Theories and explanations in psychology

Abstract

Research in psychology has undergone many changes in the last twenty years. The increased and tighter relationship between psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, the emergence and affirmation of embodied and grounded cognition approaches, the grow of interest on new research topics, the strengthening of new areas, such as the social, cognitive and affective neuroscience, the spread of Bayesian models, and the recent debates on the replication crisis, represent some of the pieces of the new emerging landscape. In spite of these novelties, one character of the discipline remains stable: its focus on empirical investigation. While we think this is an important and distinctive feature of our discipline, all too often this fascination for empirical data is accompanied by the absence of an equally deep interest for theory development. Noteworthy, while other scientific disciplines are endowed with a theoretical branch - think of the role of "theoretical physics" for physics - psychology does not have an equally institutionalized theoretical branch. This lack of theoretical interest is testified also by the fact that only few journals (Frontiers represents an exception) accept theoretical articles, i.e. articles that systematize existing evidence to inform a model or develop a new theory.