Articles in 2019

What is the connection between the curated narrative of a society and the representations of memories in the individual brains of its members? In a new study, Gagnepain and colleagues show that the organization of memories in the brain reflects the structure of a culture’s shared discourse.

With diversity rising in the United States, do people believe that progress for black Americans means increased discrimination against white Americans? Despite prior evidence of such ‘zero-sum’ beliefs, a provocative new study by Earle and Hodson challenges this narrative with large, nationally representative samples.

Conveying an impression of competence is important for jobseekers and politicians alike. New work from Oh, Shafir and Todorov suggests that subtle differences in clothing shape our impressions of how competent people are. In particular, subtly richer-looking clothes elicit greater perceived competence.

Interventions to reverse harmful traditions, such as female genital cutting, have had mixed success, sometimes backfiring. Policymakers’ intentions collide with cultural traditions and the ethics of tolerance collide with universal human rights. New research introduces a cultural evolutionary modelling framework to explain previous results and guide future campaigns for endogenous change.

There is a longstanding debate about whether culture shapes regimes or regimes shape culture. New research by Ruck et al. resolves the debate in favor of culture’s causal primacy.

There is a consensus that obesity and addiction are similar, showing overlap in cognition, neural activity and personality traits. A new study using a more nuanced approach for analysing traits reveals how obesity and addiction are less similar than previously thought, while the construct of uncontrolled eating is closely related to addiction.

We have known for a while that different doctors can produce different effects using the same substance, or even placebo, such that otherwise effective treatments might become ineffective or placebo becomes effective. Chang and colleagues now clarify that such differential effects are likely transmitted by subtle facial cues, using a placebo–pain model.

When angry, we are often advised to ‘hold your breath and count to ten’ to prevent a rash response. Could a similar time conflict underlie the expression of unwanted habits? A new study in Nature Human Behaviour shows that habits can be provoked with greater time pressure, but are overridden if an individual is given sufficient time to prepare.

Memory slowly falters as we age. A new study by Dahl and colleagues tests the involvement of a tiny region hidden in the brainstem, the locus coeruleus, which enables cellular processes of learning. Better initial learning in older individuals was related to greater integrity of this region, particularly for the part that is connected to other memory regions in the brain.

How does the relationship between political leaders and their followers affect attitudes and behaviours? Kunst and colleagues show that the psychological closeness followers experience with Donald Trump is associated with more willingness to endorse and engage in political violence.

Many theories have been put forward to explain how different sound systems evolved. Whether differences in vocal tract shape play a role has so far remained unclear. Dediu et al. document subtle differences among four broad ethnolinguistic groups. Using computer simulations, they demonstrate how differences can be amplified over time, leading to diverse vowel systems.

Classic avoidance learning leads to a dilemma: if an animal always avoids a cue that lead to a negative outcome, it will never learn anything new about the cue and outcome. A new study suggests that a protected childhood period helps resolve that dilemma: children actually prefer to explore aversive cues but only do so if a parent is present.

People are often told they ‘view the world through rose-coloured glasses’. But do desires in fact change perceptual representations? A new study suggests people not only report observing what they wish was true, but they are also more likely to see what they wish was true.

As the spectre of ‘post-truth’ looms over society, an important question remains: how to effectively respond to the growing climate of science denial? New research shows that leaving denial unanswered can have negative consequences. Fortunately, countering science deniers can reduce their influence, even among those most likely to hold anti-scientific beliefs.

How do we recognize the individual faces of our family members, friends and acquaintances across the variation that is common in daily life? Zhan and colleagues demonstrate the importance of three-dimensional structure in the representations of known individuals and argue that texture—the surface properties of faces—plays little role in representation.

Understanding how misconduct spreads among people in positions of public trust is an essential first step for tackling the problem. A new study of London’s Metropolitan Police finds that transferring police officers with a history of misconduct into a new work group increases the likelihood that the new peers will also engage in misconduct.

Researchers debate whether the adoption of agriculture was done at the expense of leisure time. A new study in ten camps of contemporary Agta hunter-gatherers actually finds that individuals who engage more in non-foraging activities have less leisure time. Results highlight the need to consider the evolutionary costs of the transition to agriculture.

While simple contagions spread efficiently from highly connected ‘influencers’, new research has revealed another kind of spreading process, that of complex contagions, which follows surprisingly different pathways to disperse through social networks.

Anxiety, ‘the disease of the 21st century’, is a clinical enigma. Using virtual predators to create real-world threat scenarios, two new studies build on prior rodent-based anxiety theory to map effects of personality and decision complexity in human prefrontal cortex. We may soon have coherent neural maps of these disabling and costly psychiatric disorders.

Every person develops brain regions to recognize people, places and things; these regions end up in similar locations across brains. However, people who played Pokémon extensively as children also have a region that responds more to Pokémon than anything else, and its location is likely determined by the size of the Pokémon on the video game player’s screen.