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When judging the pleasantness of a physical touch experienced by someone else, mothers are more likely to ascribe their personal feelings of pleasantness to their own children as compared to the children of others.
Across 34 countries, fear of disease and empathic concern encouraged adherence to COVID19 preventive measures. When trust in government is high, the link is weaker between preventive behaviour and fear but stronger between preventive behavior and empathic concern.
Spatial information is a primary organizing pillar of visual working memory and guides behaviour even when object locations are irrelevant and temporal information should be prioritized.
People are more adept at deriving and retaining associative inferences when the source of the information is a member of one’s own ingroup, potentially contributing to the spread of biased beliefs.
Across four studies with US American participants, hostility in tone of messages that rebut science denialism had small or trivial effects on their persuasiveness but was to the detriment of the perceived competence of the source.
Bullying and harassment are pervasive in academia, with many cases going unreported. One possible factor may be deliberate ignorance among perpetrators and bystanders. A number of interventions counteracting deliberate ignorance could contribute to thriving research environments.
Analysis of two longitudinal datasets from the USA and the Netherlands shows that people who hold extreme views are more likely to change these views than those who hold moderate views. The direction of change is towards moderation.
Humans are highly social beings who are interested in what others are saying, thinking, and doing. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that we can easily tell whether a person’s pattern of attention is natural or artificially manipulated.
The Covid pandemic has yielded new insights into psychological vaccine acceptance factors. This knowledge serves as a basis for behavioral and communication interventions that can increase vaccination readiness for other diseases.
Across a sample of 1,600 individuals spanning 6 to 59 years of age, common saliency models of visual attention predict women’s and young adult’s fixations better than the gaze behaviour of other groups.
When people receive advice written by large language models, they downrate the competence of the source when they know the source isn’t human. Their preference to receive advice by large language models increases with positive experience.
Across two experiments, exposure to a brief informative video on Japanese American incarceration and subsequent reparations led to greater support among Asian Americans for the payment of reparations to Black Americans.
Native English and Spanish speakers performed significantly better than chance when identifying the meanings of unfamiliar foreign language words, suggesting that the sound of words holds some association with their meaning across languages.
Leveraging on large-scale data collection through a smartphone app, Donegan et al show that the association between model-based planning and compulsivity can be estimated with as few as 25 trials
Durability of information in human working memory across time intervals can be better explained by attractor dynamics that incorporate activity-dependent plasticity. Discrete attractor dynamics are less suited to model working memory when modeling the working memory time course.
While committing to honesty via oath decreased dishonest behavior in 7 studies across the US, UK, and Mexico, Zickfeld et al found no evidence that the potential to benefit a partner increases dishonesty.
For some individuals, daily changes in positive and negative emotions corresponds to fluctuations in overall life satisfaction. A new study in Psychology and Aging suggests that the expanding reach of negative emotions is greater for younger than older adults.
Most psychological measures are used only once or twice. This proliferation and variability threaten the credibility of research. The Standardisation Of BEhavior Research (SOBER) guidelines aim to ensure that psychological measures are standardised and, unlike toothbrushes, reused by others.
Directed forgetting can be used to disrupt emotional memories. In a fear conditioning paradigm, participants had poorer recognition and recall, and developed lower physiological responses to images paired with an electric shock when instructed to forget them.