Reviews & Analysis

A study of 30,000 parents across 6 international cohorts reveals that parental genes are linked with the investments that parents make in their offspring, from adopting more healthy behaviours during pregnancy to leaving wealth to adult children. The findings suggest that parental alleles that are not transmitted can affect children through influencing the environments that parents create for their children over the course of their lives.

Responses to survey questionnaires are a vital component of nearly all social and behavioural research. This study examined item nonresponse behaviour across 109 questionnaire items from 360,628 individuals in the UK Biobank using phenotypic and genetic data. These results were used to build an improved understanding of how item nonresponse might lead to bias in genetic studies in general.

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain have an essential role in how we perceive, decide and behave. Interacting spiral waves are now seen, from functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings, to serve as a mechanism for organizing spatiotemporal activity across the whole cortex. Further, these waves enable flexible reconfiguration of task-driven brain activity.

Refugee adolescents in German schools have fewer friends and are more often rejected than their classmates. However, refugees are less rejected in more diverse classrooms because, first, other ethnic minority peers are more accepting of refugees and, second, majority-group peers build more positive relationships with refugees in more diverse settings.

Semantic representations enable humans to identify stimuli. We illustrate that the organization of semantic representations is in part shaped by psychological needs: people who are averse to uncertainty have more-differentiated and separable semantic representations than individuals who are tolerant of uncertainty, and this separation predicts improved discrimination but poorer generalization.

One of the reasons that people perform poorly when trying to detect deception is the difficulty of integrating multiple cues into a binary judgement. A simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allowed people to discriminate lies from truths.

Polygenic indices (PGIs) are increasingly advocated as screening tools for personalized medicine and education. We find, however, that rankings of individuals in PGI distributions for cardiovascular disease and education created with different construction methods and discovery samples are highly unstable. Hence, current PGIs lack the desired precision to be used routinely for personalized intervention.

With the world expansion of education, mothers have an increasingly important role in shaping the educational status of their children, particularly for daughters and in contexts with a high prevalence of mothers who are paired with a less-educated father.

Human language processing is poorly matched by artificial intelligence algorithms. We analysed fMRI brain recordings of 304 participants while they listened to short stories and compared brain activations to artificial intelligence algorithms. Unlike such algorithms, we found that the human brain operates with a hierarchy of predictions that anticipate incoming words and phrases.

Life expectancies diverged in 2021, approaching pre-pandemic levels in Western Europe and further worsening in Eastern Europe, USA and Chile. Life expectancy deficits in 2021 are almost solely explained by premature deaths due to COVID-19. Correspondingly, countries with a higher share of vaccinated individuals suffered the least life expectancy deficit.

University faculty members train future researchers and produce new knowledge. We show that US faculty members have a parent with a PhD roughly 25 times more often than the general population, with nearly double that rate at prestigious universities. The overrepresentation of socioeconomic privilege is likely to shape scholarship and diversity efforts.

Elucidating potentially causal factors for depression and the direction of their impact could beneficially inform prevention strategies. Mendelian randomization revealed the protective role of increased relative carbohydrate intake in lowering depression risk. In addition, body mass index mediated this effect but to a lesser extent than the total effect size.

A study across 61 countries showed that, on a global scale, individuals are often inconsistent when choosing between immediate and future financial options. Although economic inequality is associated with this decision-making process, nearly everyone demonstrates these anomalies, and instability can lead to worse choices, even in wealthy individuals.

Proposals to fight online misinformation range from gently encouraging users to consider the accuracy of information (‘nudges’) to bans and removing content. Using modelling techniques, we find that these interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation, but that a combined approach can achieve a significant reduction in the spread of misinformation.

A randomized controlled trial of approximately 4,500 households in Botswana during the COVID-19 pandemic was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of using low-tech learning interventions during school closures. A simple combination of phone tutoring and SMS messages substantially improved learning in primary school children in a cost-effective manner.

Human neonates discriminate vowel sounds played forward, as in normal speech, from their waveform reversal after five hours of exposure on the first day of their life. The neural dynamics supporting this rapid perceptual learning indicate a primitive brain mechanism similar to the language-processing network of adults.

We developed a new approach that uses high-frequency mobile phone data to measure internal displacement after violent events. We used this approach to study the impact of violence in Afghanistan, highlighting how patterns of internal displacement depend on the nature of the violence experienced.

This study tested the hypothesis that negativity bias — giving disproportionately more attention and decision weight to negative than to positive stimuli — is associated with right-wing political ideology. Across five distinct studies and multiple measures of ideology, the results provide no consistent evidence that people with right-wing ideology have a stronger negativity bias.

The probability of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-resistant variants depends on the number of daily infections permitted by society, and the rate and penetrance of vaccination. Rapidly vaccinating all eligible people while maintaining strict physical distancing measures can prevent the evolution of vaccine resistance.