Nick Haslam

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Melbourne

Background Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in mental health–related discussions, with particular attention focused on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. This heightened interest coincides with growing neurodiversity advocacy. The impact of these changes in the conceptualization of ADHD and autis...

Objective: Australian psychology research has become globally prominent in recent years. The present study aimed to quantify its growth and describe its current standing nationally and internationally. Method: Four databases were consulted to quantify historical trends in psychology publications by Australian-affiliated authors and to characterise...

Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) provides insight into cultural and social dynamics. Yet, the validity of methods for measuring different kinds of LSC remains unestablished due to the absence of historical benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we propose LSC-Eval, a novel three-stage general-purpose evaluation framework to: (1) develop a scalable m...

The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology is an essential guide to the study of moral cognition and behavior. Originating as a philosophical exploration of values and virtues, moral psychology has evolved into a robust empirical science intersecting psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. Contributors to this interdiscip...

BACKGROUND Social media platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in mental health–related discussions, with particular attention focused on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. This heightened interest coincides with growing neurodiversity advocacy. The impact of these changes in the conceptualization of ADHD and autis...

Theorists have argued that objectification is implicated in men’s violence against women. Growing correlational and experimental evidence supports this claim. However, little research has studied the link between objectification and violence perpetrated by intimate partners. Three studies examined this link in relation to several forms of violent b...

Rising awareness of mental illness has increased the public’s mental health literacy, with positive implications for help-seeking and destigmatization. We argue that it has also enlarged the public’s concept of mental illness. People have become better at recognizing the presence of mental illness but may have become worse at recognizing its absenc...

As with many other musical traits, the social environment is a key influence on the development of singing ability. While the familial singing environment is likely to be formative, its role relative to other environmental influences such as training is unclear. We used structural equation modeling to test relationships among demographic characteri...

Two experimental studies (Ns = 261, 684) investigated how diagnostic labels affect perceptions of people experiencing marginal levels of mental ill-health. These effects offer insight into the consequences of diagnostic “concept creep”, in which concepts of mental illness broaden to include less severe phenomena. The studies found consistent eviden...

Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions represent increases or decreases in semantic 1) sentiment (valence of a target word's collocates), 2) breadth (d...

Although riding a bicycle is an efficient, healthy and sustainable mode of travel, in low-cycling countries there continues to be negative attitudes, harassment and aggression toward riders. Recent studies have found that part of this hostility could be due to dehumanization – the belief that cyclists are lesser humans. These beliefs are relatively...

Historical linguists have identified multiple forms of lexical semantic change. We present a three-dimensional framework for integrating these forms and a unified computational methodology for evaluating them concurrently. The dimensions represent increases or decreases in semantic 1) sentiment, 2) breadth, and 3) intensity. These dimensions can be...

The present study examined the thematic composition and temporal evolution of social psychology through a co-citation network analysis of 80,350 articles published from 1970 through 2022. Six primary thematic clusters were identified: a broad “Classic Social Psychology” cluster most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s; “Traits & Affect” and “Social Co...

Substantial attention has been paid to the language of mental ill health, but the generic terms used to refer to it–“mental illness”, “psychiatric condition”, “mental health problem” and so forth–have largely escaped empirical scrutiny. We examined changes in the prevalence of alternative terms in two large English language text corpora from 1940 t...

Understanding why people identify themselves as having a mental disorder is crucial for making sense of recent rises in self-diagnosis and help-seeking. Previous studies have implicated factors such as levels of distress, mental health literacy, and stigma. Motivated by concept creep research, we tested whether self-diagnosis is also associated wit...

Over the past century the concept of trauma has substantially broadened its meanings in academic and public discourse. We document four directions in which this semantic expansion has occurred at different times: from somatic to psychic, extraordinary to ordinary, direct to indirect, and individual to collective. We analyze these expansions as inst...

The present study evaluates semantic shifts in mental health-related concepts in two di-achronic corpora spanning 1970-2016, one academic and one general. It evaluates whether their meanings have broadened to encompass less severe phenomena and whether they have become more pathology related. It applies a recently proposed methodology (Baes et al.,...

In three studies, we tested whether hierarchical preferences could explain differences in punishment recommendations for sexual harassment. Building on research that suggests punishment is used to regulate social hierarchies, we argue that individuals who are motivated to maintain existing hierarchies will treat male perpetrators of sexual harassme...

