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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.
Pryor et al. show that people conform to social norms, even when they understand that the norms have been determined arbitrarily and do not reflect people’s actual preferences. Prominent, rationality-based explanations of norm effects cannot explain these results.
Michelmann and colleagues investigated how humans search for information in episodic memory. Using MEG, the authors show fast, forward-directed memory replay, with speed changing flexibly depending on the task.
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.
An analysis of all Wikimedia projects shows that a small number of editors have a disproportionately large influence in the formation of collective knowledge.
Bollen et al. tracked changes in the emotions of Twitter users before and after they expressed a feeling online. Emotions grow quickly before—and decrease rapidly after—their expression, confirming previous affect labeling studies showing that putting one’s feelings into words can alleviate their intensity.
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.
A new study by Keynan and colleagues provides evidence that training in amygdala self-regulation via EEG neurofeedback (‘electrical fingerprint’) results in neurobehavioural markers of stress resilience in a cohort of individuals undergoing military training.
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.
Randomly informing people that they had a high or low genetic risk of obesity changed their gene-related physiology and subjective experience in a manner consistent with the perceived risk, regardless of their actual genetic risk of obesity.
The attention received by cultural products—including scientific papers, patents, songs, movies and biographies—decays following a biexponential function, suggesting that collective memory follows a universal pattern.
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.
With millions now using direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA tests, action is needed to deal responsibly with unexpected paternity issues, argues Maarten H. D. Larmuseau.
Analysing the results from four major sports leagues and a multiplayer online game reveals that prior shared success as a team significantly improves the odds of winning beyond what is explained by the skill of individual players.