Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2019

There is a widespread misconception that drug use is rife in the US–Mexico border area, particularly in Mexican states. But with a dirth of available epidemiological data, we have to be careful about the conclusions we draw, argues Guilherme Borges.

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.

Learning analytics is a novel educational research approach that uses data to help us understand and improve the learning process. Xavier Ochoa explains how Latin America is the perfect showcase for all that learning analytics has to offer in the arena of education.

A study shows that knowledge about an object’s size — how large it is in the real world — changes how people allocate attention towards the space occupied by a drawing of the object.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nearby small objects appear larger than distal large objects, reflecting a dissociation between perceived and actual object size. Collegio et al. show that inferences of true object size scale spatial attention to objects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.