Perspectives in 2018

Russ et al. discuss the broad applications of data science to mental health research and consider future ways that big data can improve detection, diagnosis, treatment, healthcare provision and disease management.

How to establish causal links is a central question across scientific disciplines. Marinescu and colleagues describe methods from empirical economics and how they could be adapted across fields, for example, to psychology and neuroscience, to test causality.

Herd and colleagues outline a framework for collaboration between social and population health scientists to better understand how the human microbiome and social environments interact and co-develop.

Increasing gender diversity can bring about substantial benefits for research and society. Nielsen et al. propose a framework for increased diversity not only in the composition of teams, but also in research methods and in the questions targeted by research.

Human infants need a social environment to survive as they rely on caregivers to maintain allostasis. This Perspective proposes that the need of others to regulate physiological changes determines brain development, not only in the social domain.

The success of humans as the last surviving species of the hominin clade may be explained by our ecological plasticity. Roberts and Stewart review evidence for human dispersal 300,000–12,000 years before present and propose that humans thrived via a unique ‘generalist specialist’ ecological niche.

The social science of happiness needs to recognize the importance of social connection and prosocial action for human well-being and become more interdisciplinary with greater collaboration, especially among social scientists and policymakers.

Studying subtle signals of generosity is important to understand the long term maintenance of human cooperative networks. Certain types of low-cost food sharing among Martu women, for example, may signal commitment and cement cooperative ties.