Articles in 2019

Using data from 765 million online music plays chosen by 1 million individuals in 51 countries, Park et al. reveal diurnal and seasonal affective rhythms in musical intensity that are consistent across diverse cultures and demographic groups. They also report differences in baseline preferences for musical intensity across cultures and ages.

An individual’s social ties contain up to 95% of the potential predictive accuracy achievable about that individual. In principle, a social platform may therefore profile an individual from their ties only, without access to their data.

When do groups exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ vs maladaptive ‘herding’? Toyokawa et al. use modelling and experimentation to show that crowd intelligence versus herding can be predicted on the basis of the task and the social learning strategies used.

Askelund et al. show that remembering more specific positive life experiences is associated with fewer negative self-related thoughts and lower levels of stress hormones in a study of 427 adolescents at risk for depression.

This scoping review identified, summarized and critiqued 15 ontologies related to human behaviour change. The review finds that no existing ontology covers the breadth of human behaviour change and identifies the need for an intervention ontology.

Why do we continue processing external events during sleep, yet remain unresponsive? Legendre et al. use electroencephalography to show that sleepers enter a ‘standby mode’, continuing to track relevant signals but doing so transiently.

Combining behavioural modelling with functional and structural brain connectivity, Karlaftis et al. show that individuals learn the structure of variable environments by employing alternate decision strategies that engage distinct brain networks.

Adolescents regularly use digital technology, but its impact on their psychological well-being is unclear. Here, the authors examine three large datasets and find only a small negative association: digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of well-being.

In the United States, France and Germany, as peoples’ opposition to genetically modified (GM) foods becomes more extreme, their self-rated understanding of genetic modification increases, but objectively, their knowledge of the science behind genetic modification tends to be poorer.

Understanding how humans behave, why we behave the way we do, what the consequences of our behaviour are and how behaviour can change are complex, multi-faceted questions, addressed by numerous diverse disciplines that rely on different methods and types of data. We welcome them all in the journal.

A study shows that knowledge about an object’s size — how large it is in the real world — changes how people allocate attention towards the space occupied by a drawing of the object.

Natural field experiments combine randomized control with an absence of observer effects. However, they have only been used to investigate key labour market phenomena such as unemployment since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the literature and summarizes the insights natural field experiments contribute to the field of unemployment.

Nearby small objects appear larger than distal large objects, reflecting a dissociation between perceived and actual object size. Collegio et al. show that inferences of true object size scale spatial attention to objects.