This chapter explores the relationship between personality and health. The seminal paper by Friedman and Rosenman (1959) on ‘Type A’ personality, which was introduced as a possible risk factor for cardiovascular disease, serves as a stimulus and unique case study for the personality-health relationship. We place Friedman and Roseman’s work within i...

What are the psychological factors driving attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and how can resistance to AI systems be overcome when they are beneficial? Here we first organize the main sources of resistance into five main categories: opacity, emotionlessness, rigidity, autonomy and group membership. We relate each of these barrier...

Research metrics are known to predict many markers of scientific eminence, but fellowship in learned academies has not been examined in this context. The present research used Scopus-based citation indices, including a composite index developed by Ioannidis et al., (PLoS Biol 14:e1002501, 2016, https:// doi. org/ 10. 1371/ journ al. pbio. 10025 01)...

Over the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in how dehumanization is conceptualized and studied. This shift has broadened the construct from the blatant denial of humanness to groups to include more subtle dehumanization within people’s interpersonal relationships. In this article, we focus on conceptual and empirical advances in...

Background What people consider to be a mental disorder is likely to influence how they perceive others who are experiencing problems and whether they seek help for their own problems. However, no measure is available to assess individual differences in the expansiveness or breadth of concepts of mental disorder. Four studies aimed to develop and v...

An authoritative resource for understanding the nature of mental illnesses and for pointing the way to treatment.

Background Emerging evidence suggests that a healthier diet is associated with a reduced risk for depressive symptoms. However, the relationships between diet quality and clinical depression and anxiety have not been established. This systematic review is the first to examine whole-of-diet associations in cohorts with diagnosed depression and/or an...

Research on concept creep indicates that the meanings of some psychological concepts have broadened in recent decades. Some mental health-related concepts such as ‘trauma’, for example, have acquired more expansive meanings and come to refer to a wider range of events and experiences. ‘Anxiety’ and ‘depression’ may have undergone similar semantic i...

Purpose How “mental disorder” should be defined has been the focus of extensive theoretical and philosophical debate, but how the concept is understood by laypeople has received much less attention. The study aimed to examine the content (distinctive features and inclusiveness) of these concepts, their degree of correspondence to the DSM-5 definiti...

Online misogyny has become a fixture in female politicians’ lives. Backlash theory suggests that it may represent a threat response prompted by female politicians’ counterstereotypical, power-seeking behaviors. We investigated this hypothesis by analyzing Twitter references to Hillary Clinton before, during, and after her presidential campaign. We...

Objective: The study aimed to characterise the past and current organisational location of psychology in Australian universities. Method: Contemporary and archived websites of 38 universities were examined to determine whether, in 2005 and 2022, psychology was located within a health-focused organisational structure and functioned as a stand-alone...

Background A key question for any psychopathological diagnosis is whether the condition is continuous or discontinuous with typical variation. The primary objective of this study was to use a multi‐method approach to examine the broad latent categorical versus dimensional structure of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Method Data were aggregated acr...

Trauma is an increasingly prominent concept in psychology and society at large. According to the theory of concept creep, it is one of several harm-related concepts that have undergone semantic inflation in recent decades, expanding to encompass new kinds of phenomena (horizontal expansion) and less severe phenomena (vertical expansion). Previous r...

Objective After learning of the rape allegation against the Attorney-General, Australians were divided in their support for an inquiry. We hypothesised that motivated reasoning on this issue would be associated with ideological preferences. We therefore examined whether perceptions of arguments about the inquiry could be explained by participants’...

Racism pervasively impacts the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and is a substantial barrier to accessing, engaging and succeeding within secondary education. Cultural resilience and support have been identified as critical to Aboriginal success within racist institutions. However, research examining experiences of racism and...

Bibliographic properties of more than 75 million scholarly articles, are examined and trends in overall research productivity are analysed as a function of research field (over the period of 1970–2020) and author gender (over the period of 2006–2020). Potential disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are also investigated. Over the last decade...

The positive psychology movement, launched near the start of the twenty-first century, aimed to shift the focus of psychology away from misery, conflict, and pathology toward happiness, human flourishing, and wellbeing. However, there have been few attempts to gauge whether psychology as a whole has become more positive in its focus. This study tes...

