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Mental health, neuroscience and neuroethics researchers must engage local African communities to enable discourses on cultural understandings of mental illness. To ensure that these engagements are both ethical and innovative, they must be facilitated with cultural competence and humility, because serious consideration of different contextual and local factors is critical.
This systematic review of 422 studies of vaccine hesitancy finds that the term is used inconsistently. Vaccine hesitancy should be defined as a psychological state of indecisiveness that people may experience when making a vaccination decision.
Marginalized scholars are often excluded from key scientific conferences owing to visa and travel restrictions, which increases inequity among academics.
The Blursday database contains repeated measures of subjective time and related processes collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more isolated individuals felt, the slower time seemed to pass.
Data has tremendous potential to build resilience in government. To realize this potential, we need a new, human-centred, distinctly public sector approach to data science and AI, in which these technologies do not just automate or turbocharge what humans can already do well, but rather do things that people cannot.
Cikara et al. propose and test the group reference dependence hypothesis, stating that violence and negative attitudes towards minoritized groups depend on the number and size of other minoritized groups in a community. Using data on hate crimes in US counties between 1990 and 2010, they show that as groups increase in rank in terms of their size, hate crimes against them become more likely.
The team of authors led by Seon-Kyeong Jang use whole-genome sequencing data and show that rare genetic variants explain much of the ‘missing heritability’ in smoking behaviours. These results help address a long-standing mystery in behavioural genetics.
When academics support refugee scholars, everyone benefits. Scholars who are refugees face complex challenges, including bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and academic barriers. Ahmad Al Ajlan discusses key steps that academic communities can take to support and integrate their refugee colleagues.
For years, researchers have interrogated scientists’ own research practices. A computational research stream, often termed ‘science of science’, studies the signatures these practices leave in big data. As the field matures, it is looking for ways to use its data-driven insights to make a tangible mark in science policy.
Elucidating potentially causal factors for depression and the direction of their impact could beneficially inform prevention strategies. Mendelian randomization revealed the protective role of increased relative carbohydrate intake in lowering depression risk. In addition, body mass index mediated this effect but to a lesser extent than the total effect size.
Across 21 societies, people alter their speech and song when interacting with infants. These infant-directed vocalizations are recognized by listeners. This suggests that forms of human vocalizations may be shaped by their functions.
Cash transfers are a popular anti-poverty strategy worldwide. In this study of 42 countries over 24 years, Richterman and Thirumurthy find that large cash transfer programmes were associated with improvements in a variety of HIV-related outcomes.