Volume 3 Issue 12, December 2019

The term ‘women of colour’ was introduced as a symbol of political solidarity, but its evolution to a biological term encompassing all non-white women has resulted in aggregation of data from diverse ethnic groups. Breaking out statistics by race, ethnicity and gender is therefore crucial for researchers who are committed to inclusion, argues Rhonda V. Sharpe.

Studies have provided rich data on global preferences for how autonomous vehicles should act in collisions. We describe a framework for incorporating such preferences in policy. Preferences should inform the design of autonomous vehicles only after being screened for bias and only to the degree to which they match major ethical theories.

When angry, we are often advised to ‘hold your breath and count to ten’ to prevent a rash response. Could a similar time conflict underlie the expression of unwanted habits? A new study in Nature Human Behaviour shows that habits can be provoked with greater time pressure, but are overridden if an individual is given sufficient time to prepare.

We have known for a while that different doctors can produce different effects using the same substance, or even placebo, such that otherwise effective treatments might become ineffective or placebo becomes effective. Chang and colleagues now clarify that such differential effects are likely transmitted by subtle facial cues, using a placebo–pain model.

Hardwick et al. show that habits in human behaviour consist of automatic preparation of an action in response to a trigger. Even though we can learn to control habits to perform different action responses, under time pressure, habitual responses resurface.

Using intracranial recordings, Kam et al. find that connectivity between the default network and a recently identified subsystem of the frontoparietal control network plays a role in attending to our own thoughts rather than the outside world.

Using billions of words of digitized historical text, Hills et al. develop and validate a measure of national subjective wellbeing, the National Valence Index, going back 200 years.

Smaldino et al. develop a formal model to explain cross-cultural differences in personality structure. Complex societies with more diverse niches show less covariation among behavioural traits, resulting in greater variability in personality types.

Using a randomized design over 24 months, Mills et al. show that the addition of restorative-justice-informed practices to a typical treatment for domestic violence crimes leads to substantial reductions in new arrests and crime severity scores.

Here we demonstrate that patients’ pain experiences are directly modulated by providers’ expectations of treatment outcomes in a simulated clinical interaction, providing evidence of a socially transmitted placebo effect.

Ing et al. develop a method of establishing direct relationships between psychiatric symptoms and neuroimaging measures of brain structure and function and use it to stratify adolescent psychopathology on the basis of underlying biology. They replicate their results in independent clinical samples.

Fonzo et al. found that brain activity during a form of emotional regulation predicted how well individuals with depression would respond to a common antidepressant. Brain function assays may herald a new era of precision medicine in psychiatry.

Abdellaoui et al. examine the geographic distribution of human DNA differences in Great Britain, finding that the geographic distribution of polygenic scores for educational attainment and other complex traits resembles the geographic distribution of economic differences.