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Patterns of gene expression vary across the human cerebral cortex. Here, Misic et al. reveal a ventromedial–dorsolateral gradient of gene assemblies and show that this corresponds to a functional gradient between affective and perceptual domains.
Anderson shows how legal systems and equitable marital property rights affect women’s vulnerability to intimate partner violence and their own condemnation of the violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Genes associated with brain asymmetry are involved with the internal skeletons of cells, and are especially active in the embryo. Some of these genes are associated with handedness and risk for psychiatric disorders.
Are vocal emotions perceived as categories (for example, anger) or as dimensions (for example, an intense negative emotion)? Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and magneto-encephalography, Giordano et al. find that categories prevail in early (less than 200 ms) neural representations, whereas dimensions emerge later (240 ms and more than 500 ms).
Based on data from two large-scale field studies in Switzerland, Liebe, Gewinner and Diekmann examine the acceptance of green energy defaults in the household and business sectors. They find large and temporally stable default effects in both sectors.
Enos and Brown find that voters in US are highly spatially segregated by party. Republicans and Democrats tend to segregate even when living in the same neighbourhoods, and this segregation persists in both urban and rural areas.
During intergroup conflict, decision-makers must often consider whether their actions will harm noncombatant members of the outgroup. Here, Han et al. examine cognitive and neural processes during ‘collateral damage’ scenarios, revealing decreased avoidance of harm to outgroup civilians when conflict escalates.
Humans display biases in evaluations of social groups, such as the negativity bias. Shin and Niv present a model that suggests that this bias may arise from inferring the hidden causes of group members’ behaviours.
Marees et al. show changes in patterns of heritability and genetic overlap between mental health problems after removing genetic variation associated with socio-economic status.
What conditions favour egalitarianism? Hooper et al. develop and validate empirically a game theory model showing that cooperation fosters greater equality when individuals can withhold its benefits from would-be dominant individuals.
This large-scale study tracing tens of thousands of university students in China, India, Russia and the United States finds significant differences in skill levels and gains among countries.
Reinvestigating the well-known Dunning–Kruger effect, Jansen et al. apply rational models to the decisions and metacognitive judgments of participants in two large online studies, finding evidence that poor performance comes with inaccurate self-assessment.
Radiocarbon dating of mud wasp nests in the Kimberley region of Western Australia has established ages of up to 17,000 years for rock art from the earliest known, naturalistic, period of Australian Aboriginal figurative paintings.
Why are some more resilient than others? Using functional MRI, Kaldewaij et al. show that prefrontal cortex activation during an emotion control task predicts severity of PTSD symptoms following a subsequent traumatic event.
Vaccination combined with physical distancing can suppress resurgences without relying on stay-at-home restrictions. To achieve herd immunity, cities with a higher population density require more stringent physical distancing measures with longer durations.
Cognitive distortions have a central role in the development of depression. Here, the authors examine the tweets of thousands of individuals who report a diagnosis of depression, revealing significantly higher levels of distortions compared with a control group of Twitter users.
Heusser, Fitzpatrick and Manning use geometric models to show the idiosyncratic ways in which people preserve or distort the shapes of their experiences when they encode them into memories.
A randomized controlled trial reveals that exposure to recent online misinformation around a COVID-19 vaccine induces a decline in intent to vaccinate among adults in the UK and the USA.
Using financial data from 6.5 million individuals, Muggleton et al. find that gambling, at all levels, is associated with financial distress, unemployment, disability and higher mortality, with stronger associations amongst the heaviest gamblers.
Human motor adaptation reaches an upper limit. Albert et al. report that this limit is linked to implicit learning. When perturbations are variable, the adaptation limit decreases as subconscious learning systems become less sensitive to error.