The present study sought to better understand the extent to which negative perceptions of people who receive unemployment benefits is due to their poverty status, their unemployment, and/or their receipt of income support payments. We sought to differentiate these three factors in a vignette‐based experiment drawing on a large Australian general po...

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three...

Harm-related concepts have progressively broadened their meanings to include less severe phenomena, but the implications of this expansion are unclear. Across five studies involving 1,819 American participants recruited on MTurk or Prolific, we manipulated whether participants learned about marginal, prototypical (severe), or mixed examples of work...

This study documents evaluation of the Her Tribe and His Tribe Aboriginal-designed empowerment pilot programs. The programs were designed to support Victorian Aboriginal people to strengthen mental health, social and emotional wellbeing, community connection, and to reduce psychological distress. A second aim was to explore participants’ experience...

Objectives We argue that mental health-related concepts have become degraded within professional circles and in the wider community. We identify three trends: concept creep, the rise of broad umbrella concepts (e.g. distress and trauma), and the conflation of mental health with well-being, which marginalises serious mental illness. We speculate on...

Some aspects of psychiatrization can be understood as forms of concept creep, the progressive expansion of concepts of harm. This article compares the two concepts and explores how concept creep sheds light on psychiatrization. We argue that although psychiatrization is in some respects a broader concept than concept creep, addressing institutional...

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—...

Stylistic changes in academic psychology writing were examined in a corpus of 790,520 psychology journal article abstracts published between 1970 and 2016. We anticipated that changing linguistic norms of scientific writing and rising pressures to publish and promote research findings would be evident in increasing levels of personal pronoun use an...

Emerging methods for studying cultural dynamics allow researchers to investigate cultural change with newfound rigor. One change that has recently attracted the attention of social commentators is “concept creep,” the semantic inflation of harm-related concepts such as trauma, bullying, and prejudice. In theory, concept creep is driven distally by...

The chapter investigates semantic changes in core concepts of psychology, specifically focusing on those related to harm. Haslam (2016) hypothesized that many psychological concepts associated with harm (i.e., forms of psychological disturbance , threat, and maltreatment) have undergone semantic broadening in the past half-century in association wi...

Dehumanization is traditionally considered in the context of intergroup conflict. An emerging body of research examines how it also occurs in interpersonal relationships and is associated with social exclusion and disconnection rather than conflict. This article examines how humanness implicates social relatedness, how social distance fosters perce...

Ethnic and racial group differences in help-seeking are a barrier to the effective and equitable delivery of mental health services. Asian American populations demonstrate relatively low levels of help-seeking. Explanations for this effect typically point to elevated levels of stigma in these populations. An alternative explanation is that low help...

The apparent convergence of psychology and brain science has been the subject of both celebration and critique, but it has never been systematically charted. We examined historical trends in the representation of neuroscientific concepts in a corpus of 798,402 psychology journal articles published over the past half century, from 1965 to 2016. A di...

ABSTRACT Introduction Research has highlighted relationships between the micro-organisms that inhabit our gastrointestinal tract (oral and gut microbiota) with host mood and gastrointestinal functioning. Mental health disorders and functional gastrointestinal disorders co-occur at high rates, although the mechanisms underlying these associations...

In this chapter I offer an overview and evaluation of dehumanization research within social psychology. The overview summarizes the history of that research tradition, the theoretical frameworks that have been elaborated, the wide range of definitions, conceptualizations and measures that have been developed, the many topic domains that have been e...

Over the past century the concept of trauma has substantially broadened its meanings in academic and public discourse. We document four directions in which this semantic expansion has occurred: from somatic to psychic, extraordinary to ordinary, direct to indirect, and individual to collective. We analyse these expansions as instances of ‘concept c...

Over (2021; this issue) proposes seven challenges to the body of psychological research and theory on dehu- manization that has flourished over the past two decades. As scholars who have contributed to this work, we believe her critique attacks an unrecognizable straw man that misinterprets its theoretical claims and ignores much of the empirical l...

Nonacceptance of emotion is consistently linked with increased levels of psychopathology and diminished well-being. Research has found that negative emotion and nonacceptance of emotion are positively associated cross-sectionally but has yet to directly investigate temporal associations between these constructs. Given that negative emotions are fre...

Three studies (Ns = 350, 301 & 341) examined the reliability, validity, and correlates of a new measure of harm inflation, the individual differences counterpart of ‘concept creep’. The Harm Concept Breadth Scale (HCBS) assesses variability in the expansiveness of concepts of harm (i.e., bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, trauma), such that thes...

