Review Articles

This Review by Neil Adger and colleagues examines the multiple dimensions of human well-being that are affected by climate change. The authors propose policy and research priorities that are oriented towards supporting well-being.

Fiona Charlson and colleagues review direct and indirect ways in which climate change impacts mental health. The authors provide an overview of the current evidence to inform the mental health field’s response to climate change and identify promising approaches for health professionals for individual-level, community-level and system-wide responses, as well as advocacy and education.

Hornsey and Lewandowsky examine psychological and structural reasons for climate change scepticism and describe strategies for reducing the destructive influence of such scepticism.

When and why are interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour effective? van Valkengoed and colleagues introduce a classification system that links different interventions to the determinants of environmental behaviour. On the basis of this classification system, they provide guidelines for practitioners on how to select interventions that are most likely to change the key determinants of a specific target behaviour.

For a long time, climate models did not account for human behaviour. This Review by Beckage et al. surveys existing social climate models, an emerging class of models that embed human behaviour in climate models, and makes recommendations for how to best represent and integrate human behaviour in climate models.

Danilo Bzdok and Robin I. M. Dunbar review the neurobiology of human and primate social behaviours and how the pandemic may have disrupted these systems.

Rachel Hartman and colleagues review interventions designed to reduce partisan animosity in the United States and introduce a framework to categorize interventions across three levels: thoughts, relationships and institutions.

Low-carbon innovations in technology and behaviour are increasingly prevalent, but they are not always equitable. This Review examines how such innovations can introduce and perpetrate inequalities, and discusses ways to ensure that a low-carbon future is both sustainable and equitable.

Registered Reports were introduced a decade ago as a means for improving the rigour and credibility of confirmatory research. Chambers and Tzavella overview the format’s past, its current status and future developments.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to school closures and distance learning that are likely to exacerbate social class academic disparities. This Review presents an agenda for future research and outlines recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers to limit the impact of school closures.

Peters and Kriegeskorte review the behavioural and neural-network-modelling literature on object-based visual representations. They call for new tasks that will bridge research in cognitive sciences and engineering in this domain.

The Review presents a comprehensive set of Bayesian analysis reporting guidelines (BARG), incorporating features of previous guidelines and extending these with many additional details for contemporary Bayesian analyses. It is accompanied by an extensive example of applying the BARG.

Social and behavioural factors impact the emergence, spread and control of human disease. This paper reviews current disease modelling methodologies and the challenges and opportunities for integration with data from social science research and risk communication and community engagement practice.

Köbis et al. outline how artificial intelligence (AI) agents can negatively influence human ethical behaviour. They discuss how this capacity of AI agents can cause problems in the future and put forward a research agenda to gain behavioural insights for better AI oversight.

Genome-wide association studies of behavioural traits can generate predictive polygenic signals. Abdellaoui and Verweij review key developments in this field and explain how advances in methods and data can further our understanding of the relationship between genetic effects and human behaviour.

Cognitive epidemiology studies prospective associations between cognitive abilities and health outcomes. Deary et al. review research in this field over the past decade, synthesizing evidence and outlining open questions.

Winterton et al. review the status and challenges of intranasal oxytocin research and argue that only a combination of theory, methodology and replicability will achieve a successful reorganisation of intranasal oxytocin research.

Harden and Koellinger discuss the goals, methods and challenges of social science genetics, which aims to unravel the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in social, behavioural and health outcomes.

Natural field experiments combine randomized control with an absence of observer effects. However, they have only been used to investigate key labour market phenomena such as unemployment since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the literature and summarizes the insights natural field experiments contribute to the field of unemployment.

Paranoia is not only a symptom of mental disorder, but may also function as part of normal human psychology. Raihani and Bell review the evidence for an evolutionary account of paranoia in which between-group competition favours the development of psychological mechanisms to avoid social threat.