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Mendenhall et al. use a locally constructed measure of stress and a mixed-methods approach to investigate a syndemic in Soweto, South Africa. Stress interacted with multiple morbidities to reduce quality of life, conditioned by illness experiences.
In a randomized controlled trial, Schleider et al. show that single-session online interventions are able to reduce depression symptoms up to three months later in adolescents.
Speech is produced and perceived at a rate of 4–5 Hz. Gagl et al. show that the temporal structure of our eye movements during reading is similar (3.9–5.2 Hz), suggesting a temporal link between reading and speech.
Do restrictive measures to control the spread of COVID-19 also reduce non-COVID-19-related mortality? Here, the authors show that, in China, non-COVID-19-related mortality declined by 4.6% during periods of stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions.
McDiarmid and colleagues show that psychologists update their beliefs about effect sizes after learning about new evidence from replication studies, although not as much as predicted by a rational Bayesian model.
Song et al. quantify the signal of natural selection on 870 complex traits in European individuals, finding that 88% of traits showed signals of selection in the past 3,000 years, including traits related to pigmentation, body shape and food intake.
Schlichting et al. investigate how the developing brain forms memories that support later decisions. Using fMRI decoding, they show that children and teens do not anchor new memories into existing, related ones, but rather store them separately.
Dick et al. show that in youth, post-traumatic stress related to Hurricane Irma was predicted by self-reported direct and media exposure. Furthermore, neural responses in brain regions associated with anxiety conferred particular vulnerability to media exposure.
How do we predict other peoples’ behaviour across a dizzying array of social settings? Van Baar et al. propose a structure learning mechanism that uncovers the hidden motives of others, which allows us to adaptively respond to their future actions.
Using a speed dating paradigm, Prochazkova et al. show that attraction was predicted by physiological synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance between two individuals.
Xu et al. show that satellite-measured urbanicity (living in a densely populated area) is correlated with brain volume, cortical surface area and brain network connectivity in a sample of 3,867 people from China and Europe.
Using lidar over an area of 85,000 km2, Inomata et al. identified 478 early ceremonial complexes in southern Mexico. These discoveries offer new information for understanding the origins of Mayan civilization and its relation with the Olmecs.
Heffner et al. show that violations of emotion expectations—emotion prediction errors—motivate social choice, such as punishing norm transgressors. Emotion prediction errors often outperformed reward prediction errors in predicting choice and were selectively impaired in those at risk of depression.
A randomized trial showed that first-language instruction—which treated the language and culture of the children as an asset—improved their school engagement in the short run and their reading skills in the majority language in the longer run.
Brzezinski et al. establish a link between science skepticism and compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies in the United States during March and April 2020. This relationship persists after controlling for political partisanship, socio-economic factors, income, education and COVID-19 prevalence.
The finding of tobacco seeds in a Pleistocene-age fire hearth suggests people learned of this plant’s intoxicant value shortly after their arrival in the Americas, initiating a long heritage of use with global societal impact.
Zhuang and colleagues show that retrieval practice boosts long-term retention after consolidation and induces false memories, through rapid reorganization of memory-related neural representations and large-scale network configurations.
An observational study of adolescent females’ Internet use reveals how online behaviours coupled with offline psychosocial and contextual factors are associated with subsequent vulnerability to Internet-initiated victimization.
In this meta-analysis of 90 randomized controlled trials of youth psychological treatment, Daros et al. show that a reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms is associated with improvements in emotional regulation skills.
Using a large dataset of workers’ technology use from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang et al. find that firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration networks of information workers to become more static and siloed and communication to shift to more asynchronous media.