“Concept creep” is the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma. This review presents a synopsis of relevant theoretical advances and empirical research findings on the phenomenon. It addresses three fundamental questions. First, it clarifies the characterisation of concept creep b...

It is often argued that successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have relaxed diagnostic criteria and thereby inflated rates of diagnosis. This claim has yet to be examined systematically. We quantitatively reviewed 123 studies in which one sample was concurrently diagnosed using two consecutive DSM edi...

Objective Psychiatrists are susceptible intermittently to use dehumanising terms in their clinical practice, which arguably harm patients and their families. Our goal is to shed light on this unwelcome phenomenon and to develop the means to combat it. Method We have examined journal articles, books on the history of psychiatry, and educational mat...

Taxometric procedures have been used extensively to investigate whether individual differences in personality and psychopathology are latently dimensional or categorical (‘taxonic’). We report the first meta-analysis of taxometric research, examining 317 findings drawn from 183 articles that employed an index of the comparative fit of observed data...

Background Climate change is anticipated to have profound effects on mental health, particularly among populations that are simultaneously ecologically and economically vulnerable to its impacts. Various pathways through which climate change can impact mental health have been theorised, but the impacts themselves remain understudied. Purpose In th...

This study is situated in the paradigms of positive organizational scholarship (POS) and positive organizational behaviour (POB). It draws upon the theoretical mechanisms of social learning and emotional contagion to suggest that psychological capital may spread through work teams to impact team outcomes such as performance, innovation, and organiz...

Background: Anxiety/depression and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are highly prevalent and burdensome conditions, whose co-occurrence is estimated between 44 and 84%. Shared gut microbiota alterations have been identified in these separate disorders relative to controls; however, studies have not adequately considered their comorbidity. This review...

In genocide studies, dehumanization is commonly understood as a preparatory step on the path to mass killing. On this understanding, the perpetrator’s propaganda explicitly likens victims to animals, and these dehumanizing metaphors enable violence. I argue that the role of dehumanization in genocide is considerably broader and more multifaceted th...

Research on concept creep suggests that the expansiveness of people's concepts of harm has implications for their moral judgments. The present study assessed the breadth of 201 American participants' concepts of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, examined predictors of the breadth of these concepts, and tested relationships between concep...

People employ a large menagerie of animal names to refer to human attributes and identities. Animals present a rich metaphorical domain that we can use to praise or to vilify, to express love or hatred, and to humanize and dehumanize. Although animal metaphors carry diverse meanings and serve varied ends, the more general concept of animality tends...

In our article (Lilienfeld et al., 2019), we hypothesized that psychopathy and some other personality disorders are emergent interpersonal syndromes (EISs): interpersonally malignant configurations of distinct personality subdimensions. We respond to three commentaries by distinguished scholars who raise provocative challenges to our arguments and...

Personality disorders have long been bedeviled by a host of conceptual and methodological quandaries. Starting from the assumption that personality disorders are inherently interpersonal conditions that reflect folk concepts of social impairment, the authors contend that a subset of personality disorders, rather than traditional syndromes, are emer...

Research on ‘concept creep’ argues that harm-related concepts such as abuse, bullying, prejudice, and trauma have expanded their meanings in recent decades. Theorists have suggested that this semantic expansion may have mixed implications. Broadened concepts might problematize harmful behavior that was previously tolerated but might also make peopl...

Psychotherapy encompasses a broad array of psychological procedures that typically address individual well-being or self-understanding. With diverse roots in hypnosis and persuasion, psychotherapy evolved from marginal treatment option at the turn of the 20th century to central modality in contemporary Western mental health services. Psychoanalysis...

Buchanan, R.D. and Haslam, N. (2019) "Psychotherapy," in The Cambridge Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.468-494.

It is often argued that psychoanalysis has declined in prominence since its ascendance in the mid-20th century. To assess this claim we examined the trajectory of psychoanalytic concepts from 1900 to 2008 in the massive Google Books database. The changing relative frequency of a sample of English-language psychoanalytic terms was explored and compa...

People receiving welfare payments are stigmatized. However, previous studies of welfare recipient stereotypes have not examined whether the stigma endures after payments are no longer received and have rarely considered the stigma associated with specific categories of welfare payments. We examined whether welfare stigma endures in three experiment...

