Research articles

‘Vocal bursts’ such as sighs, shrieks and shouts are human emotional vocalizations. In this study, Brooks et al. reveal similarities and differences in the emotional meaning of vocal bursts across five cultures.

Analysis of pottery made and used by hunter-gatherers in northeastern Europe in the sixth millennium bc supports the existence of super-regional networks enabling cultural transmission long before the arrival of farming.

Yu et al. examine whether cooking is associated with all-cause and cardiopulmonary mortality. They find that lower mortality risks are associated with cooking with clean fuels, and this may be partly attributed to increased household physical activity.

In 11,407 children, Baldwin et al. report gene–environment correlations between polygenic scores for psychiatric disorders and adverse childhood experiences, as well as partial genetic confounding of associations between adverse childhood experiences and mental health.

Kristal et al. find that rewriting a résumé so that previously held jobs are listed with the number of years worked (instead of employment dates) increases callbacks from real employers compared to résumés without employment gaps by approximately 8%.

This research finds that negative adjectives evolve faster over history than positive adjectives, with limited evidence for other parts of speech. Individual people are also more likely to replace negative words than positive words.

Using data from 15 countries, Penner et al. find that women earn less than men who are working for the same employer in the same occupation. These results highlight the continued importance of equal pay for equal work.

Goldenberg et al. find that people are attracted to social ties who are more politically extreme, rather than moderate. This tendency, called acrophily, is shown to occur when people select ties on the basis of both emotions and attitudes to political issues.

This paper uses historical folklore to show that a society’s degree of market interactions is strongly associated with the cultural salience of prosocial behaviour, interpersonal trust, universalist moral values, and emotions of guilt and shame.

Leveraging data from a longitudinal field experiment, Taylor and colleagues show that identity cues, such as a username, increase how viewers vote and reply to online content. Their results support a rich-get-richer dynamic when identity cues are salient.

Phylogenetic methods applied to ethnographic data show that systems of religious and political authority have worked synergistically over millennia of Austronesian cultural evolution, without showing a clear tendency to become more or less distinct.

This systematic review on digital media and democracy finds beneficial relationships mostly in emerging democracies but detrimental associations in established democracies for different political variables across methods.

Saltoun et al. reveal undescribed brain-wide dimensions to underlie human brain asymmetry at the population level.

Boundy-Singer and the team studied how people’s confidence can predict the accuracy of their decisions. They found that confidence estimates reflect decision reliability, not accuracy, and that the uncertainty about stimulus uncertainty limits the quality of confidence judgments.

Henkel et al. show that people’s identification with their COVID-19 vaccination status is associated with polarization in attitudes, behaviours and acceptance of vaccination policies.

This study uses data on social-distancing compliance from 19 year olds and their parents during two UK-wide lockdowns and finds evidence to suggest that mothers influence their child’s compliance with social-distancing guidelines.

Voelkel et al. find that two interventions designed to reduce affective polarization do not also significantly reduce anti-democratic attitudes.

Across five studies, Spadaro et al. show that perceiving representatives of institutions as corrupt is associated with lower interpersonal trust and prosocial behaviour among strangers.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Coles et al. present the results of a multicentre global adversarial collaboration on the facial feedback hypothesis.

In 2021, life expectancies returned to pre-pandemic levels in parts of western Europe but further worsened in eastern Europe, the United States and Chile. Life expectancy deficits were negatively correlated with vaccine uptake in later 2021.