Great minds for healthy minds: Hogrefe OpenMind collection is now available on ScienceOpen

Today at ScienceOpen we’re pleased to welcome Hogrefe, a major publisher in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and mental health, among our new partners in 2017. Their open access collection, Hogrefe OpenMind is now available on our platform and waiting for you to read, share, comment on or review.

The collection makes a significant contribution to keeping society’s mind open about relevant social psychological issues surrounding us. The collection consists of a diverse portfolio of highly-regarded, peer-reviewed articles in English and German covering many subject areas of psychology and psychiatry. As well as studies addressing highly-professional audience, such as psychometric tests, assessment reports, or experiment design updates, articles of the collection are centred around issues in psychology touching upon the functioning of any given society but are considered to be taboo topics by convention. These form the center-pieces of the OpenMind collection, and have the potential to facilitate a better understanding of these taboos and thus to raise awareness of them. So what are these issues?

1. The evolution and functioning of stereotypes
Stereotypes are something we all live by. Being part and parcel of our very basic cognitive mechanism and categorization, they unconsciously shape our worldview. This group of studies give us a chance to develop a reflexive, deliberate view of them as well as to gain a better understanding on how they work and how they influence us and structure our thinking.

• In their study Müller and Rothermund investigate to what extent stereotypes are automatically activated.
• 2 other stereotype-related studies survey how stereotype awareness affects our behavioural patterns. More precisely, how awareness of stereotypes could affect a person’s behaviour and performance when they complete a stereotype-relevant task. They also point out which kind of stereotypes are stronger in this respect: race or gender.

2. How well do you know your biases? Priming factors underlying our moral decisions
These set of studies take us closer to the unconscious physical biases that might influence our moral judgements or self-evaluation.

• 2 of them focus on the effects of underlying physiological biases. Johnson, Cheung, and Donnellan investigate whether the sense of physical cleanliness has a potential to influence our moral judgements, while Žeželj, and Jokić study the underlying effects of another physiological factor, namely: how temporal and social distance impact the evaluation of moral acts. It’s put forward that the same act will be evaluated differently depending on the perceivers’ social or physical distance from the presented event.
• Conversely, in their study Does Recalling Moral Behavior Change the Perception of Brightness?, Brandt, IJzerman, and Blanken take a reverse perspective and takes a look on whether our moral judgements can have a feedback effect on our physiological perception.
• The forth piece is a behaviour-oriented study: it investigates the potential correlation in moral self-image and willingness to practice charity.
• Last but not least, IJzerman et al. bring the issue of infidelity to the table. Their study Sex Differences in Distress From Infidelity in Early Adulthood and in Later Life investigates men’s and women’s different emotional attitudes toward infidelity. In order to identify possible cultural changes in this respect, the authors add an age dimension to the original survey.

3. Suicide intervention
A significant part of the collection comes from the journal Crisis and contains potentially life-saving information for all those involved in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. These studies show the more general, social dimensions and implications of these, for the first sight isolated, individual-level crises. As such, the collection helps to strengthen social awareness and the perception of responsibility towards suicide phenomena, and complements our existing collection on stigmatisation of mental health issues and suicide prevention.

• 2 of these studies sketch primary and multilevel suicide prevention strategies and show evidence-based best-practices for these efforts.
• Another group of articles focus on professional target groups with a high risk of suicide. Marzano and her colleagues make recommendations on how to improve detection, management, and prevention of suicide risk among prisoners. Mishara and Martin outline a suicide prevention program for the Montreal police and Doran and his colleagues quantify the economic cost of self-harm and suicide among New South Wales construction industry workers. Yu and Sung’s study also contributes to the precise identification of the especially threatened target groups by examining risks of suicidal ideation of probationers by gender.
• Not surprisingly, one of the biggest “suicide-magnets” of the world, the Golden Gate Bridge also has its rightful place in the collection. One study examines whether the suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge is effective enough. Its results hold special relevance considering the recently growing number of committed suicides (second most-used suicide site in the world) despite the existence of the countermeasures.
• Finally, Coveney et al. surveys another means of practical aid and shows how callers’ feedback on Samaritans National Suicide Prevention Helpline can help in providing a better service and therefore save more lives.

+1 Gender bias in academia
Gender bias is definitely a highly-debated issue in current academic discourse, and even the most read article on our platform is on the subject! Mutz, Bornmann, and Hans-Dieter contribute to a clearer picture by examining whether gender matters in grant peer review in an Austrian context. Here you can see their results. Peer review option is just 3 clicks away! 
The importance of the free availability of these studies for everyone is beyond question. With the help of our new discovery tools and multiple filtering options you can easily find the most relevant pieces of the collection for you. Furthermore, you can also share them with your research community by adding them to your own collection. Take a look and get engaged!