Across the globe there is a critical need for culturally informed and locally valid approaches to mental health assessment and intervention, particularly among disadvantaged and marginalized populations. To be optimally effective, such approaches must be informed by a sound understanding of locally relevant idioms of distress and its determinants,...

Exposure to sexual objectification is an everyday experience for many women, yet little is known about its emotional consequences. Fredrickson and Roberts' (1997) objectification theory proposed a within-person process, wherein exposure to sexual objectification causes women to adopt a third-person perspective on their bodies, labeled which has har...

Cycling provides many benefits to individuals and society, yet in many countries attitudes toward cyclists are largely negative. Public and humorous references to violence against cyclists are not uncommon and a significant minority of cyclists report harassment and aggression. We hypothesize that these hostile attitudes and behaviours are caused,...

Objective The default assumption among most psychologists is that personality varies along a set of underlying dimensions, but belief in the existence of discrete personality types persists in some quarters. Taxometric methods were developed to adjudicate between these alternative dimensional and typological models of the latent structure of indivi...

Trends in the cultural salience of morality across the 20th century in the Anglophone world, as reflected in changing use of moral language, were explored using the Google Books (English language) database. Relative frequencies of 304 moral terms, organized into six validated sets corresponding to general morality and the five moral domains propose...

Words and word stems employed in each moral foundation and general morality dictionary. (DOCX)

Children from highly disadvantaged families tend to experience worse health, educational, and job outcomes than less disadvantaged peers. However, the mechanisms underlying these relationships remain to be explicated. In particular, few studies have investigated the relationships between the psychosocial influences that children are exposed to earl...

Genetic and other biological explanations appear to have mixed blessings for the stigma of mental disorder. Meta-analytic evidence shows that these “biogenetic” explanations reduce the blame attached to sufferers, but they also increase aversion, perceptions of dangerousness, and pessimism about recovery. These relationships may arise because bioge...

The Enduring Appeal of Psychosocial Explanations of Physical Illness Abstract: The idea that mind plays a significant role in bodily health has a long history, with a popular appeal grounded in the need for personal control. A century of research into the connections between mind and body has its roots in both psychoanalysis and physiology. While...

It has been argued that gender essentialism impedes progress towards greater gender equality. Here we present a new gender essentialism scale (GES), and validate it in two large nationally representative samples from Denmark and Australia. In both samples the GES was highly reliable and predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and supp...

We present direct and conceptual replications of the influential taxometric analysis of Type A Behavior (TAB; Strube, 1989), which reported evidence for the latent typology of the construct. Study 1, the direct replication (N = 2,373), duplicated sampling and methodological procedures of the original study, but results showed that the item indicato...

Singh proposes that shamans violate notions of humanness in patterned ways that signal supernatural capacities. I argue that his account, based on a notion of humanness that contrasts humans with non-human animals, does not capture people's understandings of supernatural beings. Shamanic behavior may simply violate human norms in unstructured, impr...

Cross-cultural differences in social perceptions pose an intriguing puzzle. East Asians, in contrast to Westerners, tend to have the view that individuals lack coherent and thematically consistent characteristics and, therefore, are likely to exhibit cross-situationally inconsistent actions and reactions. This tendency is explained in terms of naïv...

Grindr is a smartphone application for men who have sex with men (MSM). Despite its reputation as a 'hook-up app', little is known about its users' self-presentation strategies and how this relates to objectification. This article explores objectification on Grindr. The results of Study 1 showed that Grindr users objectified other men more than non...

“Sentiment” is a potentially appealing concept for social and personality psychologists. It can render some complex affective phenomena theoretically tractable, help refine accounts of social perception, and illuminate some personality dispositions. The success of a future sentimental psychology depends on whether “sentiment” can be delimited as a...

This chapter explores the origins of lay theories, with a focus on theories associated with the concept of psychological essentialism such as Dweckian entity theories. I argue that the origins of essentialist lay theories can be approached from cognitive, developmental, cultural, and social perspectives. Cognitively, these theories appear to arise...

Cypryańska and colleagues offer a critique of existing work on the self-humanizing effect and present some empirical findings motivated by their critique. In this commentary, I question their overly restrictive understanding of self-humanizing and argue that the phenomenon does not stand or fall on a definition based on a strict analogy to the bett...