Volume 6 Issue 5, May 2022

The stories that US universities tell about diversity, equity and inclusion do not translate to actions, explains Neil A. Lewis, Jr. Instead, their actions disadvantage the people they allegedly support.

Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.

Computational psychiatry holds promise for basic research and clinical practice in safeguarding mental health. In this Comment, we discuss why China needs computational psychiatry, why its development in China will benefit the field globally, and the challenges of promoting computational psychiatry in China and how to tackle them.

An enduring puzzle in evolution is the maintenance of costly traits. Šaffa et al.¹ examine phylogenetic evidence for the origins of genital mutilation/cutting (GM/C) in human societies, and find that these practices probably emerged multiple times during the past 5,000–7,000 years, and that female GM/C arose only after male GM/C was present in a society.

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.

Blumenstock et al. find that high-frequency mobile phone data can be used to precisely measure the impact of violence on internal displacement. Using data from Afghanistan, they show how patterns of displacement depend on the nature of violence.

In a comparative cross-cultural study of genital mutilation/cutting, Šaffa et al. find that this range of practices may have originated in the mid-Holocene (5,000–7,000 years ago), with male genital mutilation/cutting predating female genital mutilation/cutting.

Obloj and Zenger use data on US academic salaries to find that pay transparency decreases inequity (including gender pay gaps) and pay inequality, and also reduces the relationship between pay and performance.

Ruisch and Ferguson examine changes in prejudice in the United States during Trump’s presidency. They find both increases in prejudice amongst Trump’s supporters and decreases amongst those opposed to Trump, changes that seem to stem from perceived social norms.

Across five studies, Johnston and Madson find no support for the hypothesis that people with right-wing political views are more sensitive to negative and threatening stimuli than people with left-wing political views.

What do people mean when they say their lives are meaningful? Hicks and colleagues suggest that experiential appreciation, or valuing and appreciating one’s experiences, represents a unique pathway to the subjective feeling that life is meaningful.

Leveraging a global dataset, the authors show how sleep away from home depends on the sleep needs of the individual: when travelling, underslept people tend to sleep more, while well-rested individuals tend to sleep less.

Using data from over one million people, von Krause et al. show that mental speed in a decision task remains steady up to age 60, and that slowing response times before this age are due to decision caution and non-decision processes.

How do we build visual memories from a single viewing? Hedayati et al. present a deep learning model that provides a knowledge scaffold from which memory traces are extracted, storing features on the basis of requirements and compressing familiar visual forms.

Unseen contents associated with null perceptual sensitivity can be reliably decoded from brain activity in higher-order areas in single human observers. This result was reproduced in deep artificial neural networks performing a similar visual task.

Bürgers and Noppeney provide evidence that alpha oscillation frequency is not related to visual one- versus two-flash discrimination in unisensory or audiovisual contexts of the sound-induced flash illusion, either within or between observers.