Barbara Kalebić Maglica
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Rijeka, Croatia
Daniela Šincek
J. J. Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, Osijek, Croatia
Abstract
The thematic issue of Psychological Topics is devoted to contemporary themes and trends in social psychology and covers research and theoretical contributions to a wide variety of important topics in the field.
As the field of social psychology is very broad, so are the topics in this issue. The themes in this issue also show the characteristics of the times in which we live. Out of a total of 10 papers in the Special Issue, three explore the COVID-19 topic. The positive consequences of COVID-19, groups more exposed to the negative consequences of COVID-19, what contributes to greater vaccination readiness and how attitudes towards vaccination affect close relationships were addressed. The importance of the relationship, this time between yoga instructor and student, was emphasized by the authors who studied the effects of yoga on well-being. Well-being was the focus of another paper. It explores the short-term and long-term effects of news exposure on well-being. Readers of the Special Issue can read about the attention that psychologists pay to monitoring the state of human rights. Three papers focus on replications and extensions of key studies, but in different areas: self-handicapping, impression formation, and Turing decision. It has also been shown that the experience of acting and guided immersion is important for the empathy. The papers explored the topics through experiments, correlation studies, qualitative reviews, but also through triangulation studies linking quantitative and qualitative approaches. The authors come from Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and Japan.
We hope that this issue will allow readers a valuable insight into the current research in social psychology. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors who contributed to this thematic issue, and to the reviewers. Also, we would like to thank Editor-in-Chief for the opportunity to present the field of social psychology in this Special Issue, and the entire Editorial Board for their help in the technical preparation of the paper.
