Volume 3 Issue 3, March 2019

Despite opprobrium from the scientific community, the creation of the first CRISPR babies by germline genome editing has led to a debate more about execution than intent. We need public education, engagement and empowerment to reach ‘broad societal consensus’ on whether, not how, to pursue heritable genome editing, argues Françoise Baylis.

Gender inequalities in work–family balance have wide-reaching ramifications: women shoulder the greatest burden of unpaid work and care, both decreasing their opportunities for employment and contributing significantly to the gender pay gap. Concerted measures at both the policy and ideological level are required to redress this problem.

Human enhancement technologies are opening tremendous opportunities but also challenges to the core of what it means to be human. We argue that the goal of human enhancement should be to enhance quality of life and well-being not only of individuals but also of the communities they inhabit.

A study finds that social norms have become weaker in the United States over the past 200 years. The changing strength of norms is linked to fluctuations in societal levels of innovation and risky behaviour.

Behavioural neuroscience and reinforcement learning theory distinguish between ‘model-free’ and ‘model-based’ computations that can guide behaviour. A recent study demonstrates that Pavlovian learning can give rise to behavioural responses that are not well accounted for by this existing dichotomy, suggesting that there may be greater complexity to the computations that underlie Pavlovian prediction.

Browman and colleagues review the empirical and theoretical literature and present a framework that unifies economic and psychological perspectives on the impact of inequality on mobility expectations in socioeconomically disadvantaged youth

Muthukrishna & Henrich argue that solving the replication crisis in psychology partly requires well-specified, overarching theoretical frameworks. They outline how dual inheritance theory provides one such example that could be adopted by the field.

Using data from 765 million online music plays chosen by 1 million individuals in 51 countries, Park et al. reveal diurnal and seasonal affective rhythms in musical intensity that are consistent across diverse cultures and demographic groups. They also report differences in baseline preferences for musical intensity across cultures and ages.

A daily, city-level happiness metric constructed from the sentiment expressed in 210 million tweets on Sina Weibo from 144 cities shows that high levels of air pollution significantly reduce Chinese urbanites’ expressed happiness on social media.

Jackson and colleagues apply methods from computational linguistics to show that American norms grew looser from 1800 to 2000. Looser American norms over time were positively associated with societal creativity but negatively associated with order.

In the United States, France and Germany, as peoples’ opposition to genetically modified (GM) foods becomes more extreme, their self-rated understanding of genetic modification increases, but objectively, their knowledge of the science behind genetic modification tends to be poorer.

Forscher et al. probe whether grant reviewers discriminate on the basis of principal investigator race or gender. In an experiment involving 412 active scientists, the authors find no evidence of pragmatically important bias.

Askelund et al. show that remembering more specific positive life experiences is associated with fewer negative self-related thoughts and lower levels of stress hormones in a study of 427 adolescents at risk for depression.

Why do we continue processing external events during sleep, yet remain unresponsive? Legendre et al. use electroencephalography to show that sleepers enter a ‘standby mode’, continuing to track relevant signals but doing so transiently.

Pool and colleagues show that Pavlovian conditioning involves learning of different classes of responses: some flexibly adapt to changes in outcome value, whereas others persist even when the outcome is no longer valuable for the individual.

Combining behavioural modelling with functional and structural brain connectivity, Karlaftis et al. show that individuals learn the structure of variable environments by employing alternate decision strategies that engage distinct brain networks.