded (and BPS award-winning). 

Research Digest was very much part of that blogging ecosystem. In fact, until very recently, we still referred to the Digest as a blog. But sadly, most of these other blogs no longer exist or are inactive. News organisations, including The Guardian and Discover, wound down their blog networks, while social media platforms like Twitter began to provide an alternative space for experts to provide commentary on research. 

Despite the demise of their blogs, these experts all continue to be key players in the communication of psychology, whether they are writing successful books, providing comments to journalists, or tweeting a critical analysis of a new paper. Others have created popular newsletters, which have some similarities with those early blogs: though for better or worse, they are often only available to paying subscribers.

Indeed, the early blogging scene seems to have been pretty central to establishing the current community of psychology writers. And in a similar vein, the Digest has provided a springboard to many writers: we've made a point over the years to commission students and less experienced contributors who want to make the leap to science communication, while Christian and I have both moved on to senior roles at other publications.    

Another 20 years?

Still, in this changing and often challenging environment, credit should go to the BPS – and particularly Managing Editor Dr Jon Sutton, alongside the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee – for ensuring that Research Digest has not only survived, but flourished. By giving prominence to the Digest and allowing it to remain an editorially-independent, open-access publication, they have cemented its place as a key authoritative voice on psychology research. 

None of this is to say that the Digest hasn't changed and adapted. Over the years, we've embraced changes in the way people consume content, publishing a successful podcast, PsychCrunch, and collaborating with The Psychologist team on an app. And while we'll always cover the fun, quirky studies, I'm personally proud of our increasing focus on research that really matters: from studies tackling gender biases to those teaching us how to effectively take action on climate change.

I'm delighted to have been part of the Digest's history – and I can't wait to see where it is in another 20 years' time.