News & Views in 2018

Does tweeting your feelings change how you feel? A study of over a billion tweets shows that we tend to tweet about our feelings after they have escalated. However, such ‘affect labeling’ tweets — even though they are constrained to 140 characters — lead to rapid reductions in the intensity of our emotions.

There is wide interest in the social norms construct across psychology, economics, law and social marketing. Now a study investigates an important missing piece in the social norms’ puzzle: what is the underlying process that explains how norms impact behaviour? The answer: self–other similarity (self-categorization) and internalization.

Cultural products have a life of their own: academic papers get cited and songs get downloaded. Surprisingly, public attention to these products shows a consistent pattern over time: a constant decline characterized by an inflexion point. This pattern might be due to how cultural products are discussed in the community and archived as cultural memories.

A new study shows that undergoing electroencephalography-based neurofeedback training of amygdala activity leads to an improved ability to regulate emotion in soldiers during combat training, a skill that may prevent future psychiatric disorders.

Understanding what enables teams to flourish has been the focus of considerable interest across domains of human behaviour. A study finds that, in addition to recruiting and retaining highly skilled members, shared prior success significantly contributes to enhanced team performance.

Sequence learning — how we learn that one event or item follows another — has been studied mostly focusing on the effects of relatively simple relationships between elements. Using network science, a new study shows that in complex probabilistic sequences, some relationships are more easily learned than others.

It is a general principle that we learn from experience, building expectations about the future that then affect perception. A new study focuses on how expectations influence learning about pain and shows that we prioritize information that confirms our prior expectations, leading to a self-perpetuating bias in judging the intensity of pain.

A new study demonstrates a novel research strategy for studying juries, moving inquiry forward more rapidly and efficiently.

Influenza is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality around the world. Nudges are small changes to the environment or choice architecture that can be designed to significantly increase influenza vaccination rates.

We rapidly make inferences about the moral character of others. Observing a single immoral behaviour is often sufficient to make us think of them as morally ‘unworthy’. But our beliefs about others’ ‘badness’ (as opposed to ‘goodness’) are more uncertain. That is, we allow ourselves more space to re-assess and, if needed, rectify these beliefs.

How the brain processes parallel streams of information has been widely researched, yet remains unsolved. A new study shows that the brain processes informative cues in serial even when they are presented simultaneously, and that patterns of cortical activity shift under the constraints of rapid decisions to optimize processing.

Years of research has shown that children do not learn words at random, but in distinct patterns. Why do we observe the patterns that we do? By using network science and investigating the words that children don’t learn, researchers have potentially uncovered a general property of word learning as a process of gap forming and filling.

In line with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, advantaged individuals recognize their privileged position and work to avoid collapsing a common pool resource, but they will not accept excessive free-riding by poorer individuals.

Network neuroscience has begun to generate fundamental insights into the structures and dynamics that lie beneath human cognition. Targeting the question what creates differences between humans, a study finds that individual differences in connectivity patterns in brain networks underlie individual differences in task performance.

It is important for research users to know how likely it is that reported research findings are true. The Social Science Replication Project finds that, in highly powered experiments, only 13 of 21 high-profile reports could be replicated. Investigating the factors that contribute to reliable results offers new opportunities for the social sciences.

A study finds association between the occurrence of intimate partner violence and marital fertility among Tsimané forager-horticulturalists, independent of proximate explanations, suggesting that intimate partner violence may persist as an evolutionary strategy to enhance male fitness.

By analysing whether characteristics of Austronesian populations could predict the rate of adoption of Christianity, researchers find that political leadership and small population sizes facilitated Christianity’s spread in the Pacific.

Agriculture is one of the key innovations of human societies, yet the nature of and reasons for its emergence are debated. A new model that hindcasts past global population suggests that an improving climate increased plant productivity and human population density, facilitating domestication.

A study shows that updating visual perceptual skills is an active process with many similarities to memory plasticity. Using classic behavioural techniques and new brain imaging tools, the authors show that this perceptual skill can undergo reconsolidation.

Category learning requires finding commonalities between objects in spite of their differences in appearance. While generally thought to rely on abstract representations, far removed from the sensory input, category learning may instead involve early sensory processes more than expected.