Jeremy D.W. Clifton

Verified

Jeremy verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Jeremy verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Senior Research Scientist at University of Pennsylvania

Beck’s insight—that beliefs about one’s self, future, and environment shape behavior—transformed depression treatment. Yet environment beliefs remain relatively understudied. We introduce a set of environment beliefs— primal world beliefs or primals —that concern the world’s overall character (e.g., the world is interesting, the world is dangerous...

Scale builders strive to maximize dual priorities: validity and reliability. While the literature is full of tips for increasing one, the other, or both simultaneously, how to navigate tensions between them is less clear. Confusion shrouds the nature, prevalence, and practical implications of trade-offs between validity and reliability-formerly cal...

When ancient humans gained the ability to investigate abstract questions, what first question did they pose? This article offers a novel, sweeping, historical analysis with important implications for psychological theory. The story begins with identifying the first question in Ancient Greek philosophy as “Where am I?” with particular interest in th...

Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication—the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological construct in one language can often measure something a bit different in another language (i.e., low “scale equivalence”). Historically, the problem was tho...

Decades of research suggest a correlation between belief in a dangerous world and political conservatism. However, research relied on a scale that may overemphasize certain types of dangers. Furthermore, few other world beliefs have been investigated, such that fundamental worldview differences between liberals and conservatives remain largely unkn...

Generalized beliefs about the world—termed ‘primal world beliefs’ or ‘primals’—have been hypothesized to affect behavior, since they contain information which influences the perceived costs, benefits, and justifications for different behaviors. For example, people who see the world as highly improvable may view prosocial behaviors as having more be...

Background and Hypothesis: Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are newly conceptualised schemas individuals form about the world’s overarching qualities. Primals fit to a hierarchical structure, e.g. the primary primal belief that the world is Good (vs. bad), and secondary primals; the beliefs the world is Safe (vs. dangerous), Enticing (vs. dull) and...

Many of us—60% of humanity, according to one study—would like to change some of our personality traits, such as decreasing pessimism or neuroticism. Dweck (2008) proposed that traits might be altered by changing beliefs. However, novel beliefs must be identified, she contends, because currently studied beliefs are empirically inadequate (e.g., low...

The Enticing world belief factor—encompassing beliefs that the world is interesting, beautiful, abundant, and worth exploring—has been hypothesized to promote subjective well-being and several character strengths (e.g., curiosity). The present pre-registered longitudinal-experimental study tests a 9-day intervention aiming to increase Enticing worl...

Sometimes skeptics are tempted to dismiss world beliefs as meaningful phenomena. Such dismissal, we argue, is a mistake. How beliefs about many different broad topics impact behavior is well-established. Psychologically-rich world beliefs have also peppered cultural milieu for centuries. Multiple, decades-old literatures have already established ps...

The Primals Inventory measures 26 constructs at 3 levels of granularity. How to refer to them briefly and clearly, that builds on existing contradictory nomenclatures (mainly from BJW and BDW literatures) has not been straightforward. For example, "BJW" in previous literatures referenced "Belief in a Just World", but 26 acronyms are unworkable; "BI...

Generalized beliefs about the world—termed ‘primal world beliefs’ or ‘primals’—have been hypothesized to affect behavior, since they contain information which influences the perceived costs, benefits, and justifications for different behaviors. For example, people who see the world as highly improvable may view prosocial behaviors as having more be...

Background Many studies suggest a link between gratitude and life satisfaction, including experimental tests of gratitude interventions. This paper presents a systematic review of recent literature on the influence of gratitude on life satisfaction. The aim of this research is to better understand the nature of the relationship between gratitude an...

Objectives: We tested whether generalized beliefs that the world is safe, abundant, pleasurable, and progressing (termed "primal world beliefs") are associated with several objective measures of privilege. Methods: Three studies (N = 16,547) tested multiple relationships between indicators of privilege-including socioeconomic status, health, sex...

Experiencing meaningful work is strongly linked to occupational health, and organizational leaders can play a role in facilitating meaningful work through various practices. However, studies identifying and classifying specific leadership practices that foster meaningful work are limited. In this article, we distill and clarify major ways leaders m...

Objectives: Courses on well-being are increasingly evaluated to see how they may promote mental health in college. We examined the impact of a course on students' well-being, anxiety, and depression. Methods: Subjects were undergraduates enrolled in the "Science of Happiness," (SOH) (n = 105), and "Child and Adolescent Psychopathology," (CAP) (n...

