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Top 25 Social Science & Human Behaviour Articles of 2022
We are pleased to share with you the 25 most downloaded Nature Communications articles* in social science and human behaviour published in 2022. Featuring authors from around the world, these papers highlight valuable research from an international community.
A new study finds that Americans underestimate how many are concerned about climate change as well as support for major climate policies by nearly half, with climate policy supporters significantly outnumbering non-supporters.
The influence of climate on premodern civil conflict and societal instability is debated. Here, the authors combine archeological, historical, and paleoclimatic datasets to show that drought between 1400-1450 cal. CE escalated civil conflict at Mayapan, the largest Postclassic Maya capital of the Yucatán Peninsula.
The relationship between social media use and well-being might change across adolescent development. Here, the authors use cross sectional and longitudinal data to show that distinct developmental windows of sensitivity to social media emerge in adolescence, dependent on age and sex.
Previous work has described a neuroprosthesis to directly decode full words in real time during attempts to speak. Here the authors demonstrate that a patient with anarthria can control this neuroprosthesis to spell out intended messages in real time using attempts to silently speak.
Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.
Where memories are located in our brains is not well understood. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that memories are spread out throughout multiple brain regions.
In exploring the energy required to provide decent living for all, the authors find the costs of inequality to be far greater than that of population growth. Nonetheless, population growth remains important for other reasons.
Most humans procrastinate to some extent, despite adverse consequences. Here, the authors show that how much an individual procrastinates, both in the lab and at home, relates to brain signals that reflect temporal discounting of effort cost.
Environmental justice and drinking water in the US: Higher proportions of Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and non-Hispanic Black residents were associated with higher public water arsenic and uranium at the county-level, findings differed by region.
Artificial intelligence approaches inspired by human cognitive function have usually single learned ability. The authors propose a multimodal foundation model that demonstrates the cross-domain learning and adaptation for broad range of downstream cognitive tasks.
Deep brain stimulation has been investigated as a potential treatment for cognitive impairments in Alzheimer’s disease. Here the authors carry out post hoc analysis of multi-center cohorts to investigate the anatomical and functional correlates of effective deep brain stimulation, and find that stimulating circuit of Papez, fornix and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and a multi-region functional network, were associated with clinical improvement.
Floods are most devastating for those who can least afford to be hit. Globally, 1.8 billion people face high flood risks; 89% of them live in developing countries; 170 million of them live in extreme poverty making them most vulnerable.
Speech unfolds faster than the brain completes processing of speech sounds. Here, the authors show that brain activity moves systematically within neural populations of auditory cortex, allowing accurate representation of a speech sound’s identity and its position in the sound sequence.
As coal is phased out, this will have an effect on mining towns. Here the authors find that in these locations ramping up energy transition metals will be more disruptive to demographic systems than ramping down coal.
Isolating the neural mechanisms of consciousness is complicated by task report and other irrelevant signals. Here, the authors removed report and eye movement confounds to uncover large scale cortical-subcortical networks specific for human visual consciousness.
While inequalities in science are common, most efforts to understand them treat scientists as isolated individuals, ignoring the network effects of collaboration. Here, the authors develop models that untangle the network effects of productivity and prominence of individual scientists from their collaboration networks.
Humans can infer rules for building words in a new language from a handful of examples, and linguists also can infer language patterns across related languages. Here, the authors provide an algorithm which models these grammatical abilities by synthesizing human-understandable programs for building words.
While the contribution of sharp wave ripples in memory consolidation and decision-making is established in rodent models, our understanding of their role in human memory is incomplete. Here, the authors discuss common methodological challenges in detecting, analyzing, and reporting sharp wave ripples, then they suggest practical solutions to distinguish them from other high-frequency events
Neuropsychiatric disorders may have shared features. Here the authors identified hubs of transdiagnostic co-alteration networks using meta-analytical maps of ENIGMA neuroimaging data for six neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.
The relationship between new greenspaces and gentrification is an important one for urbanization. Here the authors show a positive relationship for at least one decade between greening in the 1990s–2000s and gentrification that occurred between 2000–2016 in 17 of 28 studied cities in North America and Europe.
Through an analysis of global differences in human exposure to greenspace, a new study identifies a contrasting pattern of greenspace exposure between Global South and North cities and finds seasonal variations in greenspace exposure inequality.
Classical forgetting methods typically re-expose people to reminders of their unwanted memories. Here, the authors disrupt unpleasant memories by subliminally reactivating them as participants suppress retrieval of unrelated neutral memories, avoiding the need for conscious exposure.
Liu et al. report genome-wide data of 33 ancient individuals from the Himalayas, illuminating the deep genetic history of Tibetans and other Tibeto-Burman-speaking populations around the Tibetan Plateau in fine resolution.
Neural activity from perception is thought to be reactivated during memory recall. Here, the authors show that memory reactivation in visual cortex exhibits different tuning properties from those observed during perception.
Selecting economic policies to achieve sustainable development is challenging due to the many sectors involved and the trade-offs implied. Artificial intelligence combined with economy-wide computer simulations can help.