Articles in 2018

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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.

    • Matthew D. Lieberman
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Katherine J. Reynolds
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Campbell Pryor
    • Amy Perfors
    • Piers D. L. Howe
    Letter
  • 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.

    • Nichola J. Raihani
    • Vaughan Bell
    Review Article
  • 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.

    • Rui Fan
    • Onur Varol
    • Johan Bollen
    Article
  • 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.

    • Alin Coman
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Kymberly D. Young
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Tom C. Russ
    • Eva Woelbert
    • Stanley Zammit
    Perspective
  • 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.

    • Cristian Candia
    • C. Jara-Figueroa
    • César A. Hidalgo
    Article
  • 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.

    • Mark R. Beauchamp
    News & Views
  • 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.

    • Satyam Mukherjee
    • Yun Huang
    • Noshir Contractor
    Letter