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Here we demonstrate that patients’ pain experiences are directly modulated by providers’ expectations of treatment outcomes in a simulated clinical interaction, providing evidence of a socially transmitted placebo effect.
Using billions of words of digitized historical text, Hills et al. develop and validate a measure of national subjective wellbeing, the National Valence Index, going back 200 years.
Bridgers et al. combine computational modelling and developmental experiments to show that even young children reason about others’ costs and rewards to make utility-maximizing decisions about what to teach and what to let learners discover on their own.
An intervention highlighting the hypocrisy involved in blaming Muslims but not ingroup members reduces collective blame of Muslims. This reduction was maintained for a year, despite an attack by Muslim extremists that was carried out during this time.
Ing et al. develop a method of establishing direct relationships between psychiatric symptoms and neuroimaging measures of brain structure and function and use it to stratify adolescent psychopathology on the basis of underlying biology. They replicate their results in independent clinical samples.
Zhou et al. use multimodal brain imaging measures to describe the neural dynamics of same-race and other-race facial categorization. The resulting dynamic neural activity predicts racial biases in facial recognition and altruistic intention.
In a cross-cultural study of eight diverse societies, House et al. provide evidence that links societal variation in prosociality to the development of a universal psychology for responding to social norms.
Fonzo et al. found that brain activity during a form of emotional regulation predicted how well individuals with depression would respond to a common antidepressant. Brain function assays may herald a new era of precision medicine in psychiatry.
Using a real-world navigation task, Bécu et al. find a preference for geometry-based navigation in older adults, and for landmark-based navigation in younger people. Older adults also show a decreased capacity to take perspective from landmarks.
Using a randomized design over 24 months, Mills et al. show that the addition of restorative-justice-informed practices to a typical treatment for domestic violence crimes leads to substantial reductions in new arrests and crime severity scores.
Smaldino et al. develop a formal model to explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure. Complex societies with more diverse niches show less covariation among behavioural traits, resulting in greater variability in personality types.
Comparing the behaviour of humans and monkeys, Farashahi et al. show that both species take uncertainty into account when weighing reward value and probability. Both species switch to a more flexible strategy for weighing information during learning.
Dahl et al. use neuromelanin-sensitive neuroimaging in a cohort of participants spanning ages 25 to 83 and report that ‘youth-like’ rostral locus coeruleus integrity is associated with better memory performance in the elderly.
Humans and animals exhibit individual preferences in decision tasks. Lebovich et al quantify these idiosyncratic choice biases and demonstrates that such biases emerge naturally from intrinsic stochasticity in the dynamics of neuronal networks.
From the 2016 US presidential election and into 2019, Kunst and colleagues show that a visceral feeling of oneness (that is, psychological fusion) with a political leader can fuel partisans’ willingness to actively participate in political violence.
Régner et al. show that, in a nationwide competition for elite research positions, committees that hold strong implicit gender biases and doubt that women face external barriers to their success promote fewer women.
Lieder et al. leverage artificial intelligence to redesign our to-do lists into games that make us more productive. Four experiments suggest that their approach can help people make better decisions, overcome procrastination and prioritize better.
Wood and Papachristos show that a gun violence field intervention reduced the two-year incidence of gunshot victimization among participants and their network peers.
Does anatomy affect cross-linguistic differences? Using computer models of the vocal tract, Dediu et al modelled how vowels are learned and transmitted across generations. Simulations show how variations in the hard palate contribute to phonetic diversity.
Cross-culturally, humans have extensive childcare systems that help parents raise their children. Page et al. examine 1,701 alloparent–child dyads in Agta people, finding that both kin selection and reciprocity are important predictors of alloparenting.