Experiencing meaningful work is strongly linked to occupational health, and organizational leaders can play a role in facilitating meaningful work through various practices. However, studies identifying and classifying specific leadership practices that foster meaningful work are limited. In this article, we distill and clarify major ways leaders m...

Researchers have begun to explore a category of beliefs called primals which concern the basic character of the world as a whole. After discussing primals' general significance, this chapter recommends the Primals Inventory (PI-99) to those seeking to measure them. The PI-99 was created by the first effort to empirically map all major primals indiv...

INTRODUCTION: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after disr...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inves...

Introduction: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after di...

How we perceive our surrounding world impacts how we live in and react to it. In this study, we propose LaBel (Latent Beliefs Model), an alternative to topic modeling that uncovers latent semantic dimensions from transformer-based embeddings and enables their representation as generated phrases rather than word lists. We use LaBel to explore the ma...

Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the world’s basic character, such as the world is dangerous. This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals (e.g., seeing the world as dangerous keeps me safe). We first show such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred dangerou...

Primal world beliefs ("primals") are beliefs about the basic character of the world (e.g., "the world is an abundant place"). The first effort to empirically map primals identified over two dozen such beliefs. The four highest-order beliefs--the overall belief that the world is Good (vs. bad), followed by Good's three dimensions of Safe (vs. danger...

The purpose of this document is to equip researchers of any methodological background to confidently measure primals for research purposes using any of the three versions of the Primals Inventory: the 6-item Primals Inventory (PI-6) that measures overall Good world belief, the PI-18 that measures Good, Safe, Enticing, and Alive; and the PI-99 that...

Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the general character of the world as a whole (e.g., ‘the world is an abundant place’). The first effort to empirically map major primals identified over two dozen such beliefs. The four highest order beliefs––the overall belief that the world is Good (vs. bad), followed by Good’s three dimensions...

Despite sophisticated scale-generic guidance for adapting/translating self-report scales and widespread adherence to guidance, low invariance remains a problem in cross-cultural clinical research. This may be due to scale-specific translation challenges, and original scale-creation papers provide little information about item-writing choices. It is...

Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the world’s basic character, such as the world is dangerous. This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals. We first show that such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred very dangerous to slightly dangerous world beliefs for...

If behavior is influenced by the perceived character of situations, many disciplines that study behavior may eventually need to take into account individual differences in the perceived character of the world. In the first effort to empirically map these perceptions, subjects varied on 26 dimensions, called primal world beliefs or primals, such as...

Nonpharmacological approaches to chronic pain are being increasingly sought out by therapists and health-care providers. Cognitive approaches to reduce pain catastrophizing have shown some efficacy; however, interventions used to increase well-being have not been investigated. In this study, we examined a strengths-based approach to reduce chronic...

Primal world beliefs–or primals–are a category of beliefs about the overall character of the world that inform individual differences in cognition, affect, and behavior. In a recent comprehensive effort, Clifton et al. (2019) cataloged 26 pervasive primals and developed the Primals Inventory (PI-99) to measure them. In this study (N = 592), we desc...

Primal world beliefs are a recently-identified set of basic perceptions about the general character of reality (e.g. the world is boring) thought to have many psychological implications. This article explores implications relevant to wellbeing and positive intervention research. After summarizing the supposed general function of primal world belief...

Do negative primal world beliefs reflect experiences such as trauma, crime, or low socio-economic status? Clifton and colleagues recently suggested that primals—defined as beliefs about the general character of the world as a whole, such as the belief that the world is safe (vs. dangerous) and abundant (vs. barren)—may shape many of the most-studie...

Neighborhood decline and the resulting erosion of the urban housing stock in the U.S. are typically viewed as products of forces beyond the control of cities. Yet if urban neighborhoods have the characteristics of a commons, homeowners and landlords may adopt strategic behaviors that lead to a cycle of disinvestment in the housing stock, followed b...

Beliefs matter. This paper examines the “biggest” of all possible beliefs, universal assessments (UAs), which consist of our “take” on the whole universe. UAs are a subset of worldview, which is in turn a subset of schema. After discussing the development of Weltanschauung in continental philosophy and the capacity of schemas to generate